Tomorrow night is the beginning of the Jewish festival of Pesach, the Passover, the week during which we celebrate our liberation from slavery in Egypt some 3400 years ago. This is mostly a joyous holiday in which we celebrate our deliverance and freedom with family and friends. For observant Jews, though, it can be an extremely time-consuming and routine-crashing nuisance. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but for the not-so-observant, the fuss and the bother can seem like, well, an awful lot of fuss and bother.
The focus of all the scurrying about lies in this simple Biblical commandment (and many others like it).
And this day will be for you as a memorial and you will celebrate it as a feast to God. Throughout your generations you shall keep it a feast for an everlasting ordinance. Seven days you will eat only unleavened bread, but on the first day you shall have put away leaven out of your homes..."
(Exodus 12:14-15)
Not only are we to refrain from eating "leaven" (chametz) during Passover, but we must "put it out of our homes," and, typically, this means a housecleaning project of vast proportions. Every drawer in every room must be vacuumed, every floor washed and swept, every crumb hunted down and disposed of and all products containing leaven (i.e., wheat, oats, barley, spelt or rye that's been in contact with water long enough to rise) must be evacuated. Stovetops, ovens, refrigerators and sinks must be scrubbed and lined with materials that have never touched leaven. And, unless you're going away for the whole week (which many people do), all cooking utensils, pots, pans, dishes and cutlery must be stored away and replaced with Passover-only substitutes. All this during your regularly scheduled life.
There's really no controversy about the necessity of this procedure among the religiously observant. The Torah says that no leaven may remain in our homes and that's pretty much that. But as if that weren't enough, there's an additional prohibition that has taken root among Jews of European extraction (Ashkenazim) that takes the dietary restrictions one step higher. Kitniyot.
Kitniyot consist of grains that are not strictly leaven (such as rice) and legumes of all varieties (such as lentils, peas and soybeans). Although these may be kept in the home, they may not be eaten during Pesach according to the Ashkenazi tradition, although they are freely eaten in the tradition of those (Sephardi) Jews who hail from Africa, Spain and the Middle East. This prohibition has always perplexed me, especially as it tends to create a wedge between Jews from different regional backgrounds. Apparently, I'm not alone.
Two years ago, Saul Singer published a very interesting essay on this topic in the Jerusalem Post. It was reprinted last week, here. While the article itself has no religious authority whatsover, he makes a rather good case for abandoning the ban, arguing that some scholars find it contradictory to the express dictates of the Talmud.
The kitniyot custom, it turns out, is the religious equivalent of a computer virus whose only leg to stand on is that we have gotten used to it.
It all started about 700 years ago in France when someone got the bright idea that they would be more kosher than the next guy by not eating things that might be confused with the five grains that can become hametz if mixed with water and allowed to rise. The practice had barely had a chance to spread when rabbis of that time denounced it as a "foolish" and "mistaken" custom. Since it is a custom with no legal basis, there is not even an authoritative list of what "kitniyot" are, and the custom has expanded to include rice, corn, soy beans, string beans, peas, lentils, peanuts, mustard, sesame seeds, and poppy seeds.
Both Ashkenazi and Sephardi rabbis agree that it is not possible for any of these foods to become hametz. According to Conservative Rabbi David Golinkin, who wrote an exhaustive responsum on this subject, the only reason to observe this custom is to preserve an old and very widespread tradition.
My personal observance of Passover has always focused more on the eating part and less on the cleaning part. For reasons I've never quite understood, I've always abstained from eating kitniyot. Now, I don't know. There may be a few legumes on this week's menu, after all.
