I Believe in Broken Matzo

Eating matzo is an exceedingly fragile endeavor. The matzo that my family eats during Passover comes in two varieties: machine-made and handmade. Machine-made matzo -- you can find boxes of it in the kosher aisle of many supermarkets, even when it is not Passover -- is mass produced. As such, it raises some halachic questions, which leads some of the more legislatively rigorous to exclusively eat handmade matzo. Machine-made matzo is square, dependable, and reliable. Handmade matzo has a more textured personality, more misshapen, uneven, interesting. Like a snowflake, each handmade matzo is a rough approximation of a circle, unique, ugly, beautiful, and special in its own way, with lumps, nooks, and crannies. It is also shockingly vulnerable, fragile, breakable.