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xiphiasA fellow reader of ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
weirdjews wrote me a couple questions that I thought were interesting enough that I figured I'd answer them here, rather than just responding privately. The SECOND reason for this is that I think other people might be interested. But the FIRST reason is so that, if I get this wrong, y'all can correct me.
Said user can introduce himself if he so desires; I don't like just throwing people's names around for no reason. There's no real reason NOT to mention who he is, but I just like to let people choose to introduce themselves or not as they see fit.
The second question he asked was, "What makes a given wine Kosher for Passover (I understand the mevushal thing, I think)."
The two parts of that question are, "What makes a given wine Kosher," and "what makes a given wine Kosher for Passover, assuming it's already kosher?" The only really difficult part of that one is "what makes a given wine kosher?" and the answer is, "you can be certain that it wasn't used for Pagan rites." Apparently, boiling wine makes it unfit to be offered to idols. Unfortunately, it's pretty darned clear WHY it's unfit -- I mean, if the stuff tastes so bad that a STATUE won't drink it, it's pretty much not worth it for humans, either. Boiled wine had some flavor added back by filling it with lots and lots of sugar, which is why Manishewitz tastes like it does. I happen to like Manishewitz, but it's a totally different beverage than wine.
In recent years, flash pasturization has been used to make the stuff TECHNICALLY have been cooked, but to keep it nonetheless still drinkable.
Basically, in a kosher wine, an observant Jew must have been involved, supervising the process from the beginning to the end, and making sure that, among other things, non-kosher fining agents, such as isinglass from treif fish, or gelatin from non-kosher animals, weren't used. And a bunch of other things. The process of ensuring that wine is kosher is actually fairly complex.
But, if a given wine is Kosher, what makes it Kosher-for-Pesach or not? Well, the person who was watching it to make sure it was kosher must also have been watching it to make sure that nothing chametz got in it, either. In practical terms, it's going to be VERY rare that a chametz ingredient would be used in wine at all -- but I could imagine some ways that it could happen. One is "by accident." Someone accidentally drops a loaf of bread in the fermenting vat, and fishes it out.
I could also see some flavored wines, such as vermouths and other wine-based aperteifs, using ingredients that would be considered kitnyot.
But, basically, what makes a Kosher wine also Kosher-for-Pesach is that the person who was watching to make sure that nothing that would make it treif ALSO is paying attention to making sure that nothing makes it chametz.
That was the EASY question.
His FIRST question was,
"As a brewer, [ . . . ] why is it that, from the Biblical account of the Exodus, wherein the Jews are told to make unleavened bread, the traditions allow leavening (ie, yeasts) to produce fermented products, such as wine?
[ . . . .]
I understand that there is more to the rules/traditions/requirements/whatever the heck they are called than what is in the Bible, but it seems clear to this Goy that the intention was that the Jews did not have enough time to wait for leavening to occur - they must be ready to go at a moment's notice."
Well, there are two parts to my answer to this. One is the halachic question: what is the law that makes those different? And the other is the cultural question: why did we as Jews make that distinction in the first place? Or, why did G-d choose to make that distinction for us? Take whichever formulation of the question matches your theosophical outlook.
Obviously, the cultural/theological thing is going to be guesswork. The halachic thing, I can actually give an answer to, but the reason behind it is purely speculation.
The halachic answer:
Chametz is only incidentally related to yeast.
Matzah can be made from wheat, barley, spelt, oats, or rye. Plus water.
Anything that is made from wheat, barley, spelt, oats, or rye that ISN'T matzah is chametz. Yeast doesn't enter into the definition of chametz. You can go ahead and eat spoonfuls of yeast if you want.
(As an aside: this rather explains some of the reasons behind the Ashkenazic laws of "kitnyot", which originally meant treating beans and rice as more-or-less similar to chametz. Over time, lots of other things have been added to the list, most notably corn.
Much of the laws of kitnyot just don't make sense. But the basic law makes sense to this extent: I can take beans, such as chickpeas, or rice, or maize, and grind it into flour. And I can make bread out of it.
If I was careful and lucky enough, I might be able to get it into a dough strong and stretchy enough to be able to make a yeast-raised bread with it.
And that would just be weird. So I can see why the rabbis forbade it. Still, the laws of kitnyot has gotten way, way out of hand -- but that's another rant for another time)
So, wine, and mead, and other fermented products are fine because there's no reason they WOULDN'T be. There's no prohibition of fermentation -- just on wheat, barley, rye, spelt, and oats, converted into any form other than matzah.
That's the halachic reason.
Now for the speculation about why.
The earliest proto-Jews were nomadic herders. This is part of our mythology, and is also largely supported by the archaeological evidence. Nomadic herders tend to have only the most basic agriculture: you are making a circuit around a number of grazing grounds, and you can plant some human-edible plants in each of the grazing grounds which will be ready to be harvested during the next time you come around in the circuit. Obviously, the things you grow that way will only be things that can grow with no ongoing human intervention, and your crop yields will be low, but it gives you a bit more variety in food sources, and it's worth doing.
Hardy cereal grains are the primary form of plant that this works with. So you can have a bit of barley, wheat, or whatever, ready to harvest when you come back to each of your grazing grounds.
Now, as you're nomadic, your bread-making tools are going to be only those you carry with you. You'll grind grain with a fairly primitive portable quern or other tools that will give you only a fairly coarse grain. You'll bake your bread mainly on open flat stones heated in a fire. And you'll end up with flatbreads. It may be a fairly flexible flatbread, like a tortilla or dhosa, or a crispier one like injera.
What you won't end up with is a raised bread.
To reliably make a high-quality raised bread, you need a LOT of infrastructure. A lot of IMMOBILE infrastructure. You need cities, and large-scale organized agriculture.
And the master bakers of the ancient world, the ones who truly created this technology and perfected it were the Egyptians. The Egyptians had a regular, consistent, and predictable source of grain. They made improvements to the quern that allowed a higher-quality, finer flour to be produced in much higher volumes. By the time of the story of the Exodus, the Egyptians had high-quality ovens, allowing consistent baking of fine raised bread in quantities unknown before that time. They had bakeries, which allowed airborne yeasts to reach high population densities which helped them raise bread, but they also developed the sourdough method for additional leavening. The Egyptians raised bread-baking (and beer-brewing, a natural co-technology) to an art unprecedented in the ancient Near East.
So we can see the "no time to rise" bit in a different context. It's not merely not having the TIME to allow one's bread to rise. Rather, it's lacking the access to the entire bread-making infrastructure they were dependent on. They had to switch to a different style of bread entirely, one based on a more primitive, mobile technology, and avoiding the use of the existing bread-making technology that they were used to.
In leaving Egypt and going into the desert, they had to reclaim the foodways of their ancestors, and give up the higher-quality food that they had grown up on. I think that matzah was not a NEW thing created then, but rather, a throwback to the more primitive form that they'd managed to get away from by moving to Egypt in the first place, BEFORE they were enslaved.
When the Israelites set up their land a generation later, they were able to switch to stable agriculture, and they had the infrastructure to make high-quality bread. And they did. But for the festival of Passover, they, and we, ate the more primitive bread of a nomadic people, to remember who we were both before we went to Egypt, and when we came out.
weirdjews wrote me a couple questions that I thought were interesting enough that I figured I'd answer them here, rather than just responding privately. The SECOND reason for this is that I think other people might be interested. But the FIRST reason is so that, if I get this wrong, y'all can correct me.Said user can introduce himself if he so desires; I don't like just throwing people's names around for no reason. There's no real reason NOT to mention who he is, but I just like to let people choose to introduce themselves or not as they see fit.
The second question he asked was, "What makes a given wine Kosher for Passover (I understand the mevushal thing, I think)."
The two parts of that question are, "What makes a given wine Kosher," and "what makes a given wine Kosher for Passover, assuming it's already kosher?" The only really difficult part of that one is "what makes a given wine kosher?" and the answer is, "you can be certain that it wasn't used for Pagan rites." Apparently, boiling wine makes it unfit to be offered to idols. Unfortunately, it's pretty darned clear WHY it's unfit -- I mean, if the stuff tastes so bad that a STATUE won't drink it, it's pretty much not worth it for humans, either. Boiled wine had some flavor added back by filling it with lots and lots of sugar, which is why Manishewitz tastes like it does. I happen to like Manishewitz, but it's a totally different beverage than wine.
In recent years, flash pasturization has been used to make the stuff TECHNICALLY have been cooked, but to keep it nonetheless still drinkable.
Basically, in a kosher wine, an observant Jew must have been involved, supervising the process from the beginning to the end, and making sure that, among other things, non-kosher fining agents, such as isinglass from treif fish, or gelatin from non-kosher animals, weren't used. And a bunch of other things. The process of ensuring that wine is kosher is actually fairly complex.
But, if a given wine is Kosher, what makes it Kosher-for-Pesach or not? Well, the person who was watching it to make sure it was kosher must also have been watching it to make sure that nothing chametz got in it, either. In practical terms, it's going to be VERY rare that a chametz ingredient would be used in wine at all -- but I could imagine some ways that it could happen. One is "by accident." Someone accidentally drops a loaf of bread in the fermenting vat, and fishes it out.
I could also see some flavored wines, such as vermouths and other wine-based aperteifs, using ingredients that would be considered kitnyot.
But, basically, what makes a Kosher wine also Kosher-for-Pesach is that the person who was watching to make sure that nothing that would make it treif ALSO is paying attention to making sure that nothing makes it chametz.
That was the EASY question.
His FIRST question was,
"As a brewer, [ . . . ] why is it that, from the Biblical account of the Exodus, wherein the Jews are told to make unleavened bread, the traditions allow leavening (ie, yeasts) to produce fermented products, such as wine?
[ . . . .]
I understand that there is more to the rules/traditions/requirements/whatever the heck they are called than what is in the Bible, but it seems clear to this Goy that the intention was that the Jews did not have enough time to wait for leavening to occur - they must be ready to go at a moment's notice."
Well, there are two parts to my answer to this. One is the halachic question: what is the law that makes those different? And the other is the cultural question: why did we as Jews make that distinction in the first place? Or, why did G-d choose to make that distinction for us? Take whichever formulation of the question matches your theosophical outlook.
Obviously, the cultural/theological thing is going to be guesswork. The halachic thing, I can actually give an answer to, but the reason behind it is purely speculation.
The halachic answer:
Chametz is only incidentally related to yeast.
Matzah can be made from wheat, barley, spelt, oats, or rye. Plus water.
Anything that is made from wheat, barley, spelt, oats, or rye that ISN'T matzah is chametz. Yeast doesn't enter into the definition of chametz. You can go ahead and eat spoonfuls of yeast if you want.
(As an aside: this rather explains some of the reasons behind the Ashkenazic laws of "kitnyot", which originally meant treating beans and rice as more-or-less similar to chametz. Over time, lots of other things have been added to the list, most notably corn.
Much of the laws of kitnyot just don't make sense. But the basic law makes sense to this extent: I can take beans, such as chickpeas, or rice, or maize, and grind it into flour. And I can make bread out of it.
If I was careful and lucky enough, I might be able to get it into a dough strong and stretchy enough to be able to make a yeast-raised bread with it.
And that would just be weird. So I can see why the rabbis forbade it. Still, the laws of kitnyot has gotten way, way out of hand -- but that's another rant for another time)
So, wine, and mead, and other fermented products are fine because there's no reason they WOULDN'T be. There's no prohibition of fermentation -- just on wheat, barley, rye, spelt, and oats, converted into any form other than matzah.
That's the halachic reason.
Now for the speculation about why.
The earliest proto-Jews were nomadic herders. This is part of our mythology, and is also largely supported by the archaeological evidence. Nomadic herders tend to have only the most basic agriculture: you are making a circuit around a number of grazing grounds, and you can plant some human-edible plants in each of the grazing grounds which will be ready to be harvested during the next time you come around in the circuit. Obviously, the things you grow that way will only be things that can grow with no ongoing human intervention, and your crop yields will be low, but it gives you a bit more variety in food sources, and it's worth doing.
Hardy cereal grains are the primary form of plant that this works with. So you can have a bit of barley, wheat, or whatever, ready to harvest when you come back to each of your grazing grounds.
Now, as you're nomadic, your bread-making tools are going to be only those you carry with you. You'll grind grain with a fairly primitive portable quern or other tools that will give you only a fairly coarse grain. You'll bake your bread mainly on open flat stones heated in a fire. And you'll end up with flatbreads. It may be a fairly flexible flatbread, like a tortilla or dhosa, or a crispier one like injera.
What you won't end up with is a raised bread.
To reliably make a high-quality raised bread, you need a LOT of infrastructure. A lot of IMMOBILE infrastructure. You need cities, and large-scale organized agriculture.
And the master bakers of the ancient world, the ones who truly created this technology and perfected it were the Egyptians. The Egyptians had a regular, consistent, and predictable source of grain. They made improvements to the quern that allowed a higher-quality, finer flour to be produced in much higher volumes. By the time of the story of the Exodus, the Egyptians had high-quality ovens, allowing consistent baking of fine raised bread in quantities unknown before that time. They had bakeries, which allowed airborne yeasts to reach high population densities which helped them raise bread, but they also developed the sourdough method for additional leavening. The Egyptians raised bread-baking (and beer-brewing, a natural co-technology) to an art unprecedented in the ancient Near East.
So we can see the "no time to rise" bit in a different context. It's not merely not having the TIME to allow one's bread to rise. Rather, it's lacking the access to the entire bread-making infrastructure they were dependent on. They had to switch to a different style of bread entirely, one based on a more primitive, mobile technology, and avoiding the use of the existing bread-making technology that they were used to.
In leaving Egypt and going into the desert, they had to reclaim the foodways of their ancestors, and give up the higher-quality food that they had grown up on. I think that matzah was not a NEW thing created then, but rather, a throwback to the more primitive form that they'd managed to get away from by moving to Egypt in the first place, BEFORE they were enslaved.
When the Israelites set up their land a generation later, they were able to switch to stable agriculture, and they had the infrastructure to make high-quality bread. And they did. But for the festival of Passover, they, and we, ate the more primitive bread of a nomadic people, to remember who we were both before we went to Egypt, and when we came out.
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(no subject)
Date: 2010-03-24 09:28 pm (UTC)Of course, now I'm imagining a Passover bread machine plugged into the cigarette lighter of a car, and that's just all wrong...
(no subject)
Date: 2010-03-24 09:33 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-03-24 09:46 pm (UTC)But Injira? Crispy? Nooo. It's a floppy thing, very soft and highly absorbent and SOUR. חמוץ. Perfectly accessible to wanderers; a sour dough starter made from wild yeast is perfectly portable. And the acetic acid makes it less hospitable to molds.
What I find fascinating is that Yeast caught in Egypt was left in Egypt and new yeast had to be caught in the wilderness.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-03-24 09:52 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-03-25 12:00 am (UTC)Clarification: The Biblical text forbids not just chametz but also s’or, leavening agents. So yeast, even without any grains attached, may not be eaten on Pesach.
You may be thinking “wait a minute, wine is made from yeast, so how can we have wine on Pesach?” Which reminds me of one of my favorite sentences from The Jewish Catalog, at the conclusion of the chapter on how to make kosher wine: “If you would like to learn how to make kosher l’Pesach wine, please consult a liberal Orthodox rabbi, preferably one who likes wine.”
(no subject)
Date: 2010-03-25 12:26 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-03-25 03:13 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-03-25 01:42 am (UTC)It's not quite pita, and tastes like matza, from what I've been told... but it's much softer than our standard.
Not as soft as pita or any of those, though. I'm not willing to pay what they're asking for it, just to have sandwiches, but.. I wouldn't turn it down, either :)
(no subject)
Date: 2010-03-25 08:29 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-03-25 11:50 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-03-25 12:13 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-03-25 02:13 pm (UTC)I thought that was the distinction between wines that are simply kosher for Passover, and kosher for Passover wines that are mevushal?
(no subject)
Date: 2010-03-25 02:52 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-03-25 03:09 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-03-26 01:58 am (UTC)But Manishewitz makes FLAVORED wines. Even their most basic wines, like the basic Concord Grape that we all know, and some of us love, has significant amounts of Other Stuff added. For the basics, it's just added sugar.
But, from the Manishewitz web site: "All Manischewitz wines, except Elderberry, Loganberry, Cream Blush and Cream Peach, are offered as Kosher for Passover items."
And under a photo in their "Virtual Winery Tour", they show "The blending tank where additional flavors are added to the wine. Examples are Cream Peach and Loganberry wines."
They're probably adding some sort of flavor syrups to those, and I'm certain that the precise recipes of those syrups are trade secrets. Obviously, the mashgichim would know, but it ain't gonna be public knowledge. So we can speculate about whether the flavoring agents include actual chametz, or just kitnyot. I wouldn't be surprised if some form of corn made its way into some Manishewitz, for instance.
From our perspective, it's a black box, which is why we just have to trust the OU on this.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-03-29 02:26 pm (UTC)Chag sameach!
(no subject)
Date: 2010-03-26 01:51 am (UTC)Now if only I could get some good food.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-03-26 02:32 am (UTC)Okay, guys: who wants to feed Pierceheart?
(no subject)
Date: 2010-03-26 11:58 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-03-26 02:22 am (UTC)Interesting about the sourdough angle - was it necessary to create a new starter every year? Not sure about the halacha of borrowing a non-jews sourdough - there is some tricky stuff around bread.
: )
(no subject)
Date: 2010-03-26 02:44 am (UTC)