[Avodah] Ta'am of eating matzah

[Michael Makovi]

We learn that we eat matzah because we didn't have time to bake
chametz, and all our dough became matzah. But all the same, we were
commanded to eat matzah before we left, and before we had any lack of
time!

(We had an entire between-mincha-and-maariv shiur on this topic, and
this is what we spent the Monday lunch table discussing, to boot!)

All the rishonim see this contradiction - how could matzah be because
we lacked time to bake chametz, if we had already baked only matzah to
begin with, and didn't even try to bake any chametz in the first
place? There are two answers, but I forget which Rishonim said what:

1) Since we were commanded to eat matzah, it must be that we tried to
cook only matzah. However, we left so quickly that we didn't even have
time to bake matzah in our ovens, and it instead baked on our backs in
the sun.

2) We were commanded to eat matzah on davka the first night (of THE
Pesach in Mitzrayim), but for the rest of the time (i.e. for the
journey), we could have chametz, so we tried to bake regular bread for
the road. But we didn't have time, and it came out of our ovens as
matzah.

I offered a third answer which the shiur-giver didn't recall seeing
anywhere, but he thought it made sense:

G-d told us to eat only matzah, and so we baked only matzah. But had
we tried to bake chametz (which, hypothetically, we did not try to do,
but, hypothetically, had we tried to do...), we wouldn't have had
time. In other words, G-d told us beforehand not to bake chametz,
because He already knew we wouldn't have had time. In retrospect, for
us, it made sense why He commanded us to bake only matzah: viz.,
that's all we had time for, in retrospect! Therefore, the command was
given with a certain ta'am already in G-d's Mind but NOT given to us,
and LATER, the ta'am became apparent to even us.

Mikha'el Makovi