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jack"All my Jewish friends suddenly seem to be gluten-intolerant for about a week and I don't understand why...?"
Dietary Restrictions
On the first day of passover you MUST eat UNLEAVENED bread (also a wide variety of really random things of theological significance). On all the days of passover you MUST NOT eat LEAVENED bread.
Indeed, you must be extra super careful and scrub your house to remove any trace of anything that might ever have been leavened bread ever. Literally. You can't make this stuff up. Well, ok, you can, because someone DID. But what I mean is, I can't make it up. Chametz is everything you're specifically not supposed to eat, leavened bread and leavening agents and anything similar. Mainly crumbs, but also scrub your oven and clean everything thoroughly and so on.
In fact, if it's not food, you're technically ok. So once you've poured bleach on something, it's technically not chametz any more because you can't eat it, passover or not. But obviously you should normally wipe it up afterwards anyway!
Some people follow a tradition that after carefully cleaning the house, they then take approximately ten small pieces of chametz (typically bread) and hide them somewhere, and then try to find at least the same number again afterwards. While carrying a feather. The sanity of doing this when airports can do the same thing with live explosives AND THEN LOSE THEM is apparently not at question.
Digression
If you've any self-contained chametz you want to keep (eg. bottles of whisky, etc), you can put them all in one cupboard and seal it up for the duration. In principle, you are supposed to "sell" the stuff to Alec (or any non-Jew you have handy, if you're not married to Alec) with the understanding that they will "sell" it back at the end. Some communities broker this all together via the Rabbi. There are many supposedly "hilarious" stories of extremely doubtful provenance of Jewish innkeepers incautiously (or involuntarily) selling their wares to unscrupulous non-Jews :( You have to get it right according to whatever tradition you follow, but if you can manage cleaning the rest of the chametz out, you will normally manage to deal with the cupboardful somehow.
Now, some of you may be thinking "isn't that a bit of a cop-out?" Well, DON'T. You're talking to intelligent, educated people who choose to follow a set of traditions. Of course they choose to do so in a sensible way. You might say "surely you should follow everything, or nothing". Well, we have people who do that already. They're called ultra-orthodox and atheists respectively. By definition, your moderate Jewish friends are going to interpret the laws in a sensible fashion -- that's where the laws came from in the first place. You can ask "but why that" until the cows come home, and open an unending series of nested explanations, and suggest alternatives, and so on, but if you try to tell people they're doing it wrong, you are invariably opening a gigantic can of worms, something like "well, if we did that, we'd have to have animal sacrifice, and if we did that, we'd have to do it in the temple, and if we did that, we'd have to rebuild the temple, and if we did that, we'd have to knock down the Dome of the Rock first, and if we did that, we'd have to kick all the Muslims out of the area first, and if we did that, we'd have to start World War III". And so on. By all means ask, and suggest, but don't assume the people you've talking to haven't thought of this
Kosher for passover
You should absolutely not eat anything leavened. Especially not bread. Bread is extended to include any kind of fermented wheat. Thus risen bread and whisky and so on are right out. Whisky is like liquid chametz!
But to be sure people keep at least two steps removed (this is an extreme distortion, but conveys the point that there are lots of traditions of "how to be extra careful" that have become traditions in their own right, and it's not always necessarily obvious why something makes sense). Counter-intuitively, even though in principle it's leavening that's bad, because it's leavened WHEAT that's forbidden it's easier to keep wheat out of things than to keep things from fermenting, because anything left lying around is prone to spontaneously fermenting a little bit. That's how we discovered alcohol in the first place. Mmm.. alcohol.
Thus, the aim of the game is to not eat anything that has wheat in. (Overlapping but different to gluten-free.) Some people refrain from foods with wheat in. Some people only eat foods that they've made themselves, or have been certified passover-kosher[1] by a Rabbi, off special passover plates that have never had chametz on. Some people are in the middle.
[1] You might think "doesn't 'kosher' mean things you're allowed to eat NORMALLY". Well, just like it English, "kosher" means "things that are ok". It just BY DEFAULT means food that is normally ok to eat.
Matzo -- Jewish passover crackers
Originally, unleavened bread was probably something like pita bread, just a convenient form of food. But because God said to use unleavened bread to commemorate the exodus from Egypt, when people couldn't leaven bread, it has to be not just coincidentally unleavened, but really really definitely unleavened, otherwise you're not fulfilling the instruction (mitzvot).
Matzo is the traditional form -- it's just like a cracker. It's made from flour and water, and is made very carefully to make sure it absolutely doesn't leaven at all. In extreme cases you get a special rabbi to sit around WATCHING it not leaven just to be on the safe side. There is also NON-passover matzo which is made the same way but not actually certified to be chametz-free /kosher for passover. Don't get them muddled up.
There are several special points in the meal when you HAVE to eat Matzo, but you also eat it instead of bread for the rest of the week. Most people think it's quite nice, but get a bit sick of it by the end.
Whew.
To come: a checklist of actions you should always include in a passover service to make it traditional/legitimate, in the unlikely event that my blog is your definitive source of Jewish education.
Dietary Restrictions
On the first day of passover you MUST eat UNLEAVENED bread (also a wide variety of really random things of theological significance). On all the days of passover you MUST NOT eat LEAVENED bread.
Indeed, you must be extra super careful and scrub your house to remove any trace of anything that might ever have been leavened bread ever. Literally. You can't make this stuff up. Well, ok, you can, because someone DID. But what I mean is, I can't make it up. Chametz is everything you're specifically not supposed to eat, leavened bread and leavening agents and anything similar. Mainly crumbs, but also scrub your oven and clean everything thoroughly and so on.
In fact, if it's not food, you're technically ok. So once you've poured bleach on something, it's technically not chametz any more because you can't eat it, passover or not. But obviously you should normally wipe it up afterwards anyway!
Some people follow a tradition that after carefully cleaning the house, they then take approximately ten small pieces of chametz (typically bread) and hide them somewhere, and then try to find at least the same number again afterwards. While carrying a feather. The sanity of doing this when airports can do the same thing with live explosives AND THEN LOSE THEM is apparently not at question.
Digression
If you've any self-contained chametz you want to keep (eg. bottles of whisky, etc), you can put them all in one cupboard and seal it up for the duration. In principle, you are supposed to "sell" the stuff to Alec (or any non-Jew you have handy, if you're not married to Alec) with the understanding that they will "sell" it back at the end. Some communities broker this all together via the Rabbi. There are many supposedly "hilarious" stories of extremely doubtful provenance of Jewish innkeepers incautiously (or involuntarily) selling their wares to unscrupulous non-Jews :( You have to get it right according to whatever tradition you follow, but if you can manage cleaning the rest of the chametz out, you will normally manage to deal with the cupboardful somehow.
Now, some of you may be thinking "isn't that a bit of a cop-out?" Well, DON'T. You're talking to intelligent, educated people who choose to follow a set of traditions. Of course they choose to do so in a sensible way. You might say "surely you should follow everything, or nothing". Well, we have people who do that already. They're called ultra-orthodox and atheists respectively. By definition, your moderate Jewish friends are going to interpret the laws in a sensible fashion -- that's where the laws came from in the first place. You can ask "but why that" until the cows come home, and open an unending series of nested explanations, and suggest alternatives, and so on, but if you try to tell people they're doing it wrong, you are invariably opening a gigantic can of worms, something like "well, if we did that, we'd have to have animal sacrifice, and if we did that, we'd have to do it in the temple, and if we did that, we'd have to rebuild the temple, and if we did that, we'd have to knock down the Dome of the Rock first, and if we did that, we'd have to kick all the Muslims out of the area first, and if we did that, we'd have to start World War III". And so on. By all means ask, and suggest, but don't assume the people you've talking to haven't thought of this
Kosher for passover
You should absolutely not eat anything leavened. Especially not bread. Bread is extended to include any kind of fermented wheat. Thus risen bread and whisky and so on are right out. Whisky is like liquid chametz!
But to be sure people keep at least two steps removed (this is an extreme distortion, but conveys the point that there are lots of traditions of "how to be extra careful" that have become traditions in their own right, and it's not always necessarily obvious why something makes sense). Counter-intuitively, even though in principle it's leavening that's bad, because it's leavened WHEAT that's forbidden it's easier to keep wheat out of things than to keep things from fermenting, because anything left lying around is prone to spontaneously fermenting a little bit. That's how we discovered alcohol in the first place. Mmm.. alcohol.
Thus, the aim of the game is to not eat anything that has wheat in. (Overlapping but different to gluten-free.) Some people refrain from foods with wheat in. Some people only eat foods that they've made themselves, or have been certified passover-kosher[1] by a Rabbi, off special passover plates that have never had chametz on. Some people are in the middle.
[1] You might think "doesn't 'kosher' mean things you're allowed to eat NORMALLY". Well, just like it English, "kosher" means "things that are ok". It just BY DEFAULT means food that is normally ok to eat.
Matzo -- Jewish passover crackers
Originally, unleavened bread was probably something like pita bread, just a convenient form of food. But because God said to use unleavened bread to commemorate the exodus from Egypt, when people couldn't leaven bread, it has to be not just coincidentally unleavened, but really really definitely unleavened, otherwise you're not fulfilling the instruction (mitzvot).
Matzo is the traditional form -- it's just like a cracker. It's made from flour and water, and is made very carefully to make sure it absolutely doesn't leaven at all. In extreme cases you get a special rabbi to sit around WATCHING it not leaven just to be on the safe side. There is also NON-passover matzo which is made the same way but not actually certified to be chametz-free /kosher for passover. Don't get them muddled up.
There are several special points in the meal when you HAVE to eat Matzo, but you also eat it instead of bread for the rest of the week. Most people think it's quite nice, but get a bit sick of it by the end.
Whew.
To come: a checklist of actions you should always include in a passover service to make it traditional/legitimate, in the unlikely event that my blog is your definitive source of Jewish education.
no subject
Date: 2010-04-23 10:12 pm (UTC)