By By Salomon Maya
Passover. Never has a Jewish holiday been so loathed since Yom Kippur. Yet the difference between holidays is that Passover likes to torture us slowly for an entire week whereas Yom Kippur packs all the abhorrence into a 24-hour cycle.
Challah is by far one of the best inventions made by Jews, next to the laser (invented by Jewish physicist Theodore Maiman on May 16, 1960) and vaccines for cholera and the bubonic plague. But Passover takes away this wonderful thing for one week and substitutes it with the material inside of every cardboard box, or as it’s called in the Torah, matzah. And if someone ever says oh I love matzah you have every right to never ever speak to this person again. Because they don’t truly love matzah, rather, they tolerate it. If they did love it, why don’t they make all their peanut butter and jelly sandwiches out of matzah? Because they don’t want to. Because no one likes eating crumbly shoe leather.
Before I get nasty letters stating I’m bashing Passover as a holiday (which you can always do by emailing my editor at editor@lchaimmagazine.com), I am not. I’m only stating that matzah tastes like what accumulates in the garbage disposal after a couple quick pulses. Nothing more.
I love our stories and history. It truly is what makes us one of the oldest and most culturally beautiful living religions in the world. And I truly hope that my son one day will learn the stories that were taught to me. But I know, as I’ve begun feeding him solid foods now that the moment he has to eat matzah will rival roughly the feelings he had when eating peas for the first time (please see above picture as evidence). I now know that my son, at the tender age of seven months, does not like peas. Which is fine. I, along with my wife, love broccoli. I hope our genetic material transferred properly and my son will obtain his greens from broccoli.
But I digress … what I’m trying to equate with my ramble on my son liking peas is that there shouldn’t be any mammal alive who likes matzah. As a Jew, I feel we owe the world a huge apology for the advent of matzah. And yes I know, we were in a hurry in Egypt running away from crazy a Pharaoh, but couldn’t we have packed better? The only thing worse than a week of Passover matzah is the thought of 40 years of matzah.
And I know I might get comments about my spelling of matzah. Is it Matza? Or how about Matzo or for the truly weird, matzus. Whichever way you like to see it spelled, be sure to dump crazy amounts of maror to make this boat-deck-like bread palatable.
Lastly, the proof might literally be in the pudding. As I’ve attempted to explain myself, rather poorly I might add, matzah is by far one of the worst Jewish inventions ever. I put forth onto the floor for discussion this historical coincidence. At the end of World War II, the National Jewish Welfare Board produced V-shaped matzot signifying the unavoidable end of the war. It’s not hard for one to ponder that these matzot might’ve fallen into the hands of the Nazi’s. Passover in 1945 fell on April 1st, Germany conceded defeat a mere 5-weeks later? Could these patriotic V-shaped matzot and all of their crumbly tastelessness led to the annihilation of the Third Reich? Only God knows.
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