Recent Divrei Torah
Shabbat Chol Hamoed Pesach 2026
I suppose you typically eat Matzah from a square box. Whether it is made by Yehuda, Streits, Manischewitz, Aviv, or some other company, the Matzah is uniform.
Of course, when we left Egypt, we did not have machine made, uniform, square Matzot. And we did not have this for many years thereafter.
But, in 1838– A Jew named Isaac Singer who lived in Alsace-Lorraine invented a machine for making matza. His matzot were round. He was not related to the Singer sewing machine guy. The matza was not entirely made by machine, but mostly.
Then, in the mid 1850's a machine was made in Austria to make matzot. It was pretty controversial. Numerous rabbis denounced the machine and declared that matzot made in this mechanical means was Chametz. Why? First, they had concerns about whether left over crumbs and pieces rendered the machinery unclean. Second, they were concerned about machinery
taking over from workers, who needed the bakery jobs.
Then in 1886, a Jew by the name of Dov Behr Manischewitz came to the US from Lithuania. He was a luminary in the pantheon of Ashkenazic cuisine. He popularized machine made matzot in the US, and had 50 patents relating to the machinery. Meanwhile, the Rabbis relented, and machine made Matzah became ubiquitous.
Now, you know the expression, “It’s the greatest thing since sliced bread.” Of course, bread has been sliced forever with knives, but the expression means to refer to the equipment and machinery which slices bread mechanically into identically sized pieces. Before that, you’d take a loaf and slice it, but there would be thicker and thinner pieces.
When did sliced bread from machinery develop so as to make the pieces uniform? According to my research on the internet, it was not until 1928 or so.
See, https://wordhistories.net/2018/08/26/since-sliced-bread/
This means that WE had machine made matza years earlier than the goyim had sliced wonder bread.
Nowadays,(well not until after Pesach) you can go into a decent deli and get a rye bread and say, “I’d like to have you slice this, please.” The worker will put the unsliced bread into a machine, called a “cleaver” and it will mechanically give you a sliced rye. If a store sells a lot of bread, they may have a machine which will slice two loaves at once, and if they are really LUCKY to have lots of business, they’ll have one which can do 4 loaves at once.
This is where we get the expression............. Lucky, like a 4 loaf cleaver.
(Oooh. Well you know my rye sense of humor.)
As we meditate on the upcoming year, we ask ourselves:
Who will we love?
What rightful action will we take?
Who will we help?
Who will we hug?
Pope Francis wrote in the final days of his life (and who better to quote on the High Holidays):
“The absolute truth of people, most of the time, only reveals itself in moments of pain or in the real threat of an irreversible loss.”
I recently opened my Machzor and noticed that at some point in time I wrote a note to myself on the inner cover: “Less than you can; all that you should”. I don’t remember writing it or who actually said it.
But it reminds me that today we wrestle with our own mortality, our pain and our foibles and hopefully we emerge from this process with clarity around our shortcomings and with the promise of finding a pathway and establishing a commitment to becoming our “best humans”
And so we seek forgiveness from God and from ourselves for the following -
For the sin of narcissism and arrogance
It is hard to dance with a partner when you are standing on a pedestal. Better to step down and join in the choreography of life
For the sin of extinguishing curiosity and embracing ignorance
“Know what you don’t know
Don’t do what you don’t know
For you won’t know what you can’t do”
For allowing the messiness of life to create self-doubt rather than using our innate resilience to leap over barriers
For withdrawing kindness and compassion especially from family and friends
And for the sin of living in our heads rather than coming out to play even when enjoined to do so by those we love
For succumbing to rather than befriending uncertainty
For the sin of defensiveness, anger and vindictiveness when confronted with truths about our behavior
For being the loudest voice in the room when others have so much more to say
For spending too much time on the “what if’s” and not recognizing the treasures of “what is”
And for the sin of demagnetizing our moral compass
For allowing ourselves to become addicted to the virtual world of cell phones, screens and social media and donning noise canceling headphones that reduce the screams of pain and suffering that cry out for our attention
For deliberating too long on rightful action but too briefly on how to bring it about
For being buoyed down by the weight of the things we cannot let go
For always searching but not discovering the riches that stand right before us
For deferring to fright and flight rather than fight when confronting evil
And for the sin of trying to repair the world but misplacing our toolkits
For engaging in transactional altruism, seeking recognition and thanks for our acts of presumptive kindness and generosity
And for failing to recognize the extraordinary concealed in the ordinary
For responding only to the loudest notes that punctuate our lives while failing to attend to the silences between those notes- the quiet spaces that allow us to remain attuned to our “still small voice”
For failing to imagine what brought every squeegee kid and homeless person to the corner of the road where the traffic light has turned red – and for being quick to judge rather than curious to understand
And finally for the sin of not having any idea what so many of the sins in the traditional Al Chet prayer actually mean but accepting that I probably engaged in all of them…
For all of these, forgive us, pardon us and grant us atonement
May we seek to be our best humans both for ourselves and for everyone we touch…
And may we all be inscribed in the Book of Life-
Thank you and Amen