Making My Neighbors Go Crackers

As the Passover holiday crunches to its mid-mark, like me you might be asking: What can I do with my leftover matzah? Since the supermarkets sell it in shrink wrapped packages of five boxes each, it's easy to buy more than you and your family can eat. So what can you do with the extra?

Toss it? That's wasting food, even if "food" is in quotation marks.

What about an educationally-themed disposal? One year, to connect with the haggadah, and to demonstrate matzah's worthiness as construction material, I used it to build a pyramid.

Or, since the stuff doesn't get stale, you could just store it. Going this route, a friend of mine kept her leftover matzah in the garage, only to discover later that a mouse had used it to observe its own holiday. But even if you stash your surplus bread of affliction in the house, once Passover is over, it never seems the right moment to reach for a box.

So reaching for a solution let me suggest outreach.

What if you go outside with the box, and give one or two to a non-Jewish neighbor? This year, I estimated that I had two extra boxes. Does affliction like company? Grabbing a spare box, I went across the street to find out.

Walking over, I wondered, "Should I have wrapped it up? Put a ribbon on it?" An anxious vision of a matzah gift bag (like a wine bag) came to me, and fortunately evaporated as I walked up to my neighbor's front porch. "Thought you might like this," I said handing him a box of matzah that was baked in Israel.

Seeing the box, he smiled.

Turns out, my neighbor John, was hoping I would bring him some. Not tied in to its religious context, he sees matzah simply as crackers that taste good with jam. Presenting him with a box gave me the opportunity to see matzah in a new context as well--appreciated, since John loves it.

He wished me a happy Passover.

One down, one to go.

Another neighbor was planning a seder for Easter Sunday, and had asked me earlier if I could help her out. "There's just so much to put on the table," she had said, stating what anyone who plans a seder soon discovers.

The day before Passover, I knocked on her door. "Can't have a seder without this," I said handing her a box. As I looked over her table setting, I leafed through the abbreviated and interpretively different haggadah with which her church had provided her. Just like the one I used, it called for three pieces of matzah, to be covered and placed on the table. I even told her how to hide a piece for the afikoman and have her grandkids search for it. "Thanks for sharing that," she said.

Two down and such a joy. Even if I was only unloading my unwanted surplus, still, I had created a neighborly cross-cultural bread-breaking (Made easy, since the bread was perforated.)

I was passing around a piece of the Jewish experience, and if you examine the side panel on the box, a healthy one at that: Cholesterol--0. Sodium--0. Total fat--0.  As for total taste? I will leave that evaluation up to the neighbors.

Edmon J. Rodman has written about making his own matzah for JTA, Jewish love music for the Jerusalem Post, yiddisheh legerdemain for the Los Angeles Jewish Journal, a Bernie Madoff Halloween mask for the Forward, and what really gets stuck in the La Brea Tar Pits for the Los Angeles Times. He has edited several Jewish population studies, and is one of the founders of the Movable Minyan, an over twenty-year-old chavura-size, independent congregation. He once designed a pop-up seder plate. In 2011 Rodman received a First Place Simon Rockower Award for "Excellence in Feature Writing" from the American Jewish Press Association."