"Rabbi without a cause" on Kitniyos

Taken from Rabbi With Out A Cause.

I’m about to become very unpopular

Shabbos HaGadol derashah is almost done (and is very, very good, I might add), shiur for Shabbos haGadol afternoon is done. Shiurim and derashos for the first days of Pesach are complete. Shabbos Chol haMoed derashah is done. Derashos for the last days of Pesach are complete. Shiurim for Shabbos Chol haMoed and the last days of Pesach are still to come.

Time to wreak some havoc.

More havoc than my Trust the Gedolim post.

More havoc than Orthomom raised with Pamela Greenbaum.

More havoc than my previous post raised in the RWAC home.

It's time to talk Kitniyos.

Jameel, it was your mistake to invoke my name regarding Kitniyos and its potential revocation. I believe I may be the only Ashkenazi Jew in the world who will admit that the gezeirah against Kitniyos makes perfect sense.

A little background: At some point within the past millenium, the rabbis of various Jewish communities, mostly Ashkenazic, issued rulings prohibiting eating certain non-Chametz foods on Pesach, lest one accidentally eat Chametz. These rulings are titled the “kitniyos” rulings, for reasons beyond the scope of this post.

The rulings, by and large, prohibited foods that fit into three categories:
1. They were often used to make products that resembled chametz;
2. They were often ground into flour-like powders;
3. They often had chametz mixed in among them.
Foods commonly included in this prohibition are soy, rice, cumin and mustard, and many beans. American corn is usually on the list because of resemblances to European vegetation. Some wish to expand it to include New World items like quinoa and peanuts.

Today, it is fashionable among Ashkenazi Jews to moan about the tremendous hardship imposed by avoiding eating kitniyos, even as they pack their gullets with imitation pasta, imitation rolls, imitation pizza and imitation-just-about-every-delicacy-imaginable-to-mankind. Certainly, they declare, the Sanhedrin will eliminate this decree. It’s a hardship! And besides, we’re too smart to mix up those foods with chametz.

Don’t be absurd.

First, this is not a hardship. No one is starving due to the specific lack of rice, no one is missing any critical nutrients from their diets due to the absent soy (one might recommend that they replace all the chocolates and potato stuff with carrots and radishes), no one is being forced to fork over huge dollar amounts due to the kitniyos decree. Just the opposite - permitting kitniyos would mean more big-ticket delicacies on which people could waste their maos chittim (money contributed to help the poor afford basic Passover needs).

And second, who in the world can guarantee me that his rice doesn’t include wheat kernels, or that he could tell the difference between rice flour and wheat flour?

Let me tell you a story that happened to me several years ago. RWAC and RWAC were eating a salad made from Kosher l’Pesach Bodek vegetables, presumably bug-checked to the nth degree, when we found a kernel of corn. No, this wasn’t כשר לאוכלי קטניות; it was for good Ashkenazic boys and girls. They can find the leaf miners but they can’t find the corn, apparently. And I should trust that no wheat kernels make it into the rice flour?

Food manufacturing, packaging and distribution are all orders of magnitude more complex now than they were centuries ago. Mega-corporations prepare many different products in the same plant, cheap labor is untrained in anything beyond the mechanics of their specific jobs and quality control is often shoddy. How does this compare to the lone farmer who harvested his produce and brought it to the town mill six hundred years ago? I’d say the lone farmer had a better chance of keeping his produce separate.

In a day when every major kashrus organization has an absurd amount of egg on its face from one mistake or another, and every major food producer has mix-ups that involve serious allergenic issues, and the FDA itself acknowledges that its policies permit “acceptable” levels of all manner of contamination in foods, I can’t see the rationale for saying that kitniyos/chametz cross-contamination in foods is not a concern.

So I know it’s going to be unpopular, but that’s my stance.

Let me be clear: I would not expand Kitniyos, but I wouldn’t revoke it, either.

Jameel, I hope you’ll forgive me: No Rice on Pesach.