Tazria - claim your broken kingdom

Leviticus 12:1-13:59 | kings II 7:3-20

Summary: Parshat Tazria tells of a person who acts in such a way that they are not allowed to stay in the camp. The ritual through which they return restores their status - and then some! This brokenness-that-leads-to-greater-wholeness is modeled in how we break the middle matzah at the Seder.

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In 1838 people started to make matzah with machines. For 3000+ years before that, matzah was made by hand. You can, of course, still get hand-made matzah today (and you can, of course, pay dearly for it) and there is good reason to do so. In addition to providing a crunchy and dense mouthfeel along with earthy aromas and a smoky, charcoal-y flavor, each piece is like work of art, unique and expressive and bumpy, with topography similar to a small hilly New England town.

The machine matzahs tend to be more uniform, flat like Nebraska, with rows of holes arranged at perfect right angles and parallel lines. And that’s a problem, because when you break the middle matzah to do yachatz, the matzah tends to break along the lines, and you end up two approximately equal pieces of matzah, a clean break, smooth.

So what? Well, that’s not how the matzah is supposed to be broken - it’s supposed to be broken into two very specific shapes - a dalet and a yud. With a square matzah it would be like breaking off one corner, leaving one L-shaped piece and the other part looking like a smaller square. And with a round matzah it would be like removing one quarter of a pie.

Why so important? Because we’re all kings and queens. But we don’t start off that way. And neither did Yehuda.

Yehuda, ultimately, is the tribe from which Jewish kings will come. But you wouldn’t know it from his origin story. After his inspiring name is given - “Now, I will thank Hashem” - we hear nothing of Yehuda until he is standing over the pit looking at Yoseph. He asks his brothers what profit there would be in allowing Yoseph to die when they could sell him as a slave and buy shoes with the proceeds. The brothers agree, and so it is.

From this simply story, we learn that Yehuda is a) someone his brothers listen to and b) more concerned with his own grievances (and footwear) than he is with the wellbeing of his father and the family.

Fast forward twenty two years, and Yoseph is the prime minister of Egypt. He has framed his youngest brother Binyamin by placing his chalice in Binyamin’s sack and then sent his henchmen to track down his brothers and identify the thief. When the chalice is found among Binyamin’s things, Yoseph claims the thief Binyamin as a slave. Yehuda knows that if he goes home without Binyamin that their father Ya’akov will die from shock and sorrow. And though Binyamin has proven himself to be a thief, and is therefore deserving of whatever he gets, Yehuda offers himself as a slave in Binyamin’s stead because he cares about his father and the family.

Now Yehuda is a) someone his bothers listen to and b) appropriately concerned for the wellbeing of his family. Now he is worthy to be the father of kings.

We are entering the month of Nissan. The first day of the month of Nissan is, according to the Mishnah, the new year of kings. In its simplest explanation, the first day of Nissan is the next year of a king’s reign, even if he took the throne on the 28th day of the previous month, Adar. When you consider, though, Rebbe Nachman’s reminder that we are all kings and queens, and that each of us has a domain that is under our auspices, for which we are responsible, then Nissan is not just the new year of “the” king - it is the new year of our respective sovereignties. Our relationship to our respective domains is renewed.

Not only is the first of Nissan the new year of kings, the whole month of Nissan is associated with the tribe of Yehuda (as each of the twelve Jewish months is associated with one of the twelve tribes). So, in that sense, Nissan is doubly the month of kings.

More than that, each Jewish month is also associated with a letter - and the letter that symbolizes the month of Nissan is the letter heh. Like this:

The word heh means - here! Take this! (You can look in Genesis 47:23 for an example of its usage.) The letter heh is, like many Hebrew letters, composite of two, more elemental Hebrew letters, specifically a dalet and a yud. The word dalet is rooted in the root dal which means “poor” or “empty”. The letter yud is associated with wisdom and holiness. So the letter heh - the letter of this month, the month of kings, the month of Yehuda - is composed of something poor and empty plus wisdom and holiness.

Yehuda himself starts off “poor” - not in money but in integrity. He is thinking of himself and his grievances, and not the bigger picture. Whatever power he has - and he does have power - he uses for his own purposes. His is not a kingship of responsibility. He is not taking care of the people in his “kingdom.” But then something changes - - perhaps something in his encounter with his daughter-in-law Tamar showed him a picture of himself that he did not like, and this caused him t pivot and change - into that emptiness an insight enters. He realizes, somehow, the purpose of his power. He uses it to protect his family. That insight - that yud, enters into the dalet and creates a heh. Here. Have this. Let me give to you.

So, back to the matzah. The matzah is an undifferentiated square or circle, and then when it’s broken, it becomes a dalet and a yud. The dalet - our “poor” sovereignties, stuck, possibly selfish or at least self-absorbed, broken, incomplete, not seeing the bigger picture, perhaps not even seeing our our greatness, the true possible expanse of our respective domains, limited by lack of faith in ourselves and each other, by lack of vision, by lack of interest. The yud - an insight, the missing piece, all that awareness, all that expanse.

So we break the matzah like a rude awakening, alerting us to the realities of brokenness, and creating in us the will to become a bigger whole, a greater unity. We hide part of the matzah - the bigger part, the dalet, interestingly enough, as if we have the insight already and we’re looking for a configuration of the sovereignty to match it - and then we look for it all night, like a puzzle piece. This piece of matzah becomes something else, something less physical and more elemental. Maybe it’s hiding in the question a kid asks, or in a reflection on a passage from the Hagaddah, or in a word of prayer, or a moment of silence or a memory brought on by a bite of brisket.

Another way to tell this story is that a person violates community norms. Let's say they slander and speak badly about people. That person develops a spiritual skin disease call tzara'at and they are banished from the camp. With abundant time alone and nothing else to do, the person considers the error of their ways, repents, and recommits to living right. The skin disease clears up.

When that person is welcomes back to the camp, they don't simply go home and start life again. They are welcomed back into the camp with a series of rituals that are ordinarily reserved for the priests and the Levites. They are anointed and bathed, unique offerings are offered, birds are set free over the fields, they are fully shaven and they start life again like a new, holy baby.

Why couldn't they have committed themselves to living life like a new, holy baby, without skin diseases and liberated birds? Because that's not how life works. We don't know how broken we already are until we break. Then it comes, and we realize that it's been true all along.

On Pesach we acknowledge this to be so. We break the matzah - and, by extension, ourselves - to reveal that there was a dalet there all along, pretending to be a heh.