[Avodah] Soft Matza

[Zev Sero]

On 29/03/2012 7:55 AM, kennethgmiller at juno.com wrote:
>
> R' Meir Rabi wrote:
>> Why and when did Matza become hard? Matza used to be a home-baked,
>> soft product. It was baked daily during Pesach. However, Matza
>> production eventually moved out of our homes. We also stopped
>> baking it during Pesach. It was all manufactured prior to Pesach.
>> That is when, in order to prolong its "shelf-life" and prevent it
>> from becoming mouldy, it became necessary to bake it dry.

> Is this really the only reason? For a very long time, the reason I
> learned was that this is just another in a long line of chumros adopted
> for chametz and matza.
>
> [...]
> Similarly, I was taught that although the halacha is to allow matza even
> up to a tefach thick, our practice (please note that I am not using the
> word "minhag") is to minimize the possibility of chometz by baking the
> matzos very thin.

True, but "very thin" is defined for this purpose (e.g. in Ba'er Hetev)
as an etzba, which is about 10 times the thickness of today's matzos.

There are other proofs: all the poskim, right into the 19th century,
talk about the baal habayis having the only ke'arah, and distributing
from his matzos a kezayis to everybody.  It's even specified that the
middle matzah must be made bigger than the others, because each person
needs a kezayis from its smaller half.  Today's matzos barely have 3
kezeysim total, and there's no way to get more than one kezayis from
the smaller half of the middle matzah.

The poskim also talk about baking the three matzos from an isaron of
flour (which is the same as the shiur of challah); if you took that much
flour and baked three matzos as thin as ours, they would be enormous,
and wouldn't fit on most tables, and in any case would probably break
under their own weight.

RMF writes about the modern minhag of each man having his own ke'ara
that this is because our matzos are much smaller than the ones we
used to have, and therefore if each man has his own ke'ara he can
share with one woman, and it will roughly balance out.  I just went
looking for this to quite his exact lashon, and couldn't find it,
but IIRC it seemed pretty clear that he was talking about the matzos
being much bigger in his own memory, or at least in recent memory,
i.e. quite recent times.  Again, this is unlikely to mean bigger in
diameter, so it must be in thickness.



-- 
Zev Sero        "Natural resources are not finite in any meaningful
zev at sero.name    economic sense, mind-boggling though this assertion
                  may be. The stocks of them are not fixed but rather
		 are expanding through human ingenuity."
		                            - Julian Simon