[Avodah] matzah in mitzrayim

[Joshua Meisner]

On Fri, Jan 7, 2011 at 4:46 PM, <daniel at kolberamah.org> wrote:

> Quoting Saul.Z.Newman at kp.org:
>
>> the barley was  destroyed  by  barad.   the  wheat  would  not  mature
>> until  bnai yisrael  was at har sinai.
>>  one  would  assume that   flour  from previous  years  was  used .
>>
>>  this  was  then  not  shmura  wheat  of  today  , unless  they  harvested
>>  wheat and  put  in a water-guarded  place  a year  before  commanded to
>> do  so.....
>>
>
> I thought that pshat was that they were not actually obligated in matzah
> the year of yetzias mitzriayim.  Otherwise, what does it mean that they
> didn't have time to make bread?  Why would they have been making bread in
> the first place, rather then matzah, unless there was no issur that year.
>  In which case there is no reason they should have used shemura flour.
>

A friend of mine asked that exact question (IIU RDI C) by seudah shlishis
today, regarding why the reason given for Bnei Yisroel taking matzos with
them is the lack of time necessary for the bread to rise brought about by
the haste in departing, given the issur chametz.  I tried to answer based on
the Mishnah in the 9th perek of Pesachim (96), which states that Pesach
Mitzrayim did not have the issur chametz kol shiv'a that Pesach l'Doros has,
but forgot the conclusion of the gemara that aligns this mishnah with a
drash of R' Yosei haGelili, that the issur still extended the entire first
day.

After the fact, I wondered if there was any significance to the fact that
the ba'al hashmu'ah of that (apparently accepted) shita is R' Yosei
haGelili, who also holds by the unaccepted shita that there's no issur
hana'ah by chametz at all (28b), so that in his mouth, the din would only be
referring to an issur achila that spanned the first day, but it seems more
likely that when the rabbanan accepted this drash, they interpreted it
k'shitasam that even the issur hana'ah would have existed on the entire
first day.  At any rate, RYhG is coming to be meikil, so that even if we
were to reduce the scope of his drasha, it would not achieve the desired
result.

Although the drash of RYhG is based on the passuk "v'Lo yei'acheil
chameitz", we hold like Chizkiyah (21b), who reads this passuk as referring
to an issur hana'ah, so there doesn't seem to be a way out on that path,
either.

To sum, then, it seems clear that there was an issur of owning chametz on
the night of 15 Nissan until the end of the day.  That being the case, why
could we not say that the reason for their not carrying chametz with them
was because of the issur, rather than using the practical reason of the
haste that the passuk specifies?

R' Yitzchok Dovid Frankel asks a related question in Machat Shel Yad, and
develops the idea that chipazon was an intrinsic part of Yetzias Mitzrayim,
so that despite their ability to avoid the rush by anticipating the Yetziah
earlier that day, there was a necessity that chipazon be associated with
Yetzias Mitzrayim, based on HaShem's haste in taking us out at exactly the
necessary time.  This being the case, perhaps this could also serve as a
reason for the Torah's pragmatic rationale for the matzos, rather than the
latent halachic rationale.


Joshua Meisner
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.aishdas.org/pipermail/avodah-aishdas.org/attachments/20110108/27b6688d/attachment-0002.htm>