Rabbi Michael Leo Samuel

As people get ready for Passover, everyone runs around trying to find suitable foods for the holiday. Over the last several years, I have returned to an old Sephardi custom of my family that goes back literally hundreds of years–I now eat rice and beans during the holiday!

For the greater part of early rabbinic history, rice and legumes used to be considered staple foods for Passover, but when did the change occur? More importantly, why did so many Ashkenazi communities give up on eating rice and legumes? Granted, this may not be the most interesting topic. True, many people could care less about the pedantic discussions regarding the Passover status of rice and legumes.

Nevertheless, the history of this old rabbinic controversy reveals something interesting about the psychology of the forbidding mind that continues to shape the attitudes of many observant Jews who are unaware of this custom’s history and controversy. From a psychoanalytical perspective, the human compulsion to forbid the permitted is what really fascinates me. Understanding the evolution of a community’s mindset can be as exciting as reading a good Sherlock Holmes mystery.

The Talmud mentions how Rav Pappi once gave permission to the Resh Galuta’s bakers to thicken a pot with flour made from hasissi (“oven-dried grain”—Rashi). Tosfot  considers Rashi’s insight to be a no-brainer and suggests that hasissi refers to lentil flour; ordinarily, this kind of flour does not become chametz—leavened. [1]. But even this interpretation is unclear. Why was lentil flour forbidden? Tosfot does not really offer a logical explanation. Could the appearance of anything that rises–even if it derives from vegetable flour be the reason for the custom to avoid  eating legumes during Passover?

One of the subsequent Tosfot scholars named Rabbi Yitschak of Corbeil (13th century) offers an explanation in his SeMaK (Sefer Mitzvot Katan). He claims that the prohibition was by no means a “new custom,” but had already existed for many generations. The rabbis of early medieval times feared that the grains of rice or legumes might get commingled with wheat, millet, barley, rye, and spelt. “Supposedly,” argued R. Yitzchak, “people used to place their grains in any sack container that was available for storage.” Perhaps the lentil flower became commingled with a bit of wheat flour. A person might easily think he was eating lentil bread, not realizing that some of the forbidden grains might also be a part of the bread. [2]

R. Yosef Caro (author of the Code of Jewish Law) writes in his Beit Yosef commentary to the Tur, that some scholars felt that the average person might not be able to distinguish between the unripened kernels of grain and legumes since they resemble one another.[3] In practice, R. Yosef Caro (in his Beit Yosef) disregards this fear, whereas the Ashkenazi Jews follow the more stringent view and abstain from eating rice and legumes during Passover. Once canonized as “tradition,” people tend to think this is the way it has always been, but it ain’t so! Early Ashkenazi rabbis objected to this stringency for many reasons.

Some rabbinic scholars considered the special Passover proscription as a “mistaken custom,” while R. Yerucham brusquely called  it a “foolish  custom.”  One might wonder, “Why perpetuate a custom that is logically absurd?” Evidently, the champions of common sense ran into a proverbial brick wall. We may derive solace knowing that not all the medieval Ashkenazi rabbis blindly followed this custom. The real reason why beans became forbidden was because beans were the standard food of mourners, and mourning is forbidden during the holidays! The medieval rabbis had forgotten this simple truth, hence the confusion.

There are other reasons why rice and legumes ought to be used for Passover:

• There are not a lot of Passover foods to choose from.

• Rabbinic certification traditionally charges exorbitant prices for their “kosher” supervision. Once again, the public gets taken advantage by the shepherds who are supposed to be concerned with their welfare (cf. Eze. 34ff).

• Halachic stringency sometimes creates a “Holier-than-Thou” type of mentality that trivializes the holiday’s spiritual importance.
• Food affects mood. Eating rice and legumes are healthier for a more balanced diet, and are also arguably preferable to the heavy animal proteins people imbibe during the holiday. A healthier diet makes one feel lighter and less weighed down–perfect metaphors for the spiritual lightness we ought to feel during this special time of the year. Complex carbohydrates are good for mind and energizing for the body!

In the end, religious compulsiveness and neurotic anxieties triumphed over rabbinic common sense; and we have seen this kind of  obsessive compulsive thinking exponentially get worst over the centuries. Caught in a recurring time loop, the will of the naysayers continues to dominate the more flexidox religious communities, who would gladly eat legumes and rice if only their rabbis would prefer to adopt a “live and let live” kind of Halachic attitude.

The spirit of Passover celebrates freedom and not asceticism. Clearly, the Sages in their wisdom delineated enough prohibitions for the holiday. Must we add an endless list of more dietary taboos that nobody since the 13th century never heard of? Rabbinic wisdom teaches, “If the Nazirite, who only denied himself the single pleasure of drinking wine, is considered a sinner, how much more is this true about a person who denies himself pleasure in general and chooses to live a life of asceticism?” (BT Nazir 19a). Passover is a holiday to celebrate freedom; it is not a holiday to enslave ourselves to unnecessary restrictions that diminish the joy of the holiday.

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Notes:

[1] BT Pesachim 40b. Note that it never occurs to Tosfot that maybe the Talmud might have have written this anecdote out of chronological order–at a time when maybe it wasn’t so obvious.

[2] Cf. Mordechai’s gloss on BT Pesachim Chapter 2, 588, who cites the SeMak. This was also the view of the Tur (O.H. 453).

[3] O.H. 453:1