Pesach: Searching for the Chametz Within

Bedikat chametz: searching by the light of the soul

Dear friends, good evening. We are taking up the theme of Pesach, with a few preliminaries to the Hagadah, and the first of them is bedikat chametz. Literally, it means the examination of the chametz; its meaning is the removal of the chametz.

Now this chametz that we remove from the house — bal yera’eh and bal yimatzei, so that it is neither seen nor found in our possession — is above all the chametz that dwells within us. It is not simply in the dwelling; what matters is to remove it from ourselves. We express this through the ritual of a light that accompanies us as we search for this chametz in every corner of the house.

And in reality we are not removing much at all: about ten little packets have been placed in rooms already cleared of chametz, which might even make our blessing over the removal of chametz superfluous: it would be a berachah levatalah, a blessing said in vain. So, so that it should not be a blessing in vain, a child or one’s wife takes it upon themselves to scatter this chametz, these ten packets, around the house, and we set out to look for them — seriously look for them.

But I repeat once more: it is by the light of our soul, our neshamah, that we search for the particles of chametz within ourselves. And therefore this blessing would never be superfluous, because the ritual of chametz is fully binding the moment it is a matter of removing it from our thinking, from our way of speaking, from our language, from our everyday deeds.

For in every step we take there is always some small measure of ego, a self-satisfaction bordering on arrogance, and we must truly recover the moral awareness of performing the mitzvah in a disinterested way. And even if we have shown a will to fulfill these commandments honestly, consciously, expecting nothing in return but the moral elevation of our conscience, renewal is still imperative.

Renewal against inertia

Death lies in inertia, in growing old. The verb shanoh, to study, derives from the same root as shinui and shanah. Shanah is the yearly cycle. Shinui is change. Shanoh is to study. Thus with the spring, with nature’s return to life, should come the return of the spirit to a state of youthfulness, to a better perception of things as we progress in our way of acting and of thinking — and that is precisely what the removal of chametz consists of.

You will ask me: what does all this have to do with bread? Well, let us not forget that the instinct, the desire, that recurs most frequently in human nature is that of feeding oneself. The first commandment given to man concerns the eating of the fruit of the tree — that is, his own food — yet paradoxically this food of man is bound up with the knowledge of good and evil.

So in a sense, from the very beginning the Torah made no distinction between material and spiritual food; it signified to man that he must not substitute good for evil or evil for good. A distinction was needed — but that distinction is itself imaginary, because, as we have seen, G-d does not create evil; all that He creates is good. It is the diversion of things from their own essence that generates evil. In truth, to overcome this illusory distinction, we should rather learn to distinguish the true from the false.

Now chametz is not a foreign element introduced from outside, as is done nowadays when leaven is brought in and added to the dough. If the dough is left to itself, without leaven, after a certain time it will rise of its own accord. That is, the leaven itself, which gives the dough its flavor, spoils the dough if it outlasts its time. Everything, then, is a question of dosage over time, of an element that is part of the dough itself and not foreign to it.

Leaven, the yetzer and the three elements

So we say that in man, the element of desire is not to be abolished when it is part of our will, of our consciousness, the stimulus of all action — that is the leaven, the se’or. But leaven that has passed its time must be removed.

It must be removed because there are three elements that take part in the corruption of what we call the yetzer — a yetzer that has ceased to be a yetzer, an instinct that no longer creates, that no longer generates a will to act, but has overstepped or separated from its original element, has spoiled the dough, and has led man’s consciousness astray. These three elements, our sages say, are kinah, ta’avah and kavod: the competitive spirit, desire, and the ego — kavod, self-assertion.

Now we cannot claim to part with these three elements, because they genuinely take part in our processes of thought and action and can be positive; but seven days a year the task is to neutralize them, so as to take them up again afterward with new prospects for their use. That is bedikat chametz.

The three faces of bread

And this applies first to lechem, bread. Why bread? Because, as we said earlier, it is the nourishing element of man. But we also find lechem in the sense of the feminine. For example, concerning Yosef, it is said that his master deprived him of nothing, that he gave him everything — except the bread. And that bread is his wife, Potiphar’s wife: this is arayot, forbidden relations.

There is a third aspect of bread, found in the korban, the offering, which is made to nourish man, designed to nourish man; and when it is diverted from its original course it becomes avodah zarah, idolatry. So the removal of chametz covers three stages: the relationship with my own person, the relationship with others through the feminine, and the relationship with the Absolute through the korban. But when it is diverted, it becomes avodah zarah.

Another notion: as Mishlei says, a man sells himself to earn his living, for his bread, for a crust of bread; bread is the food for which a man consents to sell his own freedom. Here too, since a curse accompanies it, a man ought to examine his approach to life and to his own bread, so that he does not overstep the limits of servitude — that is, so that he does not become an unconditional servant, a slave.

This also covers a second domain, because in life we are conditioned by many situations — not only by our profession, but by our married life, by the education of our children. There too a state of servitude can overtake us. Everything wears out, everything rusts; we must stay alert. And the removal of chametz covers these matters as well — not so as to eliminate the chametz entirely, but to restore its dosage, its measure in all things.

Its measure in all things: at the level of the nefesh, the essential needs of life; at the level of the ruach, the spirit; and at the level of our service of G-d, our spirituality. Once we have done that, then we can celebrate Pesach.

Pesach: the leap beyond logic

What is Pesach? Pesach is to make a leap. Making the leap obeys no logic. There is no logic in the passage from the inert to the living, from earth to plant, from plant to animal, from animal to human. There is always a mutation, which is a going beyond the thing itself. That is called Pesach — Pesach not through pure rationality but, on the contrary, through a total mutation.

How, then, will this mutation come about? There is one thing that marks the festival of Pesach and is found in no other festival: the family table at which the children take part. We will come back to the four sons, who also represent a phenomenon of mutation in our way of dialoguing with the other.

We always want things to be logical. But marveling before a painting, listening to beautiful music, living an emotion, a joy — these do not always obey logic. They carry one’s being from one world to another, and that is what makes beauty, that is what makes joy.

Well then, let us approach life with this conviction of Pesach, of passing over — for this term appears only at the Exodus, where it is a matter of passing instantaneously from the state of a slave, of a conditioned being, to that of a free being. It happens here and now, in the blink of an eye, as we shall see later. Let us believe in this immediate change, which can occur at any moment and change the way we see things, the way we live through events, the way we escape death.

The firstborn and the end of possession

For what brought about this name was the passing-over that carried the firstborn of Israel beyond death, when they should have suffered the same fate as the Egyptian firstborn. We were no different. It was said that every firstborn should die. Why? Because they were the first fruits, which gave the parents a certain satisfaction of being, which changed their state from husband to father and fixed in them a notion of possession.

Let us not forget that Chavah called her first child Kayin — Kayin from the verb kanah, to acquire. But what is a child? A child is not acquired. A child is something else. A child is a beyond-myself. He is not my duplicate, my photocopy; he is not necessarily going to be the prototype of my own life. No — I raise him so that he may be the beyond of my own life. And there is always a Pesach taking place in the passage from father to child.

So putting an end to this notion of possession in all things, of ownership — that is what will bring man out of his conditioning, out of his ego, out of his servitude to the clichés of life, so as to see beyond, to make this leap.

What, then, can help with this? I said that the distinctive feature of the festival of Pesach is the dialogue established between father and child. And when there is no child, between the husband and his wife; and failing that, between a man and himself. So this open dialogue exists at every level. At the level of the future, it is the next generation, the children. At the level of the present, it is the wife who is before me, or the friend who accompanies me in the celebration of Pesach. And in the absence of anyone, it is me alone.

Ask yourself the question. Ask your fathers; ask your elders: they will instruct you, they will inform you. In other words: question yourself about your past, about your roots. Try to find them again. Try to move forward, and try to make the leap that has been imposed on you or for which you have been destined. Do not remain in the past, for that is death. Do not build castles in the air in your spiritual world, for that is another form of death. Try to live in a permanent present, between past and future, that will allow you to free yourself from all the chains of conditioning.

Mitzrayim: the two limits

Because, like it or not, what is Egypt? Mitzrayim. It comes from metzar, limit. We are always limited; we always live within limits. Mitzrayim is a dual form. We are limited by our past: we did not choose it. We came into the world with very specific givens, which at times we must endure. We have to struggle, to overcome them, or to take them upon ourselves, for the inheritance is heavy.

And we are also limited in our plans for the future, because however much we may want something, we need the means: material means, intellectual means, spiritual means. And we do not always have the means. So there are two metzarim, two limits: the limit of the past, of our antecedents, and the limits of the plan for the future, which are not open onto the infinite for everyone.

And we should do what we can achieve by ourselves within the limits that have been assigned to us, because what matters in a man is not the finished work, but the effort he undertakes to accomplish it — that is what is to be valued. If we have indeed deployed all our means, and wisely, then we are deserving; if we have squandered them, squandered all the strength that was invested in us, then we have no merit.

And from here, the Pesach Hagadah. The Pesach Hagadah is the linking of the past to this plan for the future, and the very will to do so — that is the movement of freedom. So freedom in itself is an abstract notion. We are not free. We are not free: we are in the process of freeing ourselves. There is a permanent movement of liberation.

Which means that freedom itself is an illusion if, in the end, we do not try to bring Mitzrayim out of ourselves. For one does not leave Mitzrayim — one tears Mitzrayim out; one tears the limits out of one’s own person. Mitzrayim is the prototype of all the forms of conditioning in which man finds himself — not only at the physical level, that of the concentration camps, Heaven forbid, but also in our life in society, our intellectual life and our spiritual life.

The four cultures and the four letters of the Name

Our sages linked the Exodus to the liberation of the Jewish people from Babylonian culture, one; Persian culture, two; Greek culture, three; and the culture of Rome — of the West, in which we live today — four. There are four stages of liberation from different cultures before one reaches this level where […] vision becomes transparent, where things themselves become transparent.

Where we pass from the name of Lordship to the four-letter Name. Let me explain. When we utter the name of G-d, what is written is yud-kei-vav-kei, from the root of the verb “to be”; yet what we pronounce is not the letters yud-kei-vav-kei — what we pronounce is the name of Lordship, the Master. That is to say, the very perception we have, even of the spiritual, is a state of subjection: we regard ourselves as the servants of a master.

But once we have gone beyond the four modes of conditioning — for this number four recurs throughout the Hagadah, and I will explain it: it corresponds to the four letters of the Divine Name, yud-kei-vav-kei, just as it corresponds to the four letters of the name of Lordship, alef-dalet-nun-yud […]. But this passage […] must be brought about, and it can be done with certainty only once we have gone beyond the elements conveyed by these four cultures, which keep us in a state of subjection and dependence. We nurture complexes toward these four different cultures. We must be able to go beyond them — and to go beyond them, we must also be able to integrate them fully. I will come back to this.

That said, there are indeed three kinds of leaven of which the Torah speaks. There is chametz — pure leaven, material leaven. There is machmetzet — feminine, a yeast — and that concerns the relationship with the feminine, as I said earlier. And then there is se’or, which shares its etymology with she’erit, the remainder — something that is considered superfluous. For leaven, from the material point of view, as we have seen, is essential; yeast, the relationship with the feminine, is also indispensable.

Now the relationship with the Absolute, with G-d — that is where man’s relationship can go beyond its own limits to cling to the Divine, to the Absolute, to what lies beyond ourselves. And the fourth dimension is within ourselves. On this too I will come back. And that is why we have four cups of wine, which are not only cups of joy at this gradual liberation that carries us onward from the first dialogue.

The four modes of speech

For in speech there are four modes. There is saying — I tell myself, I speak within myself. I speak to the other, and then […]. I am in dialogue with the other. Now, I have succeeded in winning the interest of the person facing me, or he has succeeded in winning mine — then we have formed a beam of light, a bundle of ideas, of thoughts. Eged, Hagadah, igud: that is what we want to achieve tonight — on the night of Pesach, I mean.

But on what must we end? The fourth dimension is shir, song. How do we end the night of Pesach? With song. At every level of dialogue there can be a few false notes — when I speak to myself, when I speak to another, when we have tried to smooth the edges and in the end we understand each other. But song admits no false note. And on the night of Pesach, it is thus that we complete this movement of the liberation of speech.

Our sages say: Pesach is peh sach — a mouth in motion, a mouth that speaks. That is, when we are in exile, it is speech that is in exile. We cannot manage to understand one another because we have lost the authenticity of language. To make ourselves understood we resort to every artifice, and all too often we drive out what is natural.

To free man, we must first try to free his language, because the part of the Divine that is in man is the breath that carries speech; it is through this breath that we express ourselves. That is why the Targum, the Aramaic translation, says of Adam that man became a living spirit: from the moment the Eternal breathed His breath into him, the Targum translates ruach memalela, that is, a speaking spirit, a spirit endowed with language.

And this language is in exile. Leaving Egypt means freeing language from all its artifices, from all its conditioning, so that language may recover its original breath. And for that, of course, one needs a hagadah — one needs an education.

But education — from which word does the verb come? With which word does it share its etymology? With gid. The gid is the nerve: that which moves, so to speak, all the organs of the human body, that which sets our thought in motion. And we must restore its original energy; it must not lose its vigor. So that it does not lose its vigor, one must not remain inert, without movement, without using one’s muscles and nerves […]; one should give them new energy each time.

For maror is death. It has the same numerical value: maror and mavet. Mavet, 446, has the same numerical value as maror. We will come back to this too.

Why there is no blessing over the Hagadah

We are at the preliminaries of the Hagadah. Now our sages asked: why do we not recite a blessing over the Hagadah? Generally every mitzvah we perform requires a blessing, and a blessing over the Hagadah ought to have been instituted.

First answer: if we are in the midst of liberation and the mitzvah knows no end, how can one make a blessing over something that has not yet reached its fulfillment? It is not possible. One makes a blessing for the fulfillment of a mitzvah; here it has not reached its fulfillment.

Next: what, ultimately, is this movement of dialogue that we set up in order to arrive at this movement of liberation? The Hagadah is only an instrument we use to reach our goal. And we never recite a blessing over the instruments that enable us to fulfill the mitzvah.

And finally — and with this I will conclude — the Hagadah is to be regarded as a tribute to G-d’s liberating movement in the Exodus, in four stages: ve-hotzeti, I brought you out; ve-hitzalti, I rescued you; ve-ga’alti, I redeemed you; ve-lakachti, I took you to Me as a people (Shemot 6:6–7). That is what we celebrate tonight: this recovered identity as a people. And so the Hagadah is a form of blessing.

The bikkurim and permanent remembrance

For where do we find the essence of the Hagadah? In mikra bikkurim, in the declaration the faithful Jew made when he brought the first fruits of his garden and presented them before the Kohen. And he would say — I will quote it next time, from Devarim — here I bring the bikkurim […], I bring the first fruits. And in these first fruits, what does he do? He recapitulates what the Exodus was for him — in the present.

Now this recapitulation is rendered by the Targum — once again, the Aramaic version — thus: I praise the Eternal, I praise the Eternal for having freed me from this conditioning of Egypt. And Egypt is the prototype of all exiles. Therefore, in any situation, a man finds himself in this permanent remembrance of the Exodus.

How many times is it mentioned in the Torah? Fifty times. Fifty is the Jubilee: the Jubilee that frees the people of Israel, the Jubilee that frees the lands, that frees every slave, even one who consented to sell himself. It is the return of lands to their former owners.

That is the shevach: praising the Eternal for having instituted even laws that bring about this compulsory liberation of man, for the Exodus is the starting point of the history of the Jewish people. The Jewish people was born at the Exodus.