Pesach Kitniyot Rebels Roil Rabbis As Some Ashkenazim Follow New, Permissive Ruling

http://forward.com/articles/104483/
Tel Aviv, Israel — In Tel Aviv, shortly before Passover, David Cohen was mulling over his holiday menu. “I’m thinking of making sushi,” he said.

His plan reflects more than just growing Israeli enthusiasm for Japanese food; it reflects a new polarization on one of the most controversial of Passover-related issues — kitniyot.

Cohen, a beer brewer in his 40s, is an Ashkenazic Orthodox Jew, yet he plans to eat a food shunned on Passover by most observant Ashkenazim. Rice — a key ingredient in sushi — is not in the biblically banned category of hametz, or leavened cereal grain. Religiously, if not taxonomically, it falls within the family of legumes that in Hebrew is known as kitniyot.

Sephardic Jews eat them on Passover, but Ashkenazic rabbis banned them centuries ago because they resemble leavened food when they swell up.

More and more foods have been classified as kitniyot in recent years, as Ashkenazi rabbinic positions have hardened across a wide expanse of Halacha, or traditional religious law. Of late, however, something of a rebellion has erupted among pockets of Modern Orthodox Jews who have decided to eat kitniyot.

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Some scholars predict that a combination of rabbinic rulings and demographics will eventually make the kitniyot ban a thing of the past in Israel. “The classic characteristics of halachic change” are already discernible on the issue, Hartman said. For example, large numbers of Ashkenazim — himself included — draw a fine distinction by eating kitniyot “derivatives” but not kitniyot.

The “disintegration of the divide between Ashkenazi and Sephardi” will play a significant part, Hartman said. Already there is “not a single family in the country without a Sephardi member,” and Sephardim are more influential than ever in national culture. He stressed that this development will be a result of Ashkenazic-Sephardic mixing in Israel and will not affect practice in the Diaspora.

Other experts predict that the kitniyot tradition will endure, preserved by a combination of religious traditionalism and multiculturalism. “There’s a reassertion of ethnic pride, with people feeling it’s okay to do things differently to others and to celebrate diversity,” said Bar-Ilan University Jewish studies professor Adam Ferziger.