Yes I know mere weeks before Pesach one simply must pose questions only in sets of four. If you don’t believe me just peruse the ads co-opting the “Four Questions” (and many  other aspects of this heilige Yom Tov) to purvey one or another consumer product. But with apologies we’ll begin our exploration of Pesach themes with only two queries and leave the Fihr Kashyos where they belong in the trusted hands of our tinokos shel beis rabban.

And so: Why does the Torah require us to become for one week out of the year zero-tolerance extremists regarding all things chomeitz with a vengeance that even the much-reviled chazir doesn’t elicit? What has the rather benign-looking plate of spaghetti in front of me done to deserve banishment along with its cousins in the bread and pastry families not only from my meals but from my very ownership and possession? Clearly an unusual mitzvah this.

But to compound the anomaly the very chomeitz that is pasta non grata on Pesach resurfaces a mere seven weeks hence on Shavuos to take center stage in the Beis Hamikdosh in the form of the Shtei Halechem the two loaves of leavened bread offered on the mizbei’ach. If as the Ramban teaches the seven weeks spanning from Pesach through Shavuos form a sort of meta-Yom Tov with Pesach as its “first days ” the Sefirah period as “Chol Hamo’eid ” and Shavuos as the “last days ” how are we to understand a holiday that begins with utter rejection of leaven and concludes with – voila! – one of the only instances where a meal offering consisted of chomeitz rather than matzah. 

The one word we reflexively associate with Pesach is cheirus freedom. Emancipation from enslavement that is -- as distinct from alternative interpretations of freedom from a humdrum stay-at-home holiday or from the same Seder wine as last year that again sundry market forces in our midst are more than happy to expound for our purchasing pleasure. And of all the forms that enslavement might take none is more nefarious or more difficult to extricate oneself from than servitude of the mind that is self-perpetrated and perpetuated.

There’s a word for the tragedy of man as at once both slave and enslaver: self-delusion. Why is there nothing more incorrigible than this kind of self-enslavement? Because the taskmaster is ever-present because he knows his prisoner and his weaknesses more intimately than any other jailor could ever hope to but most crucially because the enslaved has not the slightest inkling that he is so.   

We all begin life laboring under a powerful delusion and unless we act to bring ourselves to our senses we end our time on earth with this fantasy largely intact. It is an intuition that goes to the very essence of who we are: our sense of self is deeply bound up with our bodies and their physical needs and wants. As Rav Eliyahu Dessler zt”l pithily described it I relate to my body as I do to my child an extension of myself to whom I instinctively desire to give boundlessly. I regard my soul however at a remove as I would a stepchild to whom I am obligated to give more out of duty than out of love.

The truth of course is precisely the opposite of that which I intuit and it is this inversion of reality that mitzvas matzah and its companion mitzvas lo sa’aseh of chomeitz come to set right.

To be continued.