My Matzah Hangover

You’ve got to feel bad for the Matzah. After all it’s the only food we eat that is actually a Biblical Mitzvah we can fulfill today and yet we kvetch and complain about it starting about a month before Purim and it last for about as long as the Matzah Hangover lasts.

Which brings me to my current situation – my Matzah Hangover. I actually think I gained back my entire loss of 15 post Israel – pre-Pesach pounds and I believe about all of it came from Matzah. After all, you really can’t gain that much wait from the vegetables and porteins and we didn’t consume that much starch (we did have our fair share of potatoes, but we didn’t overdo it).

But I’m more focused on the spiritual Matzah Hangover. Matzah is intended to bring about a humbling of character (you betcha) after all it is flat and pretty tasteless (no negative intentions here) and here we are the week after Pesach and I’m not sure that Matzah has worked! Am I really more humble? Less defensive? More introspective? More appreciative of the gifts that G-d has given to me?

The good thing (as well as the negative thing) about food is that it becomes part of you. In the words of the mystics “blood and flesh, like your own (original) flesh”. The Matzah you eat becomes you or in classic English “you are what you eat”. So the spiritual properties of the Matzah are now part of your being.

Just like early life experiences are all recorded in your body’s memory and can be activated with the correct triggers, the same is true of the spiritual properties of the Matzah. With the right triggers we can activate the humbling effects of the Matzah.

In fact, we have the 7 week counting of the Omer to keep the activation going beginning with the second night of Pesach until Shavous a total of 49 days. In this process we activate a little step each day towards a more whole life. A life where we don’t have to eat Matzah to be humble but we can actually eat Challah and Chometz and still accomplish what we need to accomplish.

So as we recover from the Matzah, keep the triggers active each day, just a little, to keep the Matzah alive in our system and to effect a little bit of humility each day.