Not by Bread Alone

There’s a wondrous journey that takes place between Pesach and Shavuos. Defined by its endpoints, it is the journey that takes us from matzah to chometz.

We embark on this trip on Pesach, a time when even a morsel of leaven cannot be found in our possession, let alone eaten, and somehow, seven weeks later, we find ourselves embracing chometz so completely that it gains entrée into our most sacred precincts. We bring two loaves of bread, the Shtei Halechem, as a Minchah offering in the Beis Hamikdash. It is an odyssey beginning with zero tolerance and ending in full acceptance.

Spanning this Pesach-to-Shavuos period are the days of the counting of Sefirah, and it’s only logical to assume there must be something about those seven weeks that abets the transformation from adamantly eschewing chometz to heartily chewing it. What might that something be?

The Ramban famously writes that the entire period from Pesach until and including Shavuos constitutes one long meta-Yom Tov. It tracks the structure of Pesach and Succos, each of which feature a first day of Yom Tov, followed by several days of Chol Hamoed, and conclude with a final day of Yom Tov.