The following is an excerpt from my current work-in-progress, a book that examines the claims that Orthodoxy makes about itself. This is a section from a chapter about Orthodoxy’s claim to be essentially synonymous with the way that pious Jews have practiced in all times and places. I was proofreading it today, and decided to post it because it’s topical.
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The crisp matzah that Ashkenazim
eat on Pesach is another example of a
change to how we experience one of the shalosh
regalim. Our ancestors from most times and places would not recognize as “matzah” the cracker-like food which we associate
with that word. To them, matzah was a type of bread that was visibly
indistinguishable from other types of bread. It wasn’t a cracker.
Thin crisp matzah is one
of those things that more moderate frum
people might acknowledge is different from the past, but will say is not a
significant change. While the exact form that matzah takes has changed, the rules according to which it is
prepared, the halacha which is its
essence, is the same. They're right that from a halachic perspective this is an aesthetic rather than an essential
change, but it is a change that illustrates two important points. The first is
that those who take the more extreme position are incorrect, and it is not true
that all pious Jews from all generations would recognize each other's
practices. The second is that while our matzah
may be halachically the same as the matzah our ancestors ate, our experience
of eating matzah is very different.
Just like with Shavuos, we would not
recognize our ancestors' experience and they would not recognize ours.
The thin, crisp, cracker-like matzah
that we know, with its perforations, its crunch, its often burnt edges, and its
shelf-stability is a nineteenth-century invention.1 We
ritualistically call this matzah
“bread,” but it isn't really. If you didn't know what matzah was and someone handed you a piece, you would call it a
cracker.
Typical bread that we think of as such, whether loaves like white
or rye bread or flatbreads like pita and tortilla have a softer part inside,
called the crumb, and a relatively harder crust on the outside. The matzah our ancestors knew was also like
this. It really was bread.
If one were to mix flour and water, roll the dough into sheets,
and pop it in the oven, all in less than eighteen minutes, the result is not
the dry crackers that we call matzah.
It's a soft bread similar to other flatbreads.2 This is the stuff our ancestors ate, right up until when matzah baking was industrialized a few generations ago.
The products of modern matzah
factories are made by mixing flour with the least amount of water that will
still make a dough, a recipe that is the result of historical trends that we
will discuss momentarily. This creates a very dry dough that is then baked at
very high temperatures. Where bread is typically baked between 350oF
and 475oF,3 depending on type, matzah is baked
between 600oF and 800oF.4 This dries out the matzah all the way
through and produces a cracker-like product. The same historical trends that
led to using very dry dough occurred among both Ashkenazim and Sephardim,
and even the soft matzos that Sephardim
use today are dryer than the matzos
our ancestors ate.
References to matzah
throughout traditional rabbinic sources support the contention that the matzah most Jews throughout history
would recognize was indistinguishable from other breads:5
·
The gemara6 discusses a case where someone finds a moldy loaf in a bread bin and isn't sure
if it’s chometz or matzah. Hard matzos both do not become moldy and would not be confused with chometz breads. We can infer that the matzos the amoraim were familiar with were indistinguishable from regular
bread.
·
Historically, hagaddos have been the most commonly illustrated Jewish books. Some
of the surviving hagaados are as much
as seven hundred year old, and many of their illustrations realistically depict
various Pesach activities. Hagaados from the 15th century show matzos that vary in thickness from a
finger to a hand's breadth, much too thick to be the cracker-like matzo we know now, and too thick to chew
were they hard. A soft matzah a
hand's breadth thick would be indistinguishable from other types of bread, and
completely unlike the matzos we are
familiar with. Other illustrated hagaados
from over the centuries show similar matzos.
·
The Maharshal, who lived in the 16th century,
is quoted7 as saying that one should keep the afikoman
under one’s pillow. If one did this with hard matzos, there would be nothing left
but crumbs. With dense, unrisen, soft matzos,
the matzah would be fine.
·
The Chayei
Adam, written in the early nineteenth century, recommends8 that matzos be made thin, but notes
that in some places the custom is to make thick matzos.
·
As recently as 1884, the Chofetz Chaim wrote
that matzah should be “soft as a
sponge.” This implies that the matzah
that he knew was bread, not a cracker.9
The thin hard matzos
that Ashkenazim use today developed
over several centuries among people seeking to be more chumor. There are references to some people making very thin matzos as early as the 16th century,10 but as the above sources show, this was not typical. It is likely that
cracker-like matzah became standard when industrialized production in the 19th
century created the need among producers for shelf-stable matzos. This way of making matzah
originated as a chumrah with people
who wanted to bake all of the matzah they
would need for the entire yom tov
before Pesach started. They were
concerned that during baking there might be some bits of unbaked flour that
could later become chometz. They
wanted to be sure that this would happen before yom tov, when chometz
would be batul. If the matzah was baked during Pesach, when chometz is not batul,
they would run the risk of eating chometz
on Pesach, of which even a tiny bit
is prohibited. The regular thick, soft matzos
people were accustomed to making would, as bread does, go bad after a couple of
days. To make the matzah
shelf-stable, those who were baking all of it before Pesach would make their matzos
thin and dry. These thin matzos
existed alongside the soft, thick, bread-like matzah still being made daily by the majority of people who kept Pesach. As is often the case with chumros, as time passed the chumrah to bake all of one’s matzah before
Pesach became more severe, mandating
ever thinner and dryer matzos. With
the advent in the 19th century of industrialized production and of machines
that could mix very dry batter, cracker-like matzos reached the final stage in their evolution and became the matzos we're familiar with today.
Once the thin matzah was
widely available, rabbonim moved to
make it mandatory. We see here again the beginnings of the change from the
mimetic tradition, passed on through experience from one generation to the
next, to the textually based tradition that would become dominant by the
mid-twentieth century. The Chasam Sofer, who was responsible for so much of the
roots of that change, wrote that most Ashkenazi
communities had banned thick matzos -
but those bans were often ignored. In the mid-19th century, the mimetic
tradition still ruled. A hundred years later, the textual tradition, and
cracker-like matzos, became
ascendant.
To us, the relatively new thin, hard version IS matzah, and most people are only dimly
aware that matzah used to be recognizably
bread. Our experience of matzah is
very different than that of thousands of year’s worth of pious Jews, from the
time Jewish people started eating matzah
on Pesach right up until two
centuries ago. The matzah that Ashkenazim eat on Pesach and which is widely available for sale in kosher stores has
been the standard for only about 5% of the time Judaism has existed.
As we said, moderates might argue that technically matzah hasn’t changed: it is and always
has been bread that has not been allowed to rise. And so, they can argue,
Judaism hasn't changed. But this argument is itself something that only makes
sense in the new textually-dominated Orthodoxy. To our ancestors, devotees of
the mimetic tradition, the experience of Judaism was as or more important than
the technicalities of halacha. How
comfortable would they have been eating our matzah?
Would someone from a thousand years ago have even recognized it as matzah? To them, matzah was bread, not a cracker that we ritualistically refer to as
bread. Their experience was completely different than ours. It’s not true that
what we do is the same as what our ancestors did, and it's not true that any pious
Jew from any time would find Orthodoxy familiar and be comfortable in any frum community. The technicalities of
what makes something hlachically “matzah” matter much less than what it is
like to sit at a seder and eat matzos.
More than just a difference in experience in that the texture of
our matzah is different, the
significant difference is that for our ancestors, Pesach was less at odds with the rest of their lives than our
experience of it is today. Once upon a time, Hillel was eating what amounted to
a wrap made with dryish pita, roasted lamb, and salad. We've gone from what was
once a perfectly normal meal to, on the other end of the spectrum, those who
chew up two kzaysim of matzah, (according to the biggest shiur, of course,) hold it in their
cheek, and swallow it as quickly as possible in order to make sure that they
eat it “kdei achilas pras.” Imagine
the difference in experience between someone who does that and the experience
of our ancestors in antiquity.
When the tannaim and amoraim had their seder meal,
they were experiencing a perfectly normal thing. Eating a wrap is dinner, not a
ritual. Today, the mitzvah of achilas matzah is divorced from everyday
experience. It has become strange and ritualized, an obligation to eat a
prescribed amount of a food that is different from what we normally eat and to
eat it within a prescribed amount of time. This isn't a dinner, it's a ritual.
In the comments under one of the articles I used as a source for
this section someone pointed out that korech
as Hillel ate it was essentially shawarma on pita with salad. Another commenter
protested that this was “trivializ[ing] the holy and sacred.” This is a perfect
illustration of what we've been talking about here. It shows the profundity of
the changes to Judaism, the difference between the version of Judaism that is
current Orthodoxy and versions of Judaism that have existed in the past. To
many frum people to point out that
Hillel ate a normal sandwich is to trivialize it, whereas the korech of the seder, with its patina of ritual, is holy and sacred.
The way our ancestors experienced eating matzah is analogous to the way that Americans experience eating
turkey on Thanksgiving. Eating turkey is mundane, but eating it on Thanksgiving
in the way that has become traditional in the United States imbues that mundane
dinner with cultural meaning. Eating shawarma on pita with salad is mundane,
but eating it on the seder night in fulfillment
of the mitzvah as is traditional
among Jews imbues that mundane dinner with cultural and religious meaning. Now
that is no longer enough. Now frum people
expect their experience of eating matzah
to be mysterious and ritualized, and to point out that it was once experienced
as a mundane thing, albeit used for a special purpose, is to trivialize it.
The change in what matzah
is, from a bread to a cracker, is a change in Judaism, albeit a minor one. The
change in the experience of eating matzah
is significant. We do not experience Judaism the way our ancestors did. In fact
it seems some people would dismiss our ancestors' experience of Judaism as
trivial because it is not removed enough from everyday experience to seem
mystical and sacred. Our experience is fundamentally different from that of our
ancestors, and our ancestors would think that the way we fulfill the mitzvah of matzah, and more broadly, the way we relate to our Judaism, is
strange. They would not be comfortable in our communities, nor would we be
comfortable in theirs. The differences are too great, for all that we may share
the technical halachic definition of
“matzah.”
1 Most of the discussion in this section draws on Zamkanei, S. (2013, March 18). Why Your Ancestors Never Ate Matzos. The
Times of Israel. Retrieved from
http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/why-your-ancestors-never-ate-matzos/; and
Otofsky, A.Z. & Greenspan, A. (2014). The
Thick and Thin of the History of Matzah. Ḥakirah 17. Retrieved from
https://hakirah.org/Vol17Zivotofsky.pdf
2 Rainbow Tallit Baby. (March 28, 2014.). Matzah
And How Authoritarianism Is Crumby [Blog post]. Retireved from
https://rainbowtallitbaby.wordpress.com/2014/03/28/matzah-and-how-authoritarianism-is-crumby
3 Amit. What is the Ideal Oven Temperature
for Baking Bread? [Blog post]. The Bread Guide. Retrieved from
https://thebreadguide.com/what-is-the-ideal-oven-temperature-for-baking-bread
4 Siegel, R., Matzah Baking, an 18-Minute
Project. Myjewishlearning.com. Retrieved from
https://www.myjewishlearning.com/recipe/matzah-baking-an-18-minute-project
5 An often cited proof is that the word “korech”
memes “to wrap,” something that is impossible to do with cracker-like matzos. I do not cite it here because
the word can be understood as “surround.” While it seems more likely that it
meant “wrap” in the context of the seder,
the possibility of an interpretation that would work with hard matzos means that this line of argument
is not useful to use with the traditionalists who might insist that the way
things are now are the way they have always been.
6 Babylonian Talmud, Pesachim 7a
7 Be’ir Haitev (OḤ473:19)
8 Chayei Adam (128:25)
9 Mishna Berura, Orach Haim 486
10 Rema, Shulchan Arukh, Orach Chayim,
460:4. “there are those who make the Matzot wafer-thin and not a thick loaf
like other breads, for wafers do not leaven as quickly.” Translation from Sefaria.org
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