There is a food that means two opposite things at the same time.

Before the exodus from Egypt, matzah was slave bread. Flat, plain, loveless. The slave does not wait for his bread to rise because no one cares about his comfort. There is no leisure in slavery, no dignity, no time. You eat what you are given, quickly, and you get back to work. The Hebrew phrase for it is lechem oni, the bread of the poor, the one with nothing.

And then, on the night of the exodus, that same bread becomes the food of freedom. The Israelites leave Egypt in such sudden, unstoppable momentum that their bread does not have time to rise. The very quality that made matzah the........

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