08 Apr PESACH: HEALING A DIVIDED PEOPLE THE SECRET OF THE AFIKOMAN

Afikoman
For children, it is the
highlight of the
Passover Seder.
Over the years they
discovered that
because the seder
could not be concluded until this final piece
of matzah is eaten, they could “steal” it in
order to coerce their exhausted parents,
desperate for sleep, into granting them
whatever ridiculous demands they should
choose to impose, hence the American idea
of “Afikoman presents.” For adults, it just
seems like an ingenious trick to give kids an
authorized “recess,” a chance to run around
and have fun while at the same time keeping
them involved in what is happening at the
table.
What is the Afikoman?
One of the first things we do at the Passover
seder, following Kiddush and Karpas, is
“Yachatz” which is the breaking of the
matzah. Typically, a matzah will break into
two incongruent pieces. The larger piece, the
Afikoman, which literally means “desert,” is
stowed away, to be saved for later, and the
smaller piece is set in front of us. It is on this
smaller piece, that we now recite the entire
Haggadah. Many of the most crucial and
integral parts of the seder experience are
prefaced with the instruction: “Uncover the
broken matzah” or “raise up the broken
matzah.”
This matzah, precisely because it is small
and broken, aptly represents our “bread of
affliction,” and “the food of poverty.” It is
the quintessential matzah, and it plays a
leading role throughout the seder drama. If
the seder were a play, this would be one of
the main actors. Finally, after concluding the
recitation of the entire Haggadah, it is the
first thing eaten, and with it we fulfill our
biblical obligation of eating matzah.
The larger piece, meanwhile, is hidden away,
sidelined and absent; it must wait patiently
until its return much later into the night.
Only after reciting the Haggadah, after
eating matzah, maror, korech, the egg, and
after the entire holiday meal do we remember
it and retrieve it from its hiding place, and
this becomes our “dessert.” Preferably, it is
the last thing to be eaten that night so that we
sleep with the taste of matzah lingering in
our mouths and in our memories.
Although seemingly relegated to a secondary
part in the play, and cast into some sort of
supporting role, the Afikoman is just as
integral, crucial, and necessary to the seder
experience as its “younger brother.” Our
Sages tell us, “ain maftirin ad acharei

hapesach afikoman,” meaning “The seder
cannot be concluded without the Afikoman.”
It also replaces and represents what was the
biblical highlight of the seder, the Korban
Pesach.
A Tale of Two Matzos
The Passover story—enslavement followed
by liberty—is the eternal story of the Jew.
“For not only once did they stand up against
us to destroy us, rather in every generation
they attempt this again. And only G-d saves
us from their hands,” we state in the
Haggadah.
It is fascinating to observe the prestigious
place the seder held and continues to hold in
the lives of so many Jews. More Jews
conduct some form of Passover Seder than
attend even High Holiday services. The
seder strikes a chord deep within us. Many
of our warmest and fondest childhood
memories were created at our parents’ seder
table. Somehow the Jew feels that he or she
cannot ignore the seder story; it is our
personal story as individuals and as a people.
Now we can understand the deeper
symbolism behind the breaking and
separation of the matzah. Perhaps the matzah
represents the Jewish people, the
Congregation of Israel, who throughout
history have continuously been crushed,
flattened and humbled (like matzah), and
have been given to eat the “bread of poverty,”
the “bread of affliction.” Time and time
again we were not allowed to wait until our
dough rose, we had to take the wandering
stick and leave with nothing but “matzah,”
literally and figuratively.
The Division
But for a long time now, our matzah has
been divided; we are a divided people. One
part of our people, the smaller part of our
matzah to be sure, still stubbornly sits at the
“seder table,” they sit around the table of
their ancestors, following the traditions,
continuing the rituals, studying the laws and
telling the story. This is the smaller part of
the matzah, the minority of our people,
which refuses to get up of from the Passover
table and find other alternatives for life and
for happiness. Yes, they sometimes sit there
with closed eyes, half asleep, but they are
present. These are the Jews who wake up
each morning remembering that we are part
of a long narrative—beginning with
Avraham, culminating with Moshiach—and
we ought to live our lives inspired by this
narrative. They don a tallis, wrap tefilin, go
to the synagogue, pray to G-d, and send their
children to Jewish schools to receive an
intense Torah education. These are the Jews
who celebrate Shabbos, eat kosher, would

not eat a meal outside of a Sukkah, or wear a
garment made of wool and linen.
The larger part of the matzah—the majority
of our people—have wandered from the
seder table, into foreign pastures. They have
found alternatives to Torah. Indeed, most of
our nation remains ignorant and in many
ways apathetic to our heritage and its
wisdom, millions of our brethren people feel
alienated from our people and its story.
And we can identify the moment in history
when the matzah was “split.”
Over 250 years ago, with the French
Revolution, and what was known as the age
of “Enlightenment,” or “The Age of
Reason,” the shtetl walls crumbled and
many, indeed the majority, of Jews have
ultimately said goodbye to their ancient
ideology in lieu of the leading ideologies of
the day. Voltaire replaced Moses; Rousseau
replaced Rashi. Kant and Nietzsche
supplanted Abaye and Rava. In France and
Germany, enlightenment led to alienation of
hundreds of thousands of Jews from
tradition. Some decades later, in Eastern
Europe, millions of Jews bid farewell to the
Torah for a host of new “isms” that seemed
far more promising than ancient Juda-ism.
Secular Zionistic nationalism, for example,
captured the imagination of countless young
Jews, substituting a transcendent G-d with a
concrete homeland. In Russia, Jews flocked
to found and support Marxism, communism
and socialism. In America, over one million
Jews assimilated between 1840 and 1930
alone. In the last few decades in the USA,
we lost another million of our children.
And the split of the matzah continues. We
continue to be a divided people. The small
part of the matzah often looks with disdain at
the larger piece of the matzah: “I am at the
seder table; you are lost and estranged;”
while the big part of the matzah often looks
at the small piece of matzah with
bewilderment and pity, wondering how it
manages to remain so isolated and detached
from modernity and the new world.
Here we will discover the secret of the
Afikoman. Open your hearts…
The Calling of Our Generation
Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneersohn
(1902-1994) of blessed memory, who was
born on the 11th of Nissan, April 18, in 1902,
in the Ukraine, just days before Passover.
Growing up at the height of the revolutions
which swept the world and captured the
hearts and souls of millions of Jews, the
Lubavitcher Rebbe observed firsthand the
“matzah” being split, fragmented, broken,
and then almost completely consumed by

the flames of Stalinism and Nazism.
Providence had the soul of the Lubavitcher
Rebbe grace our world a few days before the
seder, perhaps because his life’s message
captured the great story of the afikoman.
What was the Rebbe’s message for a broken
and fragmented generation?
That the larger part of the matzah may be
absent from our seder table, but it is our
Afikoman; that our matzah may be divided,
but we are still one matzah. Millions of Jews
may be absent from the seder table, but they
may never be forgotten. Most importantly:
we cannot conclude our seder if we do not
bring back the larger piece of matzah which
has been gone from the seder table.
The small piece of matzah will never be
capable of reaching the culmination its seder
if it will not reach out to its brother-matzah
and bring it back to the seder table,
recognizing the truth that we are one people
and each of us has a place of dignity at the
eternal table of Jewish history and
consciousness.
This, the Lubavitcher Rebbe believed, was
the mission of our time. The seder is almost
complete, the story is almost finished.
Moshiach is at our doorstep. The meal has
been eaten, and we have had our share of
maror, of bitter herbs and suffering. And
now we must remember the Afikoman. We
must search for the afikoman, and with
much love and sensitivity bring it back to the
table, and let it reunite with its own essence,
with its own story, with its own soul.
At times the Afikoman is hard to locate, the
assimilated Jew is difficult to identify.
Sometimes he struggles to even identify
himself. But at the end of the night, at the
end of this exile, he will return, to listen to
the story of Yetzias Mitzrayim, to take part
in the mitzvah and pass it along to his own
children. For no Jew will be left behind.
Only then will we be able to conclude our
journey and truly be “Next year in
Jerusalem.”
(My thanks to Rabbi Zalman Schmukler (Los
Angeles) for sharing the nucleus of the
above idea, and to Rabbi Avi Shlomo for his
assistance in transcribing this essay.)