A farewell to bread

First off, SC would very much like to apologize for the unscheduled hiatus. Sometimes the words just stop coming. But not to worry, nothing else has been wrong aside from a severe case of writer's block. With that out of the way:

Tonight marks the beginning of Passover, the most corn-syrup free excruciatingly long invigoratingly demanding of all Jewish "festivals" (this is like calling Lent a party). The observance of Passover is marked most especially by the eating of matzah, the bread of affliction, with which your host will verily be afflicted over the next 8 days. In commemoration of the holiday, some thoughts on the language of the haggadah, the book from which Passover services are conducted:

• The Torah, which tells the story of the Jewish people, was given by G-d. The Haggadah, which details the captivity in Egypt, was given by Maxwell House. You only think I'm kidding.
• Talmudic logic, which does not always correspond to what you learned in geometry, is very much present in the Haggadah. Rabbis Jose, Eliezer and Akiva computed the ways in which we might estimate the plagues visited on the Egyptians. For example, Rabbi Jose notes that the Torah quotes the magicians in Pharaoh's court as saying that the ten plagues were the "finger of G-d", but at the Red Sea, the Egyptians were smitten by His hand instead. If one finger = ten plagues, then a whole hand = fifty plagues. The other rabbis extend this to 200 and 250 plagues, by invoking a passage from Psalm 78, "He cast upon them the fierceness of his anger, wrath, and indignation, and trouble, by sending evil angels among them". Depending on how you count the types of anger on display here, you get a multiplier of either 4 or 5, which yields the aforementioned counts.
• Applying this logic further, how many more plagues are we smitten by today! If the bread of affliction is a plague ([so saith your stomach -- ed.]), and it has 20 holes in each row of perforations (which are meant to prevent leavening), and each "board" has 20 such rows, then to eat a single matzah is to smite oneself with 400 plagues. (Note that your host didn't open up a box of matzah to check these figures; if you really must know, I'll do it tonight at the seder).
• The Haggadah contains a dispute over the proper treatment of universal quantification:

  Rabbi Eleazar ben Azaryah said: "I am like a man of seventy years old, yet I did not succeed in proving that the exodus from Egypt must be mentioned at night-until Ben Zoma explained it: "It is said, `That you may remember the day you left Egypt all the days of your life;' now `the days of your life' refers to the days, [and the additional word] `all' indicates the inclusion of the nights!"

  The sages, however, said: "`The days of your life' refers to the present-day world; and `all' indicates the inclusion of the days of Mashiach."

• It is not recorded what happened to the sage who asked if this meant that he could have his choice of nights off, or not having to remember after the Messiah comes.
• Incidentally, Rabbi Eleazar ben Azaryah wasn't just like a man of seventy years old; he was a man of seventy years old. At that age, though, he couldn't remember for sure.
• Philosopher Alfred Tarski introduced a conception of truth demonstrated by the example that "'snow is white' is true if and only if snow is white". In other words, a statement is true if it's actually supported by facts as they are. Tarski was preceded several thousand years in this endeavor by the writers of the Haggadah, who employed the same basic disquotational technique. One such "unpacking" will suffice to demonstrate the point:

  "The Egyptians treated us badly and they made us suffer, and they put hard work upon us."

  "The Egyptians treated us badly," as it is said: Come, let us act cunningly with [the people] lest they multiply and, if there should be a war against us, they will join our enemies, fight against us and leave the land."

  "And they made us suffer," as it is said: "They set taskmasters over [the people of Israel] to make them suffer with their burdens, and they built storage cities for Pharaoh, Pitom and Ramses."

  "And they put hard work upon us," as it is said: "The Egyptians made the children of Israel work with rigor. And they made their lives bitter with hard work, with mortar and with bricks and all manner of service in the field, all their work which they made them work with rigor."

In almost any other book, the original assertion would be taken at face value. But in the Haggadah, practically every clause must be explained with something that demonstrates it to be true.

• The Haggadah is hardly the only place one might go looking for word games in studying Passover. The kosher section of your local grocery store far surpasses any Rabbinic writing when it comes to the hypertechnical parsing of rules.

  For example, while the most general rule is that one should not eat chametz, which is to say leavened bread, there are a number of additional rules depending on whether one is Ashkenazic or Sephardic. Thus, as the UPenn guide to Pesach succinctly describes:

  Due to the stringency of not eating chametz on Pesach, Ashkenazic Jews have developed a custom not to eat Kitniyot (legumes) on Pesach.

  This includes the derivatives of legumes, which is why corn syrup is generally understood to be prohibited. However, since there are more Ashkenazic than Sephardic Jews, this means major lost opportunities for companies whose products include corn syrup. Therefore, the Joyva Corporation puts these weasel words on the back of every box of "Kosher for Passover" products that they manufacture:

  PLEASE NOTE: Liquified legumous extracts e.g., corn syrup, in kosher for passover foods, are fully sanctioned for ashkenazim and sephardim alike by preeminent orthodox halachic authorities, including the renowned posek hador, R. Yitzchak Elchanon Spector, ZTL

  This is, to put it mildly, not a generally accepted opinion. Rabbi Spector is, however, an Ashkenazic rabbi, and so the logic is that if some rabbi could be found to sign off on the practice, we're in business! (The "ZTL" indicates that Rabbi Spector is not here to argue the point; he died in 1896.) More seriously, the dispute turns on whether or not derivatives of a product retain the prohibited characteristics of the original, a strategy by which Kraft claims certification for Jell-O. No major certification organization buys any of this, but SC admires the chutzpah involved in trying.

Comments

[hh]

Huh! So corn syrup is out because it's leguminous? But corn isn't a legume on anyone's definition, check out the scientific classification of corn here (it's a grass), and the discussion of what a legume is here...

Is it just because it looks like it might be kind of pea-like?

[eric morse]

Wow. Very interesting stuff.
From the post title, I was sure someone from "Bread" had passed on. No "Baby I'm-a Want You" lyrics here, though...

[Margaret S.]

On a tangent, maybe you would like to spice up your traditional menu with some foreign traditions. This article starts with a glimpse of traditional Mexican Passover food: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A10612-2005Apr22.html

[Margaret S.]

Oops, make that ...articles/A10612-2005Apr22.html

[Lance]

Do pardon those who are clearly quite slow about catching up on their blog reading. In any case, I'm genuinely surprised each time I encounter an American Jew who didn't grow up with the Maxwell House haggadah. (When a friend and I set out to adapt the haggadah to our own purposes, being as we were unhappy with the archaic language and some annoying references to smiting non-Jews, we were astonished to learn how much of that thing isn't at all a necessary part of the seder.)

Although next year I might, as a semanticist, have to put back in that explanation of the difference between "the days" and "all the days". I'd forgotten how much that amused me.

[NBK-Boston]

You state: "More seriously, the dispute turns on whether or not derivatives of a product retain the prohibited characteristics of the original, a strategy by which Kraft claims certification for Jell-O."

I must also point out that it is the same strategy by which the chief rabbinate of Israel grants certification to most gelatin producted consumed in that country.

You then claim: "No major certification organization buys any of this, but SC admires the chutzpah involved in trying." The claim that "no major certification organization" accepts this position is therefore false in light of the foregoing -- the Israel rabbinate is a major player in the kosher certification business.