Orthodox passover rebels do away with Ashkenazic ban on legumes

[IndianaGreen]

Last update - 14:58 03/04/2009

Orthodox passover rebels do away with Ashkenazic ban on legumes

By Nathan Jeffay, The Forward

In Tel Aviv, shortly before Passover, David Cohen was mulling over his holiday menu. "I'm thinking of making sushi," he said.

His plan reflects more than just growing Israeli enthusiasm for Japanese food; it reflects a new polarization on one of the most controversial of Passover-related issues - kitniyot.

Cohen, a beer brewer in his 40s, is an Ashkenazic Orthodox Jew, yet he plans to eat a food shunned on Passover by most observant Ashkenazim. Rice - a key ingredient in sushi - is not in the biblically banned category of hametz, or leavened cereal grain. Religiously, if not taxonomically, it falls within the family of legumes that in Hebrew is known as kitniyot. Sephardic Jews eat them on Passover, but Ashkenazic rabbis banned them centuries ago because they resemble leavened food when they swell up.

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Bar-Hayim argues that maintaining practices unique to Ashkenazic Jews in Israel is undesirable. By definition, he said, the Jewish state should find Jews more "united in their religious practice," not "living here as if they are in the old country."

For backing he cited the Shulchan Aruch, the authoritative code of rabbinic law, which states that a Jew moving to a new area should adopt the customs of the new community rather than cling to the old ones. And since the kitniyot restriction is European and was never widely observed in the Middle East, he reasons, it holds no weight in Israel.

His ruling has provoked widespread rabbinic fury. "People have been keeping this tradition for over 600 years," former Sephardic chief rabbi Ovadia Yosef said in a lecture last month. "Those who kept it were great people. What, we should tell them to give up their traditions?"

To Bar-Hayim, the critics' approach is irrationally attached to the past and is "not halachic," possibly even "anti-halachic." "Just as it is forbidden to allow what is prohibited, it is forbidden to prohibit what is allowed," he said.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1076247.html

[Madam Mossfern]

1. Good for him!

I used to be vegetarian and found Passover quite challenging.
Now it can be rice and beans and sauteed veggies for dinner and I won't feel naughty.

[Betsy Ross]

2. Quinoa is ok on Pesach. n/t

[villager]

3. I've been making myself an "honorary Sephard" for some time now...

...otherwise, I'd be forced to eat meat and cream all week...