Did you finish your Pesach shopping? Did you put the aluminum foil down on your counters? Have you started your brisket?
A week from tomorrow night we will, God willing, be sitting around the Seder table to reenact the retelling of the Exodus. Now every family has their own customs and traditions. My mom’s chopped liver is one of our yearly must-haves. Ending with parodies and silly songs is another new tradition for many. I’m sure you all have your own.
One tradition is, of course, the hiding of the Afikoman. Raise your hand if the parents hide it and the children go look for it after the meal? It’s always fun, right? But in some families, a parent gets up from his or her chair briefly, and in that time, the children “steal” the afikoman away. They will hold it “hostage” until the end of the seder when they are given coins or gifts to get it back because the seder cannot be concluded without the taste of this special bit of matzah. Either way, it keeps the children awake and engaged with a playful element in what can be a very long night.
But wait a second. Don’t we teach our children that stealing is a sin? Many gedolim actually rule against this seder tradition. Why would we invite stealing and hiding on this holiest of nights?
Did you know that in the Mishnah and in the Talmud there is absolutely no reference to hiding or stealing the afikoman at all?
We read in Pesachim 109a:
רַבִּי אֱלִיעֶזֶר אוֹמֵר: חוֹטְפִין מַצּוֹת בְּלֵילֵי פְּסָחִים בִּשְׁבִיל תִּינוֹקוֹת שֶׁלֹּא יִשְׁנוּ.
“It was taught in a baraita that Rabbi Eliezer says: One grabs the matzot on the nights of Passover on account of the children, so that they will not sleep.”
Grab it so the children will not sleep? What sense does that make?
Rashi comes to explain that it means to eat the matzah very quickly so that the children will wonder at this strange practice. Remember, the entire night of the seder is designed to bring questions about unusual behaviors—the dipping twice, the leaning, the bitter herbs—the entire seder is made of moments designed to pique children’s curiosity, to inspire them to ask why all this truly weird stuff is happening. “Why are you eating the matzah so quickly?” for instance.
Not all the rabbis agreed with Rashi. The Ritva, a medieval rabbi from Seville, posited that this “Chotfin” meant grabbing the basket of matzah away from someone as if to say, “You’ve had enough!” Usually we want people to eat their fill, so this would raise questions from the kinderlach.
The Meiri, a famous Provencal medieval rabbi, thought it meant playing a little game of handing it to someone, then snatching it away, then offering it again as if playing a little child’s game. Again, the kids at the table would be kept alert and awake by the antics.
In the 16th century Shulchan Aruch, we see a new twist on the afikomen—now someone needs to guard it. You must understand, this piece of matzah is a stand in for the Pesach sacrifice which could no longer be eaten. One of the commandments of the holiday was to have the taste of the Pesach as the last thing in your mouth for the evening. Therefore, this matzah had to be protected early and kept away so that it could be eaten as the last thing before midnight. It should be the last thing in your mouth on seder night—not a macaroon! It was wrapped in cloth the way the Israelites left Egypt and assigned to someone to keep safe. Where could it be kept? Often, this would be in a pillow used for the ritual leaning to the left.
But how did we get from grabbing to guarding to stealing?
Believe it or not, there isn’t a single reference to hiding the Afikomen until the late 17th and early 18th century. Seriously! It appears first in the writings of the Chok Ya’akov, also known as Jacob ben Joseph Reischer, who was a Bohemian-Austrian rabbi and halakhist. His interpretation was that the afikoman should be hidden until the end of the seder so that the children would not fall asleep—this pay off at the end should entice them to last through the long hours of the night.
Does it work? Well, mostly, yes! We’re still doing it hundreds of years later, aren’t we?
But what of the stealing? What is that about?
Rabbi Yochanan Zweig faces this issue head on. On Seder night, we are commanded to think of ourselves as slaves. As slaves, we never had ownership of anything. Everything that we had could be taken away in a moment. We were vulnerable. We had nothing. The afikomen is taken from us to teach us what it is like to feel like a slave. Our most precious possessions can be taken suddenly, even by a child. So it acts as a reminder of how our possessions should not define us or give us meaning. Anything can be taken away, gone in an instant.
Let us look finally at the essence of the Afikomen. It is Tzafun, hiddenness. But it is also Yachatz, brokenness. We take the middle matzah, a beautifully hand-crafted circle, and break it into pieces. We shatter and destroy it. We hide this fractured and broken piece, taken by what Kabbalists call the “sitra achra,” the darker elements of the universe.
Who restores it to us? Who brings it back? Our children. When our optimism is gone, when our world seems splintered and cracked, the innocence and beauty of children and grandchildren come to restore our wholeness and hope. They find what is hidden. They repair what is broken. They restore the whole.
Through their hands, we will merit redemption when the final hiding of Mashiach ends.
When all the ruptures in this world and the world above heal.
When the shofar of the final redemption sounds, and we will all at last be free.
Shabbat Shalom and Chag Sameach.