FEATURE
THE BREAD OF AFFLICTION? By Gilly Balcombe
‘This is the bread of affliction that our forefathers ate in the land of Egypt. Let all who are hungry come and eat! Let all who are needy come and celebrate Passover!’ The humble matzo has a strange and mythological background. Biblical sources tell us that, when the Jews fled from the slavery of Pharaoh in Egypt, they had but 18 minutes to escape (what, all 210,000 of them!?) and they carried on their backs their bread, that had not had enough time to rise. Thus was the matzo born – except that it was probably more like a pita or flatbread than an actual matzo in those days. I’m assuming now that you all know what a matzo is. In religious terms it’s the unleavened bread that Jews eat at Pesach (Passover), the festival that commemorates the exodus from Egypt and gives us the tales of Moses, the parting of the Red Sea, the ten plagues, the wanderings in the desert and more. To this day all matzos have to be prepared and baked within that 18-minute window.
Jesus’s last supper was the first night of Pesach (so Easter and Pesach always coincide, as they are both governed by the same lunar calendar) and the famous painting that can be seen in Venice is actually inaccurate, as it shows challah bread being eaten! In the Diaspora (basically any country that isn’t Israel) the festival lasts for eight days, during which no leavened (risen) bread may be consumed, and there are all kinds of restrictions on foods that are permitted or otherwise. Israel gets time off for being…well, Israel, where it all started. Diaspora countries have an extra day tacked on because, many moons before the age of internet and telephones, it took time for the news of the festival date to reach them! Oh, and just to add more confusion, the foodie interdictions differ between Ashkenazi Jews who originate from Central and Eastern Europe, and Sephardi Jews who hail from the Latin and Middle Eastern countries. But that’s a whole other subject.
