Matzah: Taste Beyond Reason
A Simple Path Through Complexity Theory
“To confer a name is to capture, to fix, to immobilize. It is to impose a map, to capture something that exceeds and goes beyond, a becoming." (Deleuze and Guattari, One Thousand Plateus)
“In a complex system, the very act of playing the game has a way of changing the rules.” (James Gleick, Chaos)
When the Jewish people left Egypt, they had no concept of emunah (faith), so God said, let them taste the remedy (i.e. matzah), and while they are eating it, they should not eat anything else (i.e. chametz). Once they ate matzah, they were healed and discovered emunah, and after that they were allowed to eat chametz. (Zohar, Tetzaveh)
And this is the law of the meal offering: Aaron’s sons shall present it before the Lord, in front of the altar. A handful of the choice flour and oil of the meal offering shall be taken from it, with all the frankincense that is on the meal offering, and this token portion shall be turned into smoke on the altar as a pleasing odor to the Lord. What is left of it shall be eaten by Aaron and his sons; it shall be eaten as unleavened cakes (matzot), in the sacred precinct; they shall eat it in the enclosure of the Tent of Meeting. (Leviticus 6:7-9)
Rabban Gamliel taught: One who has not explained Pesach (the Paschal lamb), Matzah, and Maror (bitter herbs) has not fulfilled his obligation” (Pesachim 10:5) This matzah that we eat, what is the reason? Because the dough of our fathers did not have time to become leavened before the King of kings, the Holy One, blessed be He, revealed Himself to them and redeemed them, as it is said: ‘They baked the dough which they brought forth out of Egypt into matzah cakes, for it was not leavened; because they were thrust out of Egypt and could not tarry, neither had they prepared provisions for themselves.’” (Exodus 12:39) [Haggadah]
Jewish tradition is replete with explanations of matzah. Rabban Gamliel says that anyone who does not explain matzah has not fulfilled the obligation of remembering the Exodus. In so doing, he elevates matzah and marror (which we still eat) to the same status as the Pascal sacrifice (which we do not eat, and are, in fact, forbidden from eating). Yet, the explanation of matzah, as we will see, is not uniform. Matzah exceeds fundamental explanation. Perhaps that is the point.
Matzah is referred to in the Torah as lechem oni, the bread of poverty. The Zohar also refers to it as the food of healing (michla asvata) and the bread of faith (nehama d’heim’nuta). It is also called the bread of haste (lechem chipazon). Midrashic sources connect the matzah we eat to the manna—divinely given flatbread—consumed by the Israelites in the wilderness. Eating matzah is a central mitzvah of Pesach. Many have a tradition of abstaining from matzah the day before Pesach, if not year round, so as to enable it to be a special food, set aside for a special season. Matzah contains dialectical elements of both food that we were forced to eat by dire circumstance, and the food we choose to eat to celebrate our liberation, transforming it in the process.
In Hasidic commentaries, matzah is associated with an ethos of humility and contrasted with chametz, a more inflated or puffed up sense of self.
In this week’s parasha, Tzav, matzah is the remnant of the grain offering, which only priests were allowed to eat. It was, in other words, the holy bread of priests, their sustenance. Yet this very same type of food is a universal commandment for every Jew, suggesting that by eating matzah we attain the status of divine servants, and, that when priests eat their mincha, they sanctify the food that was once the ration of slaves.
Of course, the most obvious thing about matzah is not these wonderfully semantic flights of fancy, but the taste. The Zohar makes a simple and subtle point: eating food can transform us instantly. The taste of matzah offers healing and faithfulness. The ex-slaves, our ancestors, did not discover God by reasoning from first principles. They were not philosophers. Yet they found an essential truth, an embodied truth, just by ingesting unleavened bread. Matzah offers a non-rational, a pre- and post-rational path to relationship with God. The meanings we assign it multiply as we attempt to digest this a-rational experience and metabolize it into familiar concepts. Matzah is the thing itself.
In a complex, adaptive system, real signals exist which no human can explain. The human task is not to explain the signal, but simply to find it. This was the key insight of Jim Simons, a mathematician, whose approach to investing was focused on finding correlations in data rather than having any view on the actual assets his firm traded. Simons’s approach to investing—once deeply contrarian—is now a fundamental principle of AI and machine learning: the models don’t need to “know” the answer, they just need to know the probabilities that a response is a good answer. It turns out, you can go very far—perhaps even further than rationalist humans—by submitting to the a-rational; the idea that God’s reasons are not our reasons, or that our reasons are simply too limiting. Simons consistently beat the market, ironically, not by thinking he could pick better stocks than everyone else, but by accepting his own ignorance.
The matzah is the bread of healing and faith, and associated with humility, because it offers us a direct pathway to understanding in our bones the profound skepticism that enabled Simons to outperform. The radical meaning of chok, typically defined as a commandment that has no rationale, is not that it’s arbitrary; quite the contrary. It’s that the world is so complex that it contains truths which it is impossible to put into words and reasons and that when we try, we change and even break. The Jewish people has survived for centuries by maintaining traditions—including the traditions of meaning-making through storytelling, debate, and study—by first eating matzah, and experiencing it directly, and then coming to understand it. Our ancestors, rushing out of Egypt, had no time to ask, “What is matzah.” They were too busy for that. Only as we attempt to connect to them, and place ourselves in the same story, do we reach for explanation. The seder—like the ever expanding ocean floor—accumulates each generation’s attempt to continue the complex, adaptive system described in the Torah.
Matzah is high-signal food in a world of noise. It nourishes our faith because it is given to us, rather than fully grasped, understood, or reasoned towards from the ground-up. It is a correlation that, as it were, simply falls from heaven. And it is the food that slaves and priests eat—those who are forced to serve and those who choose to serve—because it is the food of those who know God’s in charge.
As we sit at our seder tables, we participate in a tradition that has continuously adapted while maintaining its core integrity. The meanings of matzah have multiplied over millennia, yet the simple act of eating unleavened bread remains unchanged.
Shabbat Shalom and Chag Sameach,
Zohar Atkins