Passover is
called the Holiday of Matzah, the Holiday of Springtime, and the Season of Our
Freedom. The shape of round matzah and rectangular matzah teach us about
freedom and creative rebirth in springtime. These matzah shapes give us clues
to understanding the structure of Jewish consciousness.
I write the
following sentences as Twitter tweets based upon the “Torah Tweets” blogart
project the I created with my wife Miriam http://bibleblogyourlife.blogspot.com. I created the photographs of hand-made round
matzah and machine make rectangular matzah during a Passover that we celebrated
on the island of Crete. My forthcoming book Through a Bible Lens: Biblical
Insights for Smartphone Photography and Social Media (HarperCollins) explores
the conceptual background for Bible blogging.
Round matzah
symbolizes idolatry. Since words in the
Torah scroll are written without vowels, calf (EGeL) can also be read as
circle (EGuL).
The
idolatrous transgression of the Israelites was their worship of Ra, the
sun God represented in Egyptian art as a golden circle.
Rectangular
matzah symbolizes slavery. The Egyptians
enslaved the Israelites in the malben, meaning both brickyard and
rectangle.
Mitzrayim, the biblical name of Egypt, means
narrowness. The exodus into the wide
expanses of the Sinai desert expanded consciousness.
Jews recite
these words from Psalm 118 in their prayers: “From narrow straits
I called out to God. God answered me with expansiveness.”
As we break
matzah to eat them, we break out of the box and circle, both closed forms,
breaking away from narrowness of thought.
We eat
pieces of matzah with bitter herbs and mud-like haroset to remember the
bitterness of our slavery of forced labor making bricks.
However, we
transform the tactile feeling of mud in our mouth into the sweet taste of
freedom by making haroset from a mixture of dates, apples and nuts.
Jewish
consciousness is shaped by spiral forms, from Torah scroll to tzitzit fringes
to ram's horn shofar to spiral hallah bread.
The spiral
form is the shape of DNA molecules in our cells and in cells of all plants and
animals. It is the growth pattern of
life, of palm fronds and nautilus shells.
Jews are
called Am HaSePheR, usually translated as “People of the Book.” However,
SePheR means scroll predating books by millennia.
Jews are “People
of the Torah Scroll”. The ancient SPR
root of SePheR found its way into the words SPiRal, SPiRitual and
inSPiRation.
From Times of Israel, LinkedIn, and IsraelSeen
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