Finding Your Inner Child

In-Complete

There is no holiday that transports me back to childhood more than Passover. After all, the whole purpose of the holiday is to tell the story to your children so they can tell it to their children. Our liberation story is embedded within our psyche from a young age.

There’s so much that’s relatable to a child during this festival: eating different foods, relatives staying over, and having a voice at the table way more than usual. The great boogeyman of the holiday, Chametz, the leavened food we are restricted from owning, eating, and benefitting also serves as an important part of the childhood experience.

The urgency of refraining from it, from scrubbing and cleaning it out of our houses, checking ingredient lists, and packing chametz-free snacks for outings is quite memorable as a kid. Sure, you have foods your family probably doesn’t usually have but do any of them get the extreme treatment of chametz?

If we are often so hard on chametz during this period, isn’t it kind of weird that we sustain ourselves on it during the regular year? Shouldn’t we try harder to rid ourselves of our spiritual chametz always!?

One way to read chametz differently comes from Rav Yosef Ber Soloveitchik, the great 20th century Rabbi who led Yeshiva University for decades, who shares the following thought:

Chametz represents something that has reached “the end of the line”. It represents completeness. When water comes into contact with flour a chemical reaction takes place and the flour leavens. Once this reaction has transpired, the growth potential of the flour has been exhausted. It is what it is.

Rav Soloveichik compares chametz to the mature adult who prefers cold logic over visceral emotion and hard facts over intuition. This emotional and spiritual progress comes at the cost of the deadening of “the living experience of fellowship with God”.

It’s not that we choose to eat chametz all throughout the year. We are chametz. We are intellectual seekers. We try to silence our intuition and emotion and utilize our logic and objective truths because that’s how we achieve success in life. You have to adult because it’s how you make money, take care of your family, ensure your future. It’s not inherently wrong because it’s the way of the world. But, we do need a break from it every once in awhile because it stunts a part of who we are. 

Matzah is the stage before chametz. It represents incompleteness. It represents

“the childlike clinging to and longing for God, of finding God not at the level of [the intellect], but at the level of naïveté, faith, and feeling.” 

Matzah represents the things that we adults have pretty much grown out of. According to Rav Soloveichik,

The delivery from all restrictions and limitations, the ascent from bondsmen to freemen, is attainable with the root experience of man, with his childlike commitments and perceptions, with the uncritical surrender to and naïve trust in God, with the pre-adulthood notions and truths. 

 In order to reaffirm our belief in God’s role in our lives, counter intuitively, we must negate our intellectual self. We must admit our incompleteness. We perform this symbolically by eating matzah.

We are commanded to perpetually investigate the universe, to continually hone our intellect so that it can be used as a tool with which we search for Godliness. And yet, says Rav Soloveichik,

The prelude to the illumination of one’s experience is the self-denial of the mature person and the emergence of the child.

Each year, during the seven days of Pesach, we eat matzah to remind ourselves that while grow we must, we will never – we can never – be completely complete.

It’s a magnificent teaching that helps explains why on Passover many of can easily access the headspace of being a child again. We’re supposed to! Matzah is who we try not to be most of the year...playful, fun-seeking, admitting that we need not be the best. Yet, on Passover, we embrace that side of ourselves. We welcome in our incomplete-ness. Its place in our lives must be honored and not cast aside without thought.

This also explains why a person can’t vow to refrain from Matzah during Pesach. If it contains the leaven material, shouldn’t we steer clear of any stumbling blocks and subsist solely on natural foods like fruits, vegetables, and animal products? In a book of collections that capture the teachings of Breslov Chasidim, they answer:

A person cannot escape in life from facing all of its challenges. The essence of being in service to something greater is the ability to withstand challenges and overcome them.¹

Being childlike is a good challenge for us heady people. We can’t run away from it.

I was thinking about this notion as I was preparing for Pesach this year and thinking about the yahatz step in the seder. There are 3 matzot on the table and we take the middle one and break it in two. There are many attempts to understand this breaking. One this year that resonated this me is as follows. 

Matzah, in and of itself, is a contradictory symbol. As we attest to at the beginning of the seder, it is the bread of affliction upon which the impoverished subsist. Yet, it also becomes the bread of freedom as the Israelites hastily eat it as they thrust off their shackles. It contains both freedom and slavery within it. So we break the middle one to remind ourselves that we carry both those pieces inside of beings. Matzah has that duality about it and so do we. 

We are human beings who live our regular years as chametz-beings. We use our wits, our smarts, our logic, and our rules in order to have dominion over the world around us. But, we also have that Matzah-ness inside of us, that child-like ability to open ourselves up to the curiosity and wonder of the world. 

On Passover we should honor that side of ourselves that we normally suppress. We ask questions. We express genuine surprise at things we normally take for granted. We show courage in saying, “why are we doing this again?” Being child-like is exactly what the creators of the Hagaddah intended in its formation. 

Maybe that’s also why Pesach feels so childlike. Passover, with all of its matzah eating, opens up a portal for us. It’s not just an ancient portal that allows us to delve into our collective Jewish history. It’s a portal that allows us to be kids again, reveling in the joy and wonder of what it means to truly be free, unburdened by the masks of chametz that we normally don. Seems like a nice place to be for a week!

Sending early wishes of chag kasher v’sameach...may your passovers be joy-filled, free, and full of a little child-like awe!

Shabbat Shalom and Happy Weekend

1. Siach Sarfe Kodesh 1:387