The Missing Half of the Middle Matzah

By Rabbi Doniel Z. Kramer, Ph.D., BCC, CH (LTC-ret), USAR.

Shalom.

This Issue of “The Jewish Veteran” should be arriving in our homes around Pesach (Passover) time.

For Jewish chaplains on active duty or in VA settings, Pesach presents us with an excellent opportunity to reconnect lost, disillusioned, or uneducated Jews with their heritage.

The Jewish Welfare Board (JWB) Jewish Chaplains’ Council plans to post a schedule indicating where Passover programs will take place on every military post where there is a Jewish chaplain or lay leader.

There is an intriguing custom performed during the Passover Seder ritual. It is called Yachatz, which means divide. The leader of the Seder takes the middle of the three matzot (plural of matzah) on the ritual table and breaks it in half, wrapping and hiding the larger piece, called the afikomen, which will be shared with everyone at the table at the conclusion of the festive Seder meal, and puts the smaller piece back between the two other matzot.

Many of our readers might recall the times in the 1980s and 1990s when so many Jewish federations and the United Jewish Appeal (UJA) encouraged Jewish families to recite “The Matzah of Hope” prayer at the Seder during Yachatz. This meditation remembered the Jews in the Communist Soviet Union, imprisoned behind the Iron Curtain, who were not allowed to practice their faith and were divided from and cut-off from the rest of the Jewish world. We prayed that just as the missing part of the middle matzah will be returned to the Seder table at the conclusion of the Passover meal, so too may all those Jews cut off from the Jewish world be restored to the Jewish people, and we could be one reunited Jewish family.

Indeed, one of the most remarkable Pesach Sedarim (plural of seder) that I attended was when my congregation and community welcomed and helped settle our first Jewish emigre family from the Soviet Union. This family was enjoying their first Pesach in freedom and joined us in reciting “The Matzah of Hope” prayer for Jews still imprisoned in Russia. That same prayer, which was recited by us the previous year, and collectively included them, was now being chanted by them for the first time, on behalf of their friends and relatives still in Russia!

That same message is as timely today for so many of our fellow American Jews who have dropped out, or were never formally and educationally initiated into our faith community. Some of these assimilated Jews may have some warm memory of a Passover Seder long ago perhaps at a grandparent’s home. If these individuals are in the military or work on military bases, a friendly, welcoming Seder conducted by a chaplain or lay leader could be the invitation to affiliate.

So too, with a Seder that a VA chaplain might conduct, often with the support of a local JWV post or district. Indeed, I am personally so appreciative of the members of the JWV Rockland/Orange County New York District, under the leadership of Commander Bernhard Storch, of blessed memory, who were always supportive of all of the Jewish and patriotic activities that I and others planned in the VA Hudson Valley HCS, both financially as well as physically. Their members volunteered to not only help set-up and serve, but also befriended our hospitalized veterans. And I know that this devoted service by JWV and JWVA takes place around the country! Yasher koach—all the power—to you!!!

There is another aspect to Yachatz. The first half of the Seder consists of reciting the Haggadah, retelling the story of the enslavement of the Jewish people in Egypt. Slaves were not fed full meals and were lucky to have broken pieces of bread to eat, and so only a piece of the matzah on the Seder table reminds us of the time when our ancestors were slaves in Egypt.

In this regard, the broken matzah offers an additional lesson. One of the most venerable traditions of Pesach is the Maot Chittim (literally meaning money for wheat) charity drive, when funds are collected to ensure that all Jews, especially those who are poor and destitute, have the funds to purchase matzah (hence the wheat reference) and all the other Seder necessities, to be able to conduct a meaningful, filling, and fulfilling Seder experience in a regal and respectful manner.  Jewish veterans who served and even fought while willing to make the ultimate sacrifice so that evil oppressors and despots, like the Pharaoh of ancient Egypt, could be defeated, surely should be volunteers to fight in this war against poverty epitomized by the Maot Chittim campaign.

Rabbi Shlomo Riskin concludes his discussion of Yachatz in his Passover Haggadah this way, “The saintly Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav (1772-1811) once asked, ‘Who is a whole man? He who has a broken heart.’ As long as Israel is not yet fully redeemed, the second matzah must be broken.  It remains as a reminder and symbol within the very festival of redemption that we are not yet redeemed.”

May God bless you and your family with a very meaningful, delightful, and redemptive Pesach. Hag kasher vesamayach!

Volume 77. Number 1. 2023