This Is Chametz, This Is Chametz

Freeing Ourselves From Default Thinking in Exodus, Leviticus, and Isaiah

“[The meal offering] shall not be baked with leaven (chametz); I have given it as their portion from My offerings by fire; it is most holy, like the sin offering and the guilt offering.” (Leviticus 6:10)

“This is the principal rule regarding the Passover matzot.” (Ibn Ezra)

Seven days you shall eat unleavened bread (chametz); on the very first day you shall remove leaven from your houses, for whoever eats leavened bread from the first day to the seventh day, that person shall be cut off from Israel. (Exodus 12:15)

You shall not eat anything leavened with it; for seven days thereafter you shall eat unleavened bread (chametz), bread of distress—for you departed from the land of Egypt hurriedly—so that you may remember the day of your departure from the land of Egypt as long as you live. (Deuteronomy 16:3)

Learn to do good.
Devote yourselves to justice;
Relieve the oppressed (chamutz).
Uphold the rights of the orphan;
Defend the cause of the widow.

(Isaiah 1:17)

Chametz, leavened bread, is a word we associate with Pesach (Passover), though its referent is actually unremarkable. Bread is typically leavened. It is the unleavened bread (matzah) that is exceptional, as the English pre-fix “un-” implies. We only think about chametz on Pesach, because we don’t eat it—it’s like “don’t think pink elephants”! We don’t possess it. We don’t make it. If we have any crumbs we pronounce them non-existent, lest we be “cut off” for even a morsel. Most of the time, chametz is so a part of our lives we don’t even recognize it as chametz. Leavened bread is just bread. Bread isn’t matzah that had time to rise. Matzah is the exceptional bread. Matza is the bread of pressing need, the bread eaten under duress. Matzah is the anti-chametz, but the pair only comes into focus through deprivation.

Chametz, in other words, inflicts upon us a double-concealment. It conceals the fact of its concealment. This structure is not unlike the way that Heidegger and Freud think we are most of the time hidden from ourselves. Not only do we hide from ourselves, but we hide from our hiding. Heidegger in Being and Time calls this “inauthenticity,” a basic feature of “Average everydayness.”

In his later writings, Heidegger diagnoses the modern age as not only in plight, but in plight by virtue of its denial of its plight. In contemporary parlance the youth call this “toxic positivity.” Technology conceals the ways in which it conceals the world from us. Everything is getting more productive, more efficient, but to what end? So many tools, so many shortcuts? But are we any closer to touching Being? Since the advent of the iPhone, we have the world in our pockets, and yet aggregate screentime is going up and to the right. Not only are we less present, but we see the world as one big screen. We have become avatars. Heidegger already anticipated these developments in the 50s, because he asked about the essence of technology itself. He said our age is that of the “world picture” decades before TikTok, where people perform their lives for applause, and the most desired career for the young is “influencer.”

Only a burst of the poetic can unmask the essence of modern technology for what it really is. Heidegger was no Luddite (he enjoyed watching soccer on his TV in his Black Forest hut). He thought that being anti-tech was just as simplistic and unthoughtful as being pro-tech. Heidegger’s challenge is to dinosaurs and accelerationists alike: “In your approval or disapproval of tech, in your progressive desire for AGI or your conservative fear of it, for example, do you even understand what it means to be human? Do you grasp the essence of technology, or are you already caught up in the politics and culture war of whether to be on team safety and regulation or team Let’s Go!?

Chametz is the condition in which our priors are hidden from us. Chametz is mind-blindness. Hasidic commentators associate it with ego, which is surely the case, as ego is our default mode, and that of which we are most of the time unaware. Yet the emphasis should not be on “ego” but on “default.” Chametz is that to which we default. Chametz is the essence of technology, the aspect of human life that seeks control and mastery and predictability, but buys them at the cost of awe and humility, reverence, presence, openness, inspiration. This essence long precedes AI, the printing press, and possibly even writing itself. Chametz is not malice, but automation. It is the aspect of the human being that is recurrent, machine-like, that seeks scale, sameness, and flatness and recoils at unevenness, disturbance, discomfort. In Chametz we calculate such things as LTV (lifetime value) and CAC (customer acquisition costs). In matzah mode, by contrast, we have no charts to guide us, no spreadsheets or dashboards to orient our planning efforts. We do have faith, intuition, experience, awareness, the feeling of being here, alive, in the world, open to our surroundings. In matzah broad we don’t just breathe the air, but notice it. In a Jewish context, the famous DFW commencement speech would culminate in the refrain “This is chametz, this is chametz.” In so doing, it would not longer be chametz, by existential definition, but matzah—we would be unleavening the bread by becoming aware of it.

The commandment to refrain from creating and possessing leavened bread is not unique to Passover, but appears in this week’s Torah reading, Tzav. The priests are likewise required not to make or eat leavened bread as part of their “meal offering.” The holiness of the sacrificial act makes leavened bread anathema, for holiness is the opposite of default. Chametz is chol, regular. Matzah is kodesh, holy. Although the slaves who left Egypt left in a hurry, and although the matzah is associated with slaves, as a kind of poverty bread (bread of affliction, lechem oni), the Torah also teaches that it is holy bread, the sacral food of priests. The priest, who is high status, marks his own greatness by consuming that which on Passover is requisite for all. For the greatness of the priest is or must be his humility. Conversely, the entire people, in leaving Egypt become a nation of priests, a nation of servants, a nation whose mission is to challenge that which is taken for granted. To question that which is default and to exemplify this questioning.

From Abraham who challenges God on behalf of the sinners of Sodom and Gemorrah to Jacob who wrestles with an angel to the priests who atone on behalf of the people, the religious and poetic summons is to unconceal that which conceals, not to lambast it, but to transform it. When we face the chametz in our lives we unleaven it, we deflate its power over us. When we acknowledge our averageness, our inauthenticity, our animality, our hard-wiring, our unhealthy and seemingly immovable habits and instincts, we find a way through them. This is the priestly alchemy that we are enjoined to do when we leave Egypt (the empire ruled by default thinking).

In Isaiah, the word chamotz or chamutz, appears. It is a hapax legomenon (a word that appears only once in the Torah), but one that may be connected to our Leitwort. It carries a moral tone: either we are to help the oppressed or make right the oppressor. Perhaps these are the same! Regardless, the connection between oppression and chametz recalls the way in which suffering and cruelty are both enabled by a chametzdik mindset and a chametzdik society. We can’t undo these structures, except in the messianic sense (which is why the seder points to a World To Come), but we can transform them through practices of attention, love, and reframing.

While Passover offers us a dramatic picture of a collective in flight, this week’s Torah reading, coming right before Pesach, gives us an intimate account of the inner life of that people, one in which an aspect of Egypt, a residue of chametz, remains. In a technical sense, the priest must ensure it is gone. But in the phenomenological sense, the priest must hold the chametz of the people who approach him and affirm them, empathize with them, show them a way beyond their concealment. In so doing, the plight is revealed as plight, then vanishes, goes up and smoke, and joins the great mystery.

Shabbat Shalom and Chag Sameach,

Zohar Atkins

Etz Hasadeh