[Avodah] popcorn

[kennethgmiller at juno.com]

R' David Riceman wrote:
> I think this is a source of a lot of confusion.  "Kitniyos"
> and "legumes" are not synonyms (neither rice nor corn, for
> example, is a legume).

I started a longish post on this, but then I realized that I ought to verify some basic historical information. Specifically: Were legumes banned at the same time as the non-chometz grains, or was this ban in two or more stages? And if it was in stages, what was the sequence?

My guess has been that they were either banned together, or the grains were banned first. But I would imagine that the legumes were certainly not banned prior to the grains. If someone is motivated to expand the Pesach prohibition to other species beyond the Five Grains, it seems to me that the first expansion would be to include other grains, such as rice and maize. It's hard for me to imagine why someone would ban legumes while continuing to allow grains.

To get back to RDR's question, when one says that Ashkenazim don't eat Kitniyos, I don't take the word "Kitniyos" to be an exhaustive list of what it avoided. Rather, it is the name of the minhag. Perhaps there was a time when it was said that Ashkenazim avoid all sorts of grains. But when the ban was expanded to include legumes, that's when the minhag became referred to as "Kitniyos" -- not because it describes what is banned, but because it describes the *least* *obvious* of the things which are banned.

It is an application of the colloquial phrase "needless to say". Banning all grains is so obvious that it does not need to be mentioned.

That's my guess, anyway. Rice is not a species of the kitniyos family. But rice is banned as part of the kitniyos minhag.

Akiva Miller


____________________________________________________________
Get Free Email with Video Mail & Video Chat!
http://www.juno.com/freeemail?refcd=JUTAGOUT1FREM0210