Rabbi Shimshon Rafael Hirsch
Rabbi Shimshon Rafael HirschCourtesy

Pesach, the holiday of freedom. But the central food item of this holiday – matzah – symbolizes slavery. Why?

Because Pesach doesn’t just commemorate our freedom. It commemorates how we attained this freedom. And we did so, not through our own efforts, but by the grace of G-d.

Free people don’t rush out of a country. They take their merry time and prepare food to eat on the road. Yet, we didn’t enjoy this luxury when we left bondage 3,300 years ago. On the contrary, we were “driven out of Egypt” (Shemos 12:39). In fact, we didn’t even have time to let our bread dough rise.

Rav Samson Raphael Hirsch writes: “We were still in complete lack of freedom and utter lack of power, and it was only the free directing and commanding power of G-d that allowed us to arise to freedom and independence.”

Every year on Pesach, we celebrate our freedom but remind ourselves that this freedom is thanks to G-d alone. By eating matzah, we “remind ourselves, and thereby express the fact, that at the moment of our arising to freedom and independence, neither in our persons nor in our possessions was there the slightest trace of independence, or even of the ability to achieve independence (se’or).”

This fact is so central to Judaism that any Jew who denies it is cut off from the Jewish people. It seems strange. Does one deserve kares – the harshest punishment in Judaism – merely for eating an olive-size worth of bread on Pesach?

The answer is yes. For a person who consumes chametz (“the bread of independence”) on Pesach “denies thereby the G-dly origin of our achieving freedom.” He sees our liberation “as a human achievement and thereby he exterminates himself from the future of Israel (kares) inasmuch as he forsakes the basis of the past of Israel.”

Rav Samson Raphael Hirsch (1808-1888) – head of the Jewish community in Frankfurt, Germany for over 35 years – was a prolific writer whose ideas, passion, and brilliance helped save German Jewry from the onslaught of modernity.

Elliot Resnick, PhD, is the host of “The Elliot Resnick Show” and the editor of an upcoming work on etymological explanations in Rav Samson Raphael Hirsch’s commentary on Chumash.