In many ways, Passover is all about food. But for some Jews, marks the first time in years that they will be allowed to eat foods like rice and beans during Passover.
Since the 13th century, Ashkenazi Jews living outside of Israel have been prohibited from eating certain types of food called kitniyot during the Passover holiday.
This group of foods—which includes rice, beans, corn and peanuts—was originally banned because the items were often mixed with wheat, which Jews refrain from eating during Passover except in the form of an unleavened flatbread called matzah , David Holzel reports for the Times of Israel. But recently, rabbis belonging to the Conservative movement decided to officially revisit the custom. What has happened in the United States, Levin explained, is a demographic shift in which Jews from Israel, southern Europe and North Africa are living together.
They are transforming the face of the American Jewish community, which is looking more and more like Israel, where the Sephardic Jews are permitted to eat kitniyot. Golinkin revised his earlier paper, which was aimed at Israel's Ashkenazic Jews, to make a case today for Ashkenazic Jews everywhere to dispense with the custom.
The explanation that rabbis are giving to their congregants is that kitniyot are not — and never were — hametz, the five forbidden grains in the Torah: wheat, barley, rye, oats and spelt. But centuries ago, hametz was often found mixed with these grains in the same bins. Or they were harvested and processed and ground into flour just like hametz. Also, because cooked kitniyot porridges looked very similar to hametz, or because it was customary to prepare kitniyot and hametz together, the custom from the Middle Ages to avoid legumes took root.
In a recent email to her congregants, Rabbi Annie Tucker of Beth Hillel Congregation B'nai Emunah in Wilmette asked: "Why must we still be bound by the restrictive practices of our ancestors? This "foolish" custom, many rabbis say, detracts from the joy of the holiday by limiting the number of permitted foods. There's a lack of healthy packaged foods and an extremely inflated cost of products under Passover supervision. It causes unnecessary divisions among Jewish ethnic groups.
It's not going to change things for me. What I do makes me feel connected to my parents and grandparents. Jonathan Lehrer, past president of Beth Hillel Congregation B'nai Emunah, said that he and his wife "respect and honor Jewish tradition, but as Conservative Jews, we respond to changing times. Others say they'll do whatever the rules allow, even though they're still confused. In the modern era, products like corn syrup or vegetable oil, which are derived from these ingredients, have also been excluded.
Their reasoning is simple: prohibiting these foods is wildly beside the point—an extreme measure enacted to protect an already extreme grain ban, it deviates far from the original intent of the Passover laws, creates needless problems, and leaves people with little to eat during what is supposed to be a feast of freedom. Last December, in an effort to harmonize the rules with the spirit of the law, and to finally unite the customs of all Passover observers, rabbis from the Conservative branch of Judaism issued a repeal of the notorious Legume Ban.
But, of course, the story is not that simple. Among the sages of old Ashkenaz, the Legume Ban has been controversial since the beginning. The debate raged for a time in thirteenth-century France, where the rule is thought to have originated, and heated up again in the eighteenth century, when a German rabbi, Jacob Emden, spoke out passionately in favor of legumes.
In addition to the usual complaints, Rabbi Emden was vexed that the ban would impose an additional financial burden on the struggling masses, whose food options were already limited. For Ashkenazi Jews, bemoaning the Legume Ban has itself become part of the holiday tradition. In an effort to be reasonable, though, the rabbis, at least the wise ones among them, have tried to exercise restraint.
While the social networks of many Reform and Conservative Jews have been aglimmer this week with enthusiastic legume-themed posts—mostly gloating about new Passover recipes—the mood on my Orthodox social networks has darkened. In Orthodox circles, there have long been signs that laws like the Legume Ban are drifting toward ever-stricter interpretation.
Writing in the journal Contemporary Jewry a few years ago, the scholar Marc B.
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