We’ve survived another Pesach. Getting through a whole week with no bread, no breaded schnitzel and no Pepperidge Farm is a struggle. The only thing that can get a carb-lover through is matza, also known as the bread of affliction.
Affliction was never so delicious, especially when spread with the beet-colored horseradish that is supposed to represent the bitterness of slavery. I look forward to this stuff all year. So I was unprepared when my Pesach indulgence hit a snag: the kibbutz store has a new manager, an earnest young woman, who apparently has not got the ordering thing down pat.
I bought some matzot the weekend before the holiday. It was rather early, I thought, but they had it, so why not? Little did I know that this would be all I would see for the entire holiday. From then on there was not a crumb to be found. When the rumor would spread that there was again matzot in the store, mobs of kibbutzniks would descend on the hapless clerks. Since matza is brittle stuff, it doesn’t really lend itself to a tug of war, but a few would emerge with the prized packages while most would leave disappointed.
One young clerk tried in true Stalinist fashion to tell me, as she pried my fingers from her throat, that the problem was not the ordering, it was that people were buying too much. I was nonplussed. There is only so much matza a person, even I, can eat. So if by some miracle the clerk had been right, what were people doing with the stuff? Tiling their roofs? Playing square Frisbee? Breaking it into poker chips? My mind went back to our forefathers wandering in the desert. If we have this much trouble with the bread of affliction, what do you suppose happened to them when they ran short of manna from heaven?
