‘Tis the Season: A Kemach Torah Passover Digest

First things first: The 2012 Passover Guide is proving to be enormously popular, at least by the standards of a niche blog like this one. The hit count on March 30th, the day it was published, was more than three times the previous record hit count for a single day. Thanks to everyone who shared it through Facebook, Google+ and word of mouth, and please keep spreading the word!* Please treat the comments section of this post as the new suggestion box for additions to the 2013 Guide.

Now that we’re in the final week of preparations, I thought it would be a good time to present some relevant posts you might have missed last year.

1. Who Knows Three? An explanation, a bit on the technical side, of why we have three matzot on the modern seder plate.
2. A Question of Seasonality. Addressing the oddity of charoset, which is usually made with apples even though they’re a fall crop and Passover is a spring holiday. Read the comments section.
3. The Curious Case of Matzah Ashirah. How egg matzah is highly problematic for reasons that make no sense.
4. Carrot “consommé” (vegan). Not necessarily a Passover recipe, but if you read the Guide (just follow the first link in this article) you’ll see that that’s exactly the point.

So much for old business. Now, how about that Passover-hekhshered ice cream? No? And you don’t have a dedicated ice cream maker for Passover? No problem.

Shavua tov!

* I don’t make money off of this blog or anything. I just want to make Passover better.

A slight delay, and some talk about zemanim.

When there’s no news from the worlds of politics and sports, nothing good on TV, not even interesting weather, we can still rely twice a year on one thing to keep meaningless small talk going: the shift between daylight savings time and standard time. “What an annoyance! I lost/gained an hour and it threw off my internal clock something fierce! And the sun, where did the sun go? I get out of work and it’s dark out—I feel like I’m above the Arctic Circle!”

Observant Jews have a leg up on everyone else when the clocks change, because we have an extra gripe in our bag of kvetches. Shabbat, which is traditionally begun 18 minutes before sunset (and at the moment of sunset at the very latest) is starting an hour and change earlier than it did last week. That means one hour less to get the cooking done, clean the apartment, shower, dress properly, take photographs of your bread and write blog posts about it. What do you mean, you don’t worry about that last part?

One of the more interesting aspects of Jewish observance that people don’t seem to talk about much in my presence is the degree to which one has to be in touch with the position of the sun in the sky. The sun, not a clock, determines when various prayers are said; for example, one is supposed to recite Shema at some point between the first light of dawn and the moment that is one quarter of the way from sunrise to sunset.

Bread for Re’eh

וְנִתַּצְתֶּ֣ם אֶת־מִזְבְּחֹתָ֗ם וְשִׁבַּרְתֶּם֙ אֶת־מַצֵּ֣בֹתָ֔ם וַֽאֲשֵֽׁרֵיהֶם֙ תִּשְׂרְפ֣וּן בָּאֵ֔שׁ וּפְסִילֵ֥י אֱלֹֽהֵיהֶ֖ם תְּגַדֵּע֑וּן וְאִבַּדְתֶּ֣ם אֶת־שְׁמָ֔ם מִן־הַמָּק֖וֹם הַהֽוּא: לֹא־תַֽעֲשׂ֣וּן כֵּ֔ן לַֽי·הוָֹ֖ה אֱ·לֹֽהֵיכֶֽם:־

You shall pull down their altars, smash their sacred stones, burn their Ashera-poles in fire, chop down their idols, and erase their names from that place. Do not do so to Adonay your God. (Deuteronomy 12:3-4)

Some readers may have noticed that when I cite the Torah at the beginning of my Shabbat posts, I insert an interpunct (·) into various names of God. That’s because there’s a halakha, derived from the above passage, that forbids the erasure of God’s Hebrew names. On the off chance that anyone should print one of my posts (perhaps to show friends and convince them to subscribe), I don’t want them to have to worry about proper disposal of the document (not that anyone would ever want to dispose of such a masterpiece).

This usually has no effect at all on my challah baking, because you can’t write on bread meant to be consumed on Shabbat anyway; both writing and erasing are not Shabbat-friendly activities, and eating something with writing on it is considered erasure. This week, though, my baking came a day early in honor of the sheva berakhot of two friends who got married this past Sunday. Writing on bread is fine if you’re going to eat it on a Thursday night.

Bread for Pinechas

לָכֵ֖ן אֱמֹ֑ר הִנְנִ֨י נֹתֵ֥ן ל֛וֹ אֶת־בְּרִיתִ֖י שָׁלֽוֹם:־

Therefore I say: I hereby grant him my covenant of peace. (Numbers 25:12)

The act of writing Torah scrolls and other holy books is one of the most complicated in all of Jewish ritual. In order to write a Torah, a scribe must memorize literally thousands of laws, the violation of any of which could render a scroll pasul (invalid for use). One of the most basic and best known is that you can’t have any broken letters: If a bit of ink is missing and the result is two separate islands of ink where there ought to be one, the letter, and therefore the entire scroll, is pasul.

Parashat Pinechas, which we read last week, contains the sole exception to that rule. In Numbers 25L:12, the letter ו (vav) in the word שלום (shalom, peace) customarily has a split between its upper and lower parts.

The curious case of matzah ashirah

Boxes of matzah have all sorts of interesting things written on them. Streit’s puts a message on its package telling consumers to “restore crispness” by placing the product in a warm oven, something I’ve never heard of anybody doing. (They also helpfully inform the consumer that the product must be removed from the box prior to the aforementioned recrisping maneuver, which is terrifying insofar as it implies that somebody once tried to heat up a cardboard box of Streit’s matzot in an oven.) Yehuda, which refers to its unleavened bread product “matzos” despite being an Israeli company, brags about the number of taste test awards it has received from the San Francisco Chronicle. (Incidentally, if you’re in a public space then you might not want to click on the Yehuda link without first turning off your speakers. What made San Francisco’s favorite matzah firm decide that their site should more closely resemble someone’s MySpace page?)

Who Knows Three?

I hope to update the glossary soon to account for the jargon in this entry. Please be patient. I can answer questions if you e-mail me! Don’t forget to remove the 3.

The centerpiece of the Passover seder is a tray with a stack of three whole matzot: unleavened, usually cracker-like breads made with only flour and water. Early in the seder the the middle matzah is broken in two by hand, and the larger of the two pieces—it’s virtually impossible to make them equal, and I’ve tried—is wrapped in a cloth and set aside, usually off the table. This piece, called the afikoman, is shared by all participants at the end of the seder as a last course. (It’s often referred to as a “dessert.” Nobody else seems to find this as funny as I do.)

Some people never think to ask why there are three matzot. (If they do ask, the standard response is that they represent the three levels of the ancient religious caste system: the Kohanim [the priests], Levites [the acolyte caste of which Kohanim are a subset] and Israelites [all the other Jews]. I dislike this explanation, mostly because I’m a Levite and I don’t fancy being snapped in two.) Most of us don’t realize that until recently, at least according to a Jewish standard of “recent,” there were only two matzot. But first things first: why do we break one of them?

וַיְהִ֣י ׀ בַּיּ֣וֹם הַשִּׁשִּׁ֗י לָֽקְט֥וּ לֶ֨חֶם֙ מִשְׁנֶ֔ה שְׁנֵ֥י הָעֹ֖מֶר לָֽאֶחָ֑ד וַיָּבֹ֨אוּ֙ כָּל־נְשִׂיאֵ֣י הָֽעֵדָ֔ה וַיַּגִּ֖ידוּ לְמֹשֶֽׁה: וַיֹּ֣אמֶר אֲלֵהֶ֗ם ה֚וּא אֲשֶׁ֣ר דִּבֶּ֣ר ה֔’ שַׁבָּת֧וֹן שַׁבַּת־קֹ֛דֶשׁ לַֽה֖’ מָחָ֑ר אֵ֣ת אֲשֶׁר־תֹּאפ֞וּ אֵפ֗וּ וְאֵ֤ת אֲשֶֽׁר־תְּבַשְּׁלוּ֙ בַּשֵּׁ֔לוּ וְאֵת֙ כָּל־הָ֣עֹדֵ֔ף הַנִּ֧יחוּ לָכֶ֛ם לְמִשְׁמֶ֖רֶת עַד־הַבֹּֽקֶר:־

It came to pass that on the sixth day they gathered double bread, two omer-measures [of manna] for one person, and the leaders of the community came and told Moshe. He said to them, “This is what Adonai has commanded: Tomorrow is a day of Sabbath rest for Adonai. Bake what you will bake and cook what you will cook, and leave whatever remains until morning.” (Exodus 16:22-23)