By Rabbi Mark S. Glickman

On the evening of April 6, Jews around the world will gather around our tables to celebrate the Passover Seder – the festive meal that begins the ancient, week-long Passover holiday. As we remember our ancestors’ exodus from Egyptian bondage, we’ll sing songs, tell the story of our people’s past, and, of course, we’ll eat.

And long after the Seder has ended — months from now, perhaps – many Jews will find tiny little reminders of our Seders in our homes, stubbornly refusing all of our attempts to remove them.

That’s because during Passover (Pesach, in Hebrew), it is customary for Jews to refrain from eating bread and other leavened products, and to eat an unleavened bread called matzah, instead. Jewish tradition teaches that, when it came time for our ancestors to leave Egypt, they had to leave quickly — so quickly, in fact, that they didn’t even have time to let their bread rise. Their hurried departure meant that they had to eat unleavened bread, and we honor their memory by eating it, too. All week long.

Calling matzah unleavened “bread” is actually a bit of a misnomer. It’s really more like a cracker — a big, bland and (after several days) gut-clogging cracker. Most store-bought matzah comes in boxes of square sheets, about eight inches on a side.

In order for Jewish law to consider matzah unleavened, it needs to cook quickly — no longer than 18 minutes may elapse between the time the flour and water connect to make the matzah dough and the time it is completely baked. As a result, most matzah is lined with tiny holes to help facilitate speedy cooking. In that sense, it’s kind of like a White Castle hamburger.

Matzah also carries symbolic meaning.

In Judaism, leavened products represent our misdeeds — our sins. They are the ways in which we grow too big — too “puffed up” — for our good or for the good of anyone around us. On Passover, we symbolically distance ourselves from our many misdeeds by removing all leavened products from our homes, and eating non-puffed matzah to sustain ourselves, instead.

But perhaps the most remarkable quality of matzah is its astounding ability to make crumbs. You usually have to break the stuff in order to use it — eight-by-eight sheets are otherwise too unwieldy. And even if you don’t break it by hand, you eventually need to bite into it. And, somehow, whenever matzah cracks, tiny matzah crumbs have a way of exploding from it in all directions.  It happens every time: You break a sheet of matzah to make a sandwich or crumble it into soup, you hear a quiet “snap,” and before you know it, there’s matzah shrapnel everywhere. When I’m about to take a bite of matzah, I’m sometimes tempted to yell, “Fire in the hole!”

After our Passover Seders — after the songs are sung and the food is eaten and the guests go home — we wash the dishes, fold the extra tables and chairs, and eventually we vacuum the place for good measure. But invariably, many of those little matzah crumbs stick around anyway — under the cushions, at the foot of our baseboards, and sometimes (I don’t know how) even in the light fixtures.

Come February, or April, or August, we may very well find those crumbs. And when we do, we’ll remember the songs and the laughter of our Seder celebrations; we’ll think of our ongoing efforts to better ourselves as human beings; and we’ll recall once again our commitment to building a world in which all people can celebrate the sweetness of freedom just as our ancestors did so many centuries ago.

Passover, you see, is one of the “crumbiest” holidays around. And that’s one of the things that makes it so great.

Rabbi Mark S. Glickman belongs to Congregation Kol Shalom on Bainbridge Island.