[Avodah] Gebrochts Understanding the Issue

[Akiva Miller via Avodah]

Many thanks to R' Zev Sero and R' Micha Berger for sending me links to the
HebrewBooks.org edition, and at almost the same instant.

R' Meir G. Rabi wrote:

> The ShA HaRav writes
> "as can be readily seen, many baked Matzos have a
> little flour on their surface which is a consequence
> of the Matza dough not being thoroughly kneaded ...."

I responded:

> I have trouble visualizing this. If the problem is in
> the kneading, then flour would be on the inside as well.
> If the flour is only on the outside, I would blame the
> general cleanliness and procedures of the bakery, NOT the
> kneading specifically.

I now suspect that the situation was a bit different than I had imagined. I
would like to suggest that the matzos described by the Alter Rebbe had
plain flour through and through, as a result of the dough being dry and
hard, and difficult to knead, exactly as described. But the Rebbe
complained only about the flour on the outside, and I suspect that this is
because it presents a bigger halachic problem than the flour on the inside.

I first got this feeling in the paragraph "V'hinei eineinu", though I can't
point to any specific words where he might have said this. But in the
paragraph "V'af d'haMagen Avraham", he is machmir on one who crumbles his
matza into the soup, but he is meikil for one who puts matza balls into the
soup.

What I translated as "matza balls" are, more precisely in his words,
"ground matza that they make into rounds (agulim)", and the room for
leniency is because it can be judged to be a ta'aroves. I'm going into some
detail here, because he is NOT talking about crumbling some matza into a
dry bowl, which would contain a mixture of matza meal and flour, and the
flour would lose its identity to the matza meal before it ever got wet. No,
that's not what he is talking about. He makes explicit reference to these
balls which were made previously, and were added to the soup afterward,

I am at a loss to explain the advantage of these matza balls over one who
crumbles his matza directly into the soup. The only advantage I see is that
one who crumbles the matza into his soup is making chometz personally,
whereas in the other case the chometz was made in the kitchen when the
matza balls were fashioned. (Footnote 45 there might be saying something
similar.)

Be that as it may, it leads me to a very wild guess that when the dough is
not kneaded well, it will have flour on the inside, and although one might
think that this flour is subject to chimutz, the truth is that there is
some room for leniency because that flour is batel to the matza itself.
However, this leniency applies only to the flour inside the matza, and not
to the flour on the outer surface of the matza. Again, this paragraph is
only a wild guess that I offer to the group.

(On a side point, I'd like to ask about the modern "hard (kasheh)" dough
that the Alter Rebbe described. Why was it hard? I can understand spending
less time kneading it so that it can be rushed into the oven, but the Rebbe
seems to feel that the consistency of the dough changed too. Why would
anyone think that using less water is a good idea? Kneading a bread dough
is hard work, and it seems like common sense to me that if we want to knead
it well, you'd use *more* water, not less. Does extra water accelerate the
chimutz, independently of the temperature of that water?)

Akiva Miller
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