I have often wondered why in the text of the four questions of the Passover Haggadah and the original text of the four questions in the Talmud (Pesachim 116a), it says, “On all other nights, we eat leaven and matza, but on this night only matza,” whereas when the Haggadah describes the bitter herbs it states, “On all other nights, we eat other vegetables, on this night only bitter vegetables.”  Why when it comes to bitter herbs, do we not mention eating bitter herbs the rest of the year, but with regard to matza, we say that the rest of the year we eat both matza and leaven bread? In fact we eat bitter herbs the rest of the year much more often than we eat unleavened bread.

In Bergen-Belsen, there was a barrack for Jews who held passports from countries which had not been conquered by Germany, mostly South American and British. The week before Passover, they decided to write a letter to the camp commandant, Adolf Haas, asking that instead of their daily bread ration, they receive flour with which to bake matzah for the coming holiday. All 70 of the inmates signed the petition and the great Rabbi Israel Shapira, the Rebbe of Bluzhov, was appointed to bring the petition to the commandant. Haas read the letter and with contempt said, “I will forward the request to Berlin.” Though the Jews were sure they were taking their lives into their own hands, a miracle happened and they were given permission to make a clay oven and bake three matzahs.

The night of Pesach, they held a makeshift seder in the barracks on one of the sleeping tiers with an overturned dented pot as a seder plate, featuring only the three matzahs and one boiled potato. The Rebbe led the seder and recited the Haggadah from memory and explained it. After the youngest child in the group asked the four questions, the Rebbe said: “Bread is leavened, it has height; matzah is unleavened and flat. On all other nights, meaning during all of our previous exiles and sufferings, we had bread and matza. We had moments of bread – creativity and light, and moments of matzah- of suffering and despair. But on this night, the night of the Holocaust, we experience our greatest suffering and have only matzah. Yet we do not despair, for this also is the beginning of our redemption as it was for our ancestors in Egypt…”

In this story I find a deep answer to our question.  When it comes to bitter herbs, we want a year without bitterness so we say, “on all other nights we eat only other vegetables,” but when it comes to matzah whose symbolism is more subtle—humility, lowness, quietude—these things are always part of life. We pray the year will not have bitterness and trauma, that it will be a year without bitter herbs, but life can not be lived without both matza and bread, without some disappointment, setbacks, and some moments of darkness, which perhaps deepen the creativity and the complexity of the light which is symbolized by bread. If we understand that life is a mix of matza and leaven, then when it comes to Pesach, and we see ourselves as if we truly are slaves, we can also feel the sense of hope and redemption which is always there, in the deep darkness just before the dawn.

That night in Bergen-Belsen, the Bluzover Rebbe finished by pointing out that the word for slaves in Hebrew, avadim, is an acronym for the phrase we say in the prayer service every day, “David ben Yishai avdecha mishichecha,” or “David son of Jesse, your servant, the messiah.”

Let us live a year with no more bitter herbs but indeed one of both leaven and matza, of the interplay between stepping forward and back, failure and success, humility and power, and always feel that in the soil of darkness and exile, we know that the seeds of redemption grow.