Happy Passover--No Bread for You!

Tomorrow marks the beginning of spring break in Israel, but it already feels more like summer.  Unlike in the US where spring break is about as nonreligious a holiday as you can get, in Israel spring is tied to Passover, which the Christians then tie to Easter.  Since Passover follows the lunar calendar, it jumps around and this year it's pretty late into April, hence the summer-like feeling.  Temps are soaring into the mid 80's as families and teenagers crowd the beaches.  School got out last week and won't be back in session until 4/26.  So, on the surface of it, the holiday looks very American.

However, as with everything in Israel, it's what's below the surface that matters.  I haven't written about food in Israel yet because it is one of the most annoying things about life in this country.  It's a democracy so as a person living in Israel I have a right to eat or not eat whatever I like.  However, to eat a bacon cheeseburger in Israel you have to first find the bacon, which feels like trying to buy drugs on the black market.  I'm told by other more experienced ex-pats that you can find Arab Christian butchers on a street in Haifa who will cut you a nice slab of pork, but I have yet to see a slaughtered pig anywhere--maybe they keep them in the back room.

The reason why you will not find any pork or clams or lobsters or scallops or other tasty things in your local supermarket has everything to do with kosher dietary laws which restrict the sale of non-kosher items in any store that also wants to carry kosher ones.  It's a zero-sum game.  In order to be kosher, the item must not be kept in the same room as anything non-kosher.  A supermarket that wants to be kosher cannot allocate one half to serve the kosher patrons and one half to serve non-kosher.  Anything non-kosher in the entire store renders the other items non-kosher.  This is also the reason behind the yummy subsidized lunches at the cafeteria.  If the cafeteria controls what I eat in the dining hall and the cafeteria cooks according to kosher laws, everything is kosher.  If I brought a cheeseburger in my lunch box to the cafe (forget the bacon this time--you can't mix meat and dairy), it would render the entire cafeteria non-kosher and offend 15 orthodox Jews--so that's out of the question.  So now that you understand what kosher is, please understand that in Passover, kosher goes into hyperdrive.

Way back in the days of the exodus when the Israelites had camped at the base of Mt. Sinai, Moses told the assembled crowd to commemorate their escape from slavery in Egypt by holding a yearly feast of Passover.


In the first month, on the fourteenth day of the month between the two evenings is the lord's Passover. And on the fifteenth day of the same month is the feast of unleavened bread unto the lord; seven days ye shall eat unleavened bread.  (Leviticus 23:5)

This practically means that the Jewish people are to eat no leavened bread for seven days.  I'm sure you've seen the Matzo cracker that substitutes for bread during this week, and although my Israeli coworkers lament that it is the most terrible thing to be forced to eat, it doesn't taste that bad.  Okay, so Matzo is like the Thanksgiving turkey (appearing once a year and lasting for seven days :-), not so bad.  But this is where the lawyers take over.  Different rabbinical schools have different interpretations "unleavened bread" so they created the classification of "chametz" for "leavened" food which is banned.  Chametz is anything made with five types of grain and anything left to ferment or rise.  That means in addition to no bread or pitas, there is no pasta, no couscous, no barley, no oats and no wheat products (flour) in the supermarkets.  There is no beer since beer is fermented (big no) wheat (double no).  Rice is borderline and possibly a yummy substitute for Matzo for the kids.  It sneaks in because although a grain, it was not cultivated in the land of Israel at the time of the exodus.  Cakes are also banned, unless flourless chocolate, and depending on the orthodoxy, chemical leavening is suspect.  Eggs and potatoes are permitted and so feature heavily in the Passover dishes.

But wait, there's more!  Since the Torah explicitly says the Israelites are supposed to remove every crumb of leavened product from their houses, modern interpretation is that non-chametz products such as jam, if made in a factory that also produces chametz, also becomes chametz-contaminated.  So the grocery stores will carry dual inventories of jam.  The chametz-contaminated one goes under the sheets "for sale the rest of the year" and the one produced in a clean factory is sold expressly during Passover.  You cannot purchase items from out from under the sheets, as we were warned by the checkout lady on Friday.  "There will be no bread."

What's a good Christian to do?  We shopped like we were going camping for forty days in the desert.  Stocking up on loaves of bread, pastries, cookies,  pasta, couscous, beer, we filled the shopping cart.  Our fridge has never been so full.  All of my coworkers and ex-pats told us, go shopping, stock the fridge.  If you don't you'll be stuck eating Matzo.  As aforementioned, Israel is a democracy.  As a  "goy" I can eat chametz during Passover--I just have to find it.

For more about chametz, check out this wikipedia article.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chametz
I would say it was made up or exaggerated except that my Israeli cross-cultural trainer told me personal stories about searching out crumbs of chametz with a feather and a candle when she was young.

So now it's the night of the Passover Seder and all the families are gathered together for one big meal, like Thanksgiving.  The festival continues for a week which is all family time, like it or not.  We get two days off from work which is a nice thing and we are going to spend the vacation going to Jordan where alcohol will be harder to find, but bread will not.

I miss Easter!