"And ye shall observe the feast of the unleavened bread; for in this selfsame day have I brought your armies out of the land of Egypt: therefore shall ye observe this day in your generations by an ordinance forever." Ex.  12:17

""Ye shall eat nothing leavened; in all your habitations shall ye eat unleavened bread." Ex. 12:20

"No leaven shall be found in your houses for seven days. For whoever eats what is leavened that person shall be cut off from the community of Israel whether he is a stranger or a citizen of the country. You shall eat nothing leavened in all your settlements you shall eat unleavened bread." 12:16-20.

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So what is matzah anyway? What makes it kosher?  

We're in the process of clearing the house of chametz, leavening and leavened bread and food. The calendar on my office wall for the Jewish month of Nisan features an engraving by Benjamin Picart from Amsterdam in 1725, entitled "Cleaning the Home Before Passover."  In it, there are four women and two girls in a kitchen and dining area. They have taken out all the pots and pans from the cupboards. One woman is holding a candle so another can better scrutinize the cupboard floor and sweep up crumbs. The scene is one that invokes the idea of hard work, scrubbing, and carefully, even obsessively, cleaning and hunting down and cleaning away these every last crumb of leavening. I love the engraving, and the topic, although I feel a little guilty at the same time. We search, and we take out the chametz, but we don't do nearly the scrutinizing labor of the people in Picart's artwork. We will sweep uo and burn the remnants of the chametz symbolically. I even go so far as to symbolically sell any leftovers to a goy friend. To be sure any chametz in the house is just not mine anymore. But now the question is WHAT is kosher matzah. Do I HAVE to eat that crappy stuff in the box that our rabbi warns will give you gas? 

I was listening today, as I often do, to Israel National Radio. My Hebrew isn't all that great, but I thought I heard an exchange between the host and interviewee that amounted to a wish for a happy AND a kosher holiday. Interesting, I thought. So much of what people think is kosher for Passover is in dispute depending on the lineage of the observer.  Sephardim eat rice and beans but ashkenazim would never. I was listening to the show with great interest today because a rabbi was on (forgive me for not remembering his name) who has made it his big interest to research and memorialize what people do for matzah. Remember the story (the events of the Passover story are related in Exodus 1-15) goes that when Pharoah finally relented and let us go, he commanded Moses to lead us out of Egypt IMMEDIATELY. So quickly in fact that our bread didn't have time to rise....and we had to set out with these flat breads of basically flour and water we call matzah.

The rule related now to us is that the matzah can't have any leavening in it, or even the appearance of leavening. We say that it has to be prepared from mixing to oven in less than 18 minutes. So, I read elsewhere today that the English invented a matzah making machine in 1875 that we have to thank for the dry, crumbling, tasteless, square stuff that we eat throughout Passover. I have been arguing for years that nowhere does torah say that matzah has to be this square stuff that tastes just like the boxes it comes in. I have been wondering why, for example, I couldn't mix whatever flour is on hand without yeast, pop it into the oven, and eat it fresh, and soft.  I admit that there is a place in my heart hoping that some form of tortilla will pass kosher muster. But I haven't been so bold a to press the issue. Listening today to INR I heard that Yemeni and Iraqi matzah bakers DO produce a soft matzah. There is supposed to be an Iraqi baker in Jerusalem, in fact. Wow. So  with matzah flour I'll try this. See what happens.

So, as I cleaned the kitchen cupboards tonight, and pulled out all of our flour staples and such, I continued to wonder about matzah. So, tonight, I'm looking at a book I checked out from the library. It's "Pesach For The Rest of Us" by Marge Piercy. She has ideas for improving the matzah experience, like baking it with a cottage cheese and fruit and eggy concoction or making matzah brei, a kind of eggy matzah fry thing. But, she allows that matzah is "bread in its purest and most basic form" just flour and water. In a poem, she calls it "homely." And she also rightly mentions the fact that this is bread made in haste. Though it's ok and kosher since modernity to prepare it by machine- its beginnings were simple and hasty. It is bread made by people in a hurry to get out with what they could make quickly and with what was on hand. But I' m preparing to burn our chametz or sent it away. Though Torah says not to have it in the house and not to eat it, we aren't really given a better recipe. I just find it hard to accept the matzah schmura on the box as more kosher than my 15 minute mix of flour and water a little spice and some fire. It says leavening...nothing about spice. Although, I understand that there is a teaching about the blandness of the matzah being a reminder to us of the need for humility. Regular leavened bread is all "puffed up." Eating the bland, crumbly, tasteless cracker is supposed to cure us of our arrogance. So, maybe the spice is too much arrogance for matzah. I don't know. Maybe someone can send me the ruling and commentary against spice in matzah. It would have to be Talmudic source since it's not in Torah. It's all just supposed to remind us of our hasty departure. This year, I'm making my own matzah. Mixing it in 18 minutes or less and getting it onto the fire. It's going to be awesome. Even if I don't push the issue with the spice...the is going to be a matzah revolution in my house. No square flavorless crackers...from the industrial revolution. No thank you. This year. I make my own schmura matzah. Makes me a heretic I'll bet in someone's book, eh? 

I have heard matzah referred to a lechem oni, translated to the "bread of poverty" or "poor people's bread." Nothing fancy here.  Just flour, water, and heat. Often we hear it called the "bread of affliction." But, that sounds more of a Christian theme to me. Our matzah is a bread of escape. We're fleeing from Egypt, we left in a hurry, but we are fleeing away from affliction and oppression and going toward freedom. Of course, the freedom we entered brought challenges and choices and perils of its own as we marched toward the Promised Land. To Israel. Things we still face as Israelites, clearly.

 So, I'm going to do so more musing about this matzah thing.....as we get out our paper passover plates (just in case some chametz escaped into our regular plates). Part of the beauty of this ritual, even as we gripe every year about what Torah says versus all the obsessing we do about cleaning the house of chametz, is that we are all of us, everywhere, doing it. At least we hope we are and encouraging each other to do it, too.   Because God said so. Blessings, Ren