Is it a bird? A plane? No, its Matzoh Man, getting ready for Passover.
Matzoh Man has parked his Matzoh Mobile at Farragut Square. Accompanied by his trusty sidekick, the Matzoh Maharat, it is time for him to leap into action.
“Who wants matzoh?” Matzoh Man shouts, proffering a square of crispy unleavened bread to passersby out in the Tuesday lunchtime sunshine. “Matzoh! Kosher for Passover!”
Every year as Passover approaches, Rabbi Shmuel Herzfeld dons a brown and white two-piece suit imprinted with a distinctive pattern, with a skullcap and shoes to match. He looks like a walking Saltine cracker, but is in fact a piece of matzoh, the unleavened bread central to the Passover Seder dinner.
“You want some matzoh with that yogurt?” Herzfeld asks a startled-looking woman walking up 17th Street. “No?”
There are two things that Herzfeld — the rabbi at Ohev Sholom synagogue on 16th Street NW — has in abundance: chutzpah and matzoh.
There are 50 boxes of the latter in the back of the Matzoh Mobile, an old Crown Victoria sedan that has been wrapped in matzoh-patterned vinyl.
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On Monday night, Ohev Sholom will host its annual communal Seder, inviting all comers.
Though Herzfeld is handing out store-bought matzoh today, he says they will serve homemade at the Ohev Sholom Seder, made the proper way: just flour and spring water.
“That’s why I originally got the matzoh suit,” he says. “I love baking matzoh so much that I got a matzoh suit to match my passion for the matzoh.”
With him is Ruth Friedman, a clergywoman called a maharat. She is wearing a matzoh hat made by Elana Mendelson. It's bedecked with fabric elements of a Seder plate, including an egg, a shank bone and greens.
“Matzoh!” says Herzfeld. “Who wants matzoh? It’s sacred bread.”
He lowers his voice, then says to me: “You know how I can tell who’s Jewish? They look away.”
Some Jews, Herzfeld thinks, are embarrassed that they don’t know where they’ll be spending Passover — or don’t have any place to go.
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“Even a Jew who’s very distant wants a Seder,” Herzfeld said. Ohev Sholom’s communal Seder, he explains, is a way to “bring people back to the community they grew up in. Who doesn’t have warm feelings for their family’s matzoh ball soup?”
People pose for selfies with Matzoh Man and his car.
“You want matzoh?” he asks again and again.
“You ever had any?” he asks those who politely refuse.
“And you still don’t like it?” he says in jest to those who say they’ve had it.
Herzfeld accepts that some may not share his affection for the bread.
“If you don’t go to a Seder, your mother will be sad,” he says to one young man who takes a piece of matzoh. Friedman hands the man a flier for Monday’s dinner.
Herzfeld figures if the rabbi can embarrass himself wearing a matzoh suit, people can go to a Seder where they don’t know anybody.
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“Where are you going for Passover?” he asks an older man.
“Florida,” the man answers.
“Where all the Jews are,” Herzfeld says. “Have you seen my Matzoh Mobile?”
The rabbi nods toward the Matzoh Mobile.
“Who did it for you?” the man asks.
“We got a guy,” Herzfeld says.
That guy was Troy Yates of Capital Wraps of Raleigh, N.C. Last month, Yates drove up and met Herzfeld at a taxi garage in Northeast D.C. Yates said he'd wrapped a lot of things with a lot of images — including a huge likeness of Under Armour endorsee Michael Phelps on a disused fuel storage tank in Baltimore — but he had never wrapped anything in matzoh.
I ask Herzfeld whether all this — the suit, the car, the street-corner theatrics — is maybe a bit silly.
“Religion should be serious, but it should also be fun,” he says. “It needs to be both.”
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The most famous Passover song is “Dayenu,” Herzfeld says. The word means, roughly, “it would have been enough.”
Any one of the things God did for the Jews — bringing them out of Egypt, parting the Red Sea, giving them the Torah — would have been enough. That God did all those things? Bonus!
Says Herzfeld: “If they see this car and they smile: Dayenu, it would have been enough.”
After about an hour, Matzoh Man and the Matzoh Maharat get back in the Matzoh Mobile and drive off. More matzoh must be baked before Monday.
Twitter: @johnkelly
To see a video of Matzoh Man, go to washingtonpost.com/johnkelly.
For previous columns, visit washingtonpost.com/johnkelly.
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