Ari Levisohn: Welcome to Into the Verse, where we share new and unexpected insights about the parsha, AND an upcoming holiday … diving deep into the verses to uncover the Torah’s own commentary on itself.

This is Ari Levisohn. Passover is a week away, and we’re all frantically cleaning out our houses, trying to remove every last crumb of chametz. You might even be cleaning as you listen to this podcast. And as we stock up on matzah and kiss goodbye to bagels, you’ve got to wonder: What’s the big deal about chametz, anyway? Why don't we eat it on Passover?

Easy question, right? To commemorate that matzah we ate when God took us out of Egypt. But if you think about it, that only explains the matzah. It doesn't explain why we can't eat chametz. If you think about it, this prohibition is pretty strange. Imagine if on Sukkot, we shook the lulav and threw away all the rest of our plants. Why isn't eating the matzah enough? Why do I have to spend hours removing any trace of chametz from my house each year? 

Well, it turns out that this week's parsha, Parshat Tzav, actually talks about chametz too, when it describes the daily offering of flour, the korban minchah, that the priests brought in the mishkan, the Tabernacle. The Torah specifically says it has to be baked in the form of matzah. All year round, the minchah offering can never be chametz. In this episode, Imu Shalev and Rivky Stern explore the prohibition of chametz in the mishkan in order to try to understand just why we abstain from it on Passover. Here they are.  

Imu Shalev: We are joined by the incredibly talented and ever-brilliant Rivky Stern. Rivky, welcome.

Rivky Stern: Well, thanks for having me. 

Imu: So Rivky, what should we talk about this week in Parshat Tzav?

Rivky: I'm following your lead, Imu.

Imu: Okay. Well, here's something interesting that I noticed. Right here in Leviticus chapter 6, verses 7 through 11, it's talking about the torat ha-minchah, the instructions of the meal offering. There's some interesting instructions here that really pop out at us while all of us are kind of in the throes of Pesach preparation, of Passover preparation. Here's what's interesting. Out here in verse 9, we're told to eat the minchah as matzah. It needed to be baked as matzah. מַצּוֹת תֵּאָכֵל בְּמָקוֹם קָדֹשׁ – it should be eaten in a holy place as a matzah. And we're told in the very next verse, לֹא תֵאָפֶה חָמֵץ – you got to make sure that it is not chametz. It is not baked with leaven. 

So Rivky, I thought that this was really interesting to point out, that there is matzah and chametz in our parsha. What question pops out at you when you hear about how the kohanim, in the general service of the mishkan, need to be making sure to be eating matzah and not having chametz?

Rivky: My first instinct is to ask why that would be. Why would it be that something that we associate with Pesach, which is not eating chametz and making sure to eat matzah, would be associated with a korban (offering) at all? Why would it come up in Parshat Tzav?

Imu: Okay, good. So explain to me why it would make sense if it were a Pesach offering.

Rivky: Well, on Pesach we are given the commandments not to eat chametz and to eat matzah specifically to remember what happened the night of the Exodus. On the night of the Exodus, we were in a rush, the Torah tells us, and because we were in a rush, the bread did not rise, and therefore we ate these cracker-like things, matzah, instead of eating chametz, which is regular fluffy, doughy bread.

Imu: Okay. You want to take us to a particular verse?

Rivky: Let's go to Exodus chapter 12 and then let's go down to verse 39. וַיֹּאפוּ אֶת־הַבָּצֵק אֲשֶׁר הוֹצִיאוּ מִמִּצְרַיִם עֻגֹת מַצּוֹת כִּי לֹא חָמֵץ – And they baked this unleavened bread of the dough that they took out of Egypt, it was matzot, כִּי לֹא חָמֵץ – it was not chametz, כִּי־גֹרְשׁוּ מִמִּצְרַיִם – because they were thrust, they were pushed out of Egypt, וְלֹא יָכְלוּ לְהִתְמַהְמֵהַּ – and they could not tarry, וְגַם־צֵדָה לֹא־עָשׂוּ לָהֶם – and they hadn't prepared for themselves anything in advance, any provisions.

So this verse explicitly sets up a contrast between matzah and chametz, almost like they're opposites. That they couldn't eat chametz, they couldn't eat bread, so instead they ate matzah, they ate these crackers, this unleavened bread.

Imu: There are a couple of questions, right? So if the reason why we desist from chametz and the reason why we eat matzah is because we left Egypt really, really quickly, and the dough didn't have time to rise, and because of the miraculous nature of that haste, we really appreciate God and so we choose to celebrate that haste through which we were saved by eating matzah and getting rid of slow bread, of chametz – it makes sense. I have some explanation as to why I keep Pesach and matzah. But it doesn't really make sense in Tzav. It doesn't really make sense when we're discussing the laws of this minchah sacrifice, why the kohanim (priests) would have to eat matzah. That's the basic question.

Let's make the question a bit stronger. So I want to take you to Exodus 23, verse 18. Here in Exodus 23, we're just getting a bunch of general laws, and one of the laws here is לֹא־תִזְבַּח עַל־חָמֵץ דַּם־זִבְחִי – make sure that when you sacrifice any sacrifices, please, I don't want any chametz in My mishkan. So there's a rule, this isn't just about the minchah, this is just rules in general for the mishkan. It seems as if God is celebrating Passover year round. He does not want any chametz in the mishkan. The question is, why?

Rivky:  My suspicion is that matzah and chametz have to be bigger than just the Exodus, than just yetziat Mitzrayim. It's not just that we eat matzah and desist from chametz to remember yetziat Mitzrayim. It has to be that these two things, matzah and chametz, sort of symbolize something bigger. And I think that that's going to get to our fundamental answer of why we do not eat them as part of the minchah offering.

Imu: Let me ask you a question. If God had said, “I took you out of Egypt really quickly, so I want you to eat matzah as a commemoration,” and He never gave the commandment that said, “and I also want you to desist from all chametz,” would you have had a problem with that? Would you have had any questions?

Rivky: No. It kind of actually, intuitively, makes more sense that way. Right? You have your normal life, you have the regular things that you do, but now you add this special commandment for Pesach that you're remembering the Exodus by also eating matzah. The way on any other holiday, you commemorate it by adding something. You don't take away, but instead you add something. You don't destroy your house on Sukkot, but you sit in a sukkah. So you would add in the matzah without taking away the chametz from your regular life.

Imu: Exactly. If the point of matzah is a symbol to remember that we left quickly, why is there an opposite? It's almost like it's offensive to the matzah if you were to eat chametz, because it was not fast. But let me make it a little bit more clear or sharpen the question. There are other symbolic foods we eat on Passover, like maror (bitter herbs).

Rivky: Right, I was having the exact same thought. I was thinking about in the Four Questions, one of the things we say is, we ask about vegetables and about maror. And in the Four Questions it's very clear. We don't take away other vegetables. We eat other vegetables as normal, but we add in one thing. What do we add? We add maror.

Imu: Right. We don't get rid of sweet cucumbers. We don't get rid of cilantro, although some of us may wish that we get rid of cilantro on Pesach. We eat maror, and there's no offensive vegetable to us, there's no vegetable that we have to really, really get rid of.

By the way, the implications of this are huge, right? Entire Pesach program industries exist because of how seriously we take this law to get rid of chametz. And it doesn't feel like the answer of “we left Egypt really quickly” is compelling enough to explain why we don't eat chametz.

Let's make this question even stronger. I want to take you just a few verses above, in Exodus 12:8. This is before Israel flees Egypt. They're still in Egypt and they're getting the commands of the korban Pesach (Passover offering) that they're going to do before the final plague. They're told: וְאָכְלוּ אֶת־הַבָּשָׂר בַּלַּיְלָה הַזֶּה – Make sure to eat this sacrifice, the meat of this sacrifice, this night, צְלִי־אֵשׁ – roasted, וּמַצּוֹת עַל־מְרֹרִים יֹאכְלֻהוּ – do Me a favor, eat this with matzah. 

I don't understand! Matzah only becomes significant after they flee Egypt and the dough doesn't have time to rise. So then why is God telling them to eat the korban Pesach (Passover offering) with matzah? You hear the question?

Rivky: Yeah, absolutely. The korban Pesach happened before we left Egypt, so why is matzah already a thing if it wasn't commemorating the haste with which we had to leave Egypt? Good question, Imu.

Imu: I'll just say personally, for me, this is a question that has plagued me many a Pesach, because it always felt kind of suspicious to me. The number one way in which we celebrate Pesach – maybe number two if you count the Haggadah and the Seder night, which is a really, really beautiful mitzvah (commandment) – is about chametz. It feels like, for someone who wants to dial into the spiritual significance of the mitzvot and why we do what we do, Pesach just feels hard. It feels difficult to not really understand this whole chametz business. 

There are a lot of answers. There are Maharalian answers and kabbalistic answers about the spiritual destructiveness of things that take a lot of time. So while I value alacrity and zeal as much as the next guy, I think that that answer is actually – it's a deeper answer of something that's a little more p'shat (simple meaning) based, something that is maybe more readily apparent in the text and something that is a more common theme throughout the chumash (Five Books of Moses).

So Rivky, in order to get at an answer, I want to take you back to Exodus 23, to Parshat Mishpatim, where we hear about the very first time that there's no chametz allowed not in a Pesach context. This is the first time where we're told that you can't have chametz in the mikdash (Temple). I want to read two verses with you and look for context clues. Let's see if we can get some sort of context that will help us understand: Why does God have a problem with chametz? If He's not keeping Pesach in the mishkan all year round, what other reason could He have for prohibiting chametz? Let's read these pesukim (verses) and see if the context will help us understand.

לֹא־תִזְבַּח עַל־חָמֵץ דַּם־זִבְחִי – Make sure not to bring chametz along with the blood of My offerings. וְלֹא־יָלִין חֵלֶב־חַגִּי עַד־בֹּקֶר – Make sure not to leave over the fats of the chag (holiday) offering until the morning; it's got to be fully consumed. רֵאשִׁית בִּכּוּרֵי אַדְמָתְךָ תָּבִיא בֵּית יְקוָה אֱלֹקיךָ – You must bring the first fruits to the House of God. The first fruits that you grow should be brought to Me, the bikkurim. לֹא־תְבַשֵּׁל גְּדִי בַּחֲלֵב אִמּוֹ – By the way, please make sure not to cook a kid in its mother's milk (Exodus 23:18-19).

Rivky: That is a rather odd assortment of commandments in just two verses.

Imu: It is. So what do these things have in common, if anything? What pops out at you? How would you make sense of this random collection of laws? No chametz in the mikdash, make sure not to leave the fat from the offering over until the morning, bring bikkurim, and don't eat milk and meat together.

Rivky: My first thought is about bikkurim. Bikkurim is meant to sort of be a reminder for us. As a farmer, I've done a lot of work. I've raised these crops, I've grown this food, and I'm so proud of myself to sort of look around and say, “I did this! Congratulations, me!” and kind of give myself a pat on the back. Bikkurim is meant to sort of be a reminder to me, that farmer, saying: Not so fast. Yes, you did this. You should be proud of yourself. But don't forget, God is the one who gave you these tools, God is the one who enabled this for you. And even while you are excited about these fruit, recognize God and bring Him those choicest, first fruits.

Imu: So let's focus on that verse, verse 19, which is bikkurim and לֹא־תְבַשֵּׁל גְּדִי בַּחֲלֵב אִמּוֹ – don't cook a kid in its mother's milk. I think what you said about bikkurim is a really great place to start. It's almost like there's a spiritual danger of being a farmer. When you're a farmer, there's amazing creativity that you can do – you can literally cultivate new life, these amazing vegetables or fruits – and there's a spiritual danger to that great creativity. That spiritual danger is that you might forget that there is a Creator above you.

What's the way in which the Torah tells us to bridge that spiritual danger and channel that creativity, that could otherwise be harmful, into something incredible and brings you closer to God? The beautiful ritual of bikkurim. You simply take the first fruits that you've grown and labored over and you bring it to the mishkan. You testify before God that you understand that this comes from Him.

Rivky: It's funny, there's actually a lot of overlap here with Pesach, because one of the parts that we say at the seder as part of our Haggadah is the speech that the farmer gives when he brings bikkurim. The farmer gives this speech that starts with אֲרַמִּי אֹבֵד אָבִי (“my father was a wandering Aramaean,” Deuteronomy 26:5) and goes all the way down, giving the chain of history, acknowledging that he remembers that he is not the person who did this on his own. That there is a long line of people, and God, that brought him to this moment where he is even able to bring these bikkurim. We talk about that on Pesach at the Hagaddah.

Imu: Yes, that's definitely true, and there are many Pesach connections. That one which you discussed of אֲרַמִּי אֹבֵד אָבִי – the actual text that you are supposed to say, according to the Torah in Devarim, when you give bikkurim. The text that we read at the seder, the core text that we read in the hagaddah, comes from that declaration of bikkurim describing how we left Egypt, because apparently we're supposed to recognize that we left Egypt whenever we give bikkurim.

But also the word bechor (firstborn). Right? Bikkurim is bechor. Pesach is the bechor holiday. The very first time we're told to bring the first of our animals is in the context of the tenth plague and the korban Pesach (Passover offering).

Ari: Let's take a minute to connect some of these dots. We started in Parshat Tzav with the year-round prohibition of chametz in the mishkan. Then we looked at the role of matzah in the Exodus story, where we get the prohibition against chametz specifically on Pesach. And that led us to a question: What's the deeper meaning of chametz that would explain why it's forbidden in these two different contexts? Does it symbolize something bigger, the way Rivky suggested before?

So Imu took these four different laws that we find in two short verses in Parshat Mishpatim, four laws that at first glance seem totally unrelated to each other, but one of them is a law about not having any chametz along with animal offerings in the Tabernacle. Is it possible that the context, the other three laws in these verses, could help us understand why God prohibits chametz in the Tabernacle? And strangely enough, the very first law they looked at, bringing first fruits to the Temple, took us back to the Passover haggadah and the law to sacrifice firstborn animals, which was given at the time of the Exodus.

So far, we don't have an answer to our chametz question, but we have some tantalizing connections to Passover with the law of first fruits, bikkurim. And we have this idea about how we can get into spiritual danger if we fail to recognize the source of everything we have. Next, Imu and Rivky will tackle another law from these two verses, the commandment not to cook a baby goat in its mother's milk. We're going to get pretty far afield from our starting point in Parshat Tzav! But these seemingly disparate laws are going to bring us to a theory that ties it all together. 

Rivky: So Imu, I think actually, building on that, I'm now seeing a little bit of maybe how it connects to the next commandment in that verse, which was “do not cook a kid in its mother's milk.” We talked about bikkurim as a way of recognizing the Creator, of us bringing these fruits to recognize that we are not the source of everything that we've created. And in the same way, I think, when we abstain from mixing together a child and its mother, especially with the milk, which is actually what sustains and nourishes that kid, we too recognize, sort of, this respect for creators. 

Imu: The prohibition of not cooking a kid in its mother's milk is obvious. Right? It's an awful thing to do. This is a mother and a child. How could you do that? Rabbi Fohrman argues that the rabbis read this verse and understand it as hyperbole, as a general blanket prohibition of cooking milk and meat together in general. It's basically saying: Milk is something a parent gives to its child to nourish it, and for you to be so insensitive to where your food comes from, to treat milk as merely an ingredient – so much so that you would mix it with an animal itself and cook it together and just say, yeah, there's no difference, they're both ingredients to me – to not recognize the relationship between milk and the animals it provides for is immoral, and the Torah prohibits that.

Let's actually – now that we've clarified maybe the meaning behind those two different mitzvot, what would you see, Rivky, as the connection between bikkurim and the prohibition of milk and meat?

Rivky: So I think that to a certain extent, what they're really both trying to say is recognizing and respecting that relationship between creator and created. It's really recognizing source. It's recognizing where I came from, where my accomplishments came from, and it's recognizing where this animal came from, this animal came from its parents, and respecting that source.

Imu: So both of these ideas are about the ills that could happen to you spiritually if you as a farmer, or you as a consumer of meat or dairy products, can fall prey to if you don't recognize the Creator that lives above us. You can be an over-consumer. You can eat your fruits and ignore God. Or you can corrupt this relationship between parent and child among animals and treat them as ingredients. So these laws are there to remind us of who we are in the order of things and understand that we are little creators and that there's a big Creator above us.

Rivky: Not only does it make sense, it gives me a framework with which to continue to approach these. Because now I'm looking at לֹא־תִזְבַּח עַל־חָמֵץ דַּם־זִבְחִי – do not offer together the blood of My sacrifice with the chametz, with this leavened bread. And that makes me think that that's also about recognizing this relationship between Creator and created, recognizing source. Because the visceral language of sacrifices being tied to blood feels also very much about this natural, created language, and God is saying, don't mix that with chametz. 

Imu: I think you're on to something. I never thought about reading that verse and reading the word blood. But I think you're probably right. What jumps out at me is: What we offer on the mizbe’ach (altar) isn't, the best chefs come together and they sous vide something incredible for God together with some garlic and some arugula and paella, right? What we do is, we bring the animal in its most raw form. The blood is the essence of an animal. The Torah actually says כִּי הַדָּם הוּא הַנָּפֶשׁ – the blood is the soul, the blood is the essence of a being (Deuteronomy 12:23). The Torah is sort of saying, don't mix that with chametz. If it's referring to bread that is baked as compared to blood, then those two things couldn't be more opposite.

Rivky: I mean, blood feels like such visceral, intense language. We associate blood with life, as opposed to something like bread, which feels much more removed. You take the wheat and then you crush it and you kill it. It's much more complex.

Imu: Bread, it's something that is highly processed. At its core form, if you were bringing this on the mizbe’ach (altar) in its blood-like form, what you would be bringing is grass. Wheat. Wheat is basically a grass. We take that and we kill that wheat. We dry it, we cut it, we leave it out in the fields to dry it again. Then we crush it and then we give it water, as if to give it new life, and then we bake it, kill it again with more heat. 

That's how humans baked bread for thousands of years, which means that most people, when they baked, they were baking matzah. But there was a culture that invented a new way to further process the bread. They would do something interesting to make it rise. They would expose it to yeast and they would let it sit. And the people who invented that, the culture that invented that, and there's some historical debate, but many think it is… go ahead, Rivky.

Rivky: Egypt. I remember actually my eleventh grade chumash teacher telling us that, and it really blew my mind.

Imu: Right, the Egyptians invented chametz. I believe what they did is they first invented beer, which is liquid bread, through the fermentation process. And they were able to bake bread and sourdough. It made the bread taste differently. It made the bread literally rise. It was almost like you were breathing life into the bread. They said the Egyptian priests were the ones who held the secrets for how to do this, and it eventually spread among the masses as well.

But in that context, what chametz represents is, this could possibly trigger mankind's spiritual danger and mankind's spiritual challenge. Here we are in an age of iPhones, and it's kind of hard to relate to that. But back in the times of the Torah, it seems like this was a major technological innovation that was really part of making Egypt not only the most powerful nation in the world, but also the most god-like. If you look back at Egypt and who Egypt was in Bereishit, Egypt were the bread makers, and they were the breadbasket of the ancient world. It's interesting, also, what were the Israelites doing as slaves for the Egyptians?

Rivky: Very cool. They were building storehouses for the grain which was going to lead to bread.

Imu: Exactly. They weren't building any pyramids. They were building storehouses for grain. So I think that in the context of these other mitzvot in verses 18 and 19, here in Exodus 23, we see possibly a major reason for the spiritual ills of chametz, of over-processing our food, and the dangers of that.

I think, though, God doesn't have a problem with us eating chametz all year round, in the same way that God doesn't have a problem with us being farmers all year round. But there is a recognition process that we need to go through and almost like a cleanse that we need to go through once a year on Pesach, where we get rid of all the chametz, where we strip down bread in its most basic form without us breathing new life into it, and we use it to recognize God during that time period.

It would also mean that God's not keeping Passover all year round in the mishkan. The mishkan is a place for us to recognize God, the raw materials, the basics. Most of the grain offerings in the mishkan were simply flour, flour mixed together with oil. In the mishkan here, the minchah is baked into matzah. It can't be anything more than that. That would be inappropriate.

Rivky: It's interesting also because we think of the mishkan as the physical place in which we humans can have that direct relationship with God, and then the equivalent is also the holidays, including obviously Pesach, as being the place in time where we can have this intimate relationship with God. So this idea of the mishkan and its relationship with creation, and also holidays and its relationship with creation, and the relationship that we have with God in both of these – I think there's also something there also that makes me think.

Ari: So chametz is all about overprocessing. It distances us from our Source, so once a year we go through this kind of cleanse to remind us that all of this goodness we see in our lives, even the things we think we have created ourselves, it all really comes from God. 

But I am still wondering one thing: Out of all the holidays, why is Passover the one that is so closly associated with this type of cleanse? Here's what I think. Every year, we remember how God built the Israelites out of nothing. We entered into Egypt as one tiny family and left as a mighty nation. The Exodus story emphasizes that no matter what we achieve together as a nation, God is our source. On Passover, we turn the clock back to a time when we were like matzah, an infant nation with nothing to show for ourselves and with God as our undeniable source. 

But along with that national acknowledgment of God comes a personal one. We eat matzah to remind us of all the ways where overprocessing has distanced us from God and to remind us that He is truly the source of everything in our lives. So as we finish our cleaning and say our final goodbyes to pasta, I encourage us all to reflect on the chametz in our lives, and think about how we are going to use this Passover to reconnect to our Creator.

Credits

 This episode was recorded by Imu Shalev together with Rivky Stern.

When this episode originally aired on Aleph Beta, it was edited by Rivky Stern. 

Into the Verse editing was done by Sarah Penso.

Our audio editor is Hillary Guttman.

Our senior editor is me, Ari Levisohn. 

Thank you so much for listening, and we’ll see you next week.