Passover/Freedom/Providence

The Third Oven
My Torah for Pesach 2010

There is a sense of schizophrenia at the heart of the Jewish educational experience. No where is this disorderly mindset more evident than in the Jewish history of ovens.

From as early as I can remember, my Hebrew school class would make an annual trip to the local Chabad bakery in the weeks preceding Passover. Filled with the excitement that always comes with a field trip and a sense of wonder and confusion at the long beards and sense of urgency of the Chabadniks, we learned the rules and procedures of making our own matzo. We also learned the elaborate halachic guidelines these bakers had to follow to make and keep their ovens kosher for Passover. Here’s a summary from the Orthodox Union website:

Kashering an Oven: 1. Clean walls, floor, door, ceiling and racks thoroughly with an abrasive cleaner (for example, Easy-Off ) to remove tangible chametz. Pay special attention to the temperature gauge, the window in the door and the edges of the oven chamber. Black discolorations that are flush with the metal do not have to be removed. 2. Once the oven is clean, it is preferable that it remain unused for twenty- four hours. 3. Place the racks back into the oven, and turn the oven to broil for one and-a-half hours. 4. Pesach food or pans may be placed directly on the door or racks once the oven has been kashered.
Note, we pay such careful attention to how to do this koshering that there are even divergent opinions about how to do this. Here’s one of my favorite: “The method of kashering described above is based on the ruling of Rav Aharon Kotler zt’l. However, Rav Moshe ruled that the oven must be kashered with a blowtorch.”

Now in all honesty, as a child, who was paying attention to these Rabbis drone on about how to kasher the oven? My friends and I just wanted to get our dough and start rolling it out. We wanted to use the roller which creates the perforations in the piece of matzo. Most importantly, we wanted to try and retrieve the piece of matzo that WE made from the oven when it was done.

Despite the fact that we live in another state, last year, my son, attending our Modern orthodox preschool, made the trip to the local Chabad house and went through the same process. He brought his matzo home. I told him I was proud of him. And I was touched by the continuity of Jewish education.


The second ovens we learn so much about in Hebrew school are the crematoria of the Nazis. We sit, fifth and sixth graders, hearing these fantastically foreign synonyms for death: Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Bergen-Belson. The ovens in these camps were used with just as much urgency as the ones in the Chabad bakery: Initially, 340 corpses could be burned every 24 hours after the installation of the three furnaces, but after a fourth furnace was installed, 1,440 corpses could be burned in this crematorium every 24 hours.

These cremations were horrifying to Jewish people for two reasons. First, because of the halachic expectation in the resurrection of the dead in the messianic era, cremation was a direct affront to Jewish hope in redemption. Second, and perhaps more important to our modern sensibilities, the horror of the crematoria was that the mounds of ashes they produced served to destroy human individuality and familial and communal history. In being reduced to ashes, our individual human value was negated. There would never be any visiting lost relatives at a peaceful graveside. There would never be any leaving of flowers or rocks on headstones on a breezy Sunday afternoon. There would be no speeches extolling the deeds of the lost; a child’s ready but mischievous smile, the way this father was always so patient when teaching his son how to tie his shoes, the way that mother’s laugh filled the house whenever she remembered how her friend Gittel tripped down the stairs on the first day of school. The crematoria reminded us that we go from ashes to ashes, dust to dust a bit too literally.

So what do we make of this dissonance?

It’s important to state the paradox clearly:

We are sitting here at the Passover seder. We have just read the “maggid” or “retelling” portion of the Haggadah. Passover (and its associated ovens and matzo) is a holiday in which we retell the story of God’s miraculous redemption of the Jewish people from slavery. In the Exodus story, God PHYSICALLY and OVERTLY intervenes in human history to alleviate suffering and injustice. We re-tell this story every year, and for many (though some Rabbinic authorities beg to differ) this re-telling is the centerpiece of the seder. On the other hand, we’re taught about the crematoria and The Shoah: We’re taught a story in which God IN NO WAY intervenes in human history to alleviate the tremendous suffering and injustice of our world. Some Jews in the camps prayed vehemently for God to intercede, yet God hid his face. At the height of paradox, there is the story of how a group of Jews in one particular camp, during Passover, requested from a Nazi guard that he procure them some matzo so they could observe the mitzvah of eating matzo on Pesach! They wanted to observe a holiday in which God’s power and justice is evident in the midst of a real life situation in which his silence was deafening.

And here we sit with the knowledge of both ovens. What are we doing?

I would like to suggest that one answer may lie in learning about a third, famous Jewish oven. In the Talmud, (Bava Metzia 59a and 59b), we are told the story of “The Oven of Achnai.” So as not to bore you with the halachic minutiae of the argument in the Talmud, suffice it to say that the Rabbis were having a machloket, a Talumdic debate, over the proper ritual construction of a particular oven. The content of the dispute is beside the point here. The radical part of the story comes with the disputation. It pits R. Eliezer against “The Sages.” We are told, “R. Eliezer advanced all the arguments in the world but the sages did not accept his arguments. R. Eliezer said to them, if the halacha accords with me let this carob tree prove it…whereupon the carob tree uprooted from its place and moved one hundred yards. Unconvinced, the sages said, ‘you cannot bring proof from a carob tree!’ R. Eliezer then said, if the halacha accords with me, let the water canal prove it, whereupon the water in the water canal flowed backward. The sages said, ‘you cannot bring proof from a water canal.’ R. Eliezer then said to them, if the halacha accords with me, let the walls of this study hall prove it, whereupon the walls of the study hall leaned and were about to fall. The Sages remained unconvinced. So R. Eliezer went big: If the halacha accords with me, let heaven prove it, whereupon a Heavenly voice went forth and proclaimed: “what argument do you have with R. Eliezer…the halacha accords with him!” Upon hearing this, R’ Yehoshua jumped to his feet and declared: “The Torah is NOT in Heaven!!!” then R. Yirmiyah said: “This means that we pay no heed to a heavenly echo in matters of halacha for the Torah was already given to man at Mount Sinai.” How does God respond???? “God was laughing and saying ‘My children have prevailed over me, My children have prevailed over me!”

What a radical story. The Torah is not in heaven, and in the story, God is pleased by this human initiative this human chutzpah!

So how does this help with our paradox? We don’t live in the world of the Exodus. We tell these Bubbamanses every year about God’s powerful hand and about his mighty word, but we know about the ovens of Auschwitz, we know about the babies who die of cancer, we know about the people afflicted with diseases who suffer daily and desire to be whole. We know about the violent child sex trade in east Asia. We see unabated and unpunished injustice and suffering in our world every day.

Presented with this paradox, Jews have posited some answers: we’re waiting for justice when the Mashiach comes—it is then when justice will be upheld!. We wait and wait and wait. But, to quote Rabbi David Hartman, this is living a life in deferral. This is not living life at all. This is waiting for life to begin!

Another option is to just keep telling the bubbamanses about when everything was better. Keep living in memory. Let the memory that God ONCE may have done these things be enough! In this vein, we read the Torah as a kind of scrapbook of great times we had with God, not necessarily as a promise about the future.

BUT, I’d like to offer a third option. We are enjoined, we are COMMANDED to live this seder night and tell this Exdous story as if it had and has and is happening to us! It is the foolish son in the Haggadah who separates himself from the community and sees these events as distinct from his own personal experience! He sees it as a mere memory, as part of the past. So what do we do?

We might maintain hope, but we live by the lesson of the Oven at Achnai. The Torah is not in heaven!!!! God is not coming to help us! WE are the keepers of justice. We are the makers of society. We are responsible for helping the orphan and the widow. When the Jews left Mitzrayim all they brought was matzo. When they ran out, they were sustained directly by the hand of God in the form of manna that fell from the sky! But we don’t do that. Look at our seder table! We are supposed to act as if the Exodus is happening to us! Look how much food we’ve prepared! By all rights, we should pack a backpack with matzo and go hike the Appalachian trail with no supplies! Certainly that would make the message of the Exodus more real to us! But we don’t live on Manna. We live on well stocked tables and preparation because we know that the story of the Oven of Achnai is true! We know that the Torah is not in heaven. We know we have to pack sandwiches when we’re going on long trips and that we need to buy life insurance to make sure our widows and orphans are cared for.

What role can Jewish ritual and spiritual life play then? There is value in the Bubbamanses. There is value in memory. There is value in hoping for redemption. But maybe the ashes belching forth from the crematoria of Auschwitz were smoke signals telling us that our Jewish lives were not to be lived in deferment without action, Manna without kugel and brisket. We remember, we hope, but we also know that proof cannot be brought from a carob tree, or from a water canal, or even from God’s voice. Proof and order and meaning must be brought by us. Tonight we celebrate freedom. Freedom from physical slavery yes. But also freedom from the psychological slavery of being trapped in memory and adrift in Quixotic hope. We pray and wrap tefillin and avoid eating pork, not because of the memory of someone else doing it—how long can that sustain practice in our own contemporary world??? We pray and wrap tefillin and avoid eating pork not because of the eternal hope that one day, putting on tefillin will bring the Moshiach or that one of prayers will cure a baby of cancer. No! If we do that, we ignore the ovens of Auschwitz and toil in the fields of Egypt. Were their prayers and hopes and dreams any less valid than our own? Is it ethically plausible or acceptable that God hid his face from those millions but will answer us? No, that’s a self-idolatry!

We pray and wrap tefillin and avoid eating pork. We give tzedakah. We go grocery shopping for the elderly. We go to political marches and protests. We celebrate the founding of the State of Israel, we do all of these things because we realize we must seek the divine presence and face (whatever that means for each of us as individuals) because he is no longer (or may have never been) seeking us! This seems fatalistic but it is the opposite. This is the beauty of the human condition. Rav Soloveitchik, perhaps the most famous Rabbi of the 20th century, believed that “hester panim” (the hiding of God’s face) was a great gift—it leads to the intense and absolute dignity of human endeavor. That is the beauty of human freedom. In a world seemingly devoid of justice and divine care, WE demonstrate our freedom and agency and dignity by postulating out OWN justice and care in imitation of the God we love in memory and hope.

This is how Sinai is still happening now! Tonight! This is the definition of the ongoing revelation: we finish His sentences and anticipate His thoughts so he need not speak or do. And like we’re told He was in stories, we will imitate now, like we’re promised he will be in the future, we will create here. We are not slaves.

So which oven are we going to live by? Will we live in the memory of the Chabad house, where we act as if the kosher level of the oven facilitates miraculous redemption? Will we live by the memory of the ovens of Auschwitz in which our redemption was totally subject to the mean apathy of historical circumstance? Where control was totally in the hands of others while we prayed in vain for the actualization of the God of the old stories? Or will we live by the lesson of the Oven at Achnai, where human ingenuity and dignity serves as the basis for the best justice we can hope for. Perfect, Divine justice? Maybe not. But maybe justice and hope created by our own hands, cooked in our own ovens, in our own homes, with our own families trumps a life in deferment of waiting and maybe this is freedom of slavery. Maybe this is the true escape from Pharoah. Maybe this is how we identify and claim the specific piece of matzo that we rolled and baked. Maybe the point of that trip to the Chabad bakery was to teach us to make our own matzo, identify it when it comes out of the oven and live by it.