[Avodah] ta'am of eating matza

[Arie Folger]

RRW wrote:
> I could be wrong but menachos that were 'rekikim" seem to me to be wafer
> like and NOT flexible at all. That does not mean there was no suc hthing as
> bendable matzo [iow unleavened pita] but I am not convinced that this was
> EVER the exclusive matza formula...

Pardon me, but IIUC, there were four basic type of mena'hot, plus some special 
cases like min'hot 'havitin, min'hat sotah and le'hem hapanim. They were not 
all prepared the same way. While some were reqiqin, not all were.

Thus, nothing indicates that a simple min'hat solet would be hard baked. In 
fact, neither need a min'hat mar'heshet be hard, it was possibly rather a 
kind of unleavened dumpling. Min'hah 'al ma'hvat could conceivably have been 
a soft pan cake. The hard one was min'hat pitim, and the fact that it is a 
category unto itself indicates that perhaps it was the only hard baked 
min'hah. (but this is debatable, as the point of pitim is the double baking 
process, not it becoming hard.)

Furthermore, as the mena'hot contained oil, they were fundamentally different 
from le'hem 'oni, which we were discussing originally. Parenthetically 
[or, "(parenthetically? ;-))"], I can't recall whether the le'hem hapanim was 
made with or without oil. Parshat Emor mentions only flour, no oil.

KT,
-- 
Arie Folger
http://www.ariefolger.googlepages.com