Kitniyot - to eat or not to eat?

An article in Ha'aretz this morning tackles the age-old question of whether it's okay for Ashkenazim to eat kitniyot on Passover. There is a growing number of Ashkenazim who are choosing to forgo the kitniyot ruling, and now there's a Modern Orthodox group that has emerged to say that eating kitniyot is fine (at least in Israel, where products containing kitniyot can be certified kosher for Passover for consumption by Sephardim).

I'm torn on the kitniyot issue. My family is Ashkenazi, and we don't eat kitniyot. (The ruling on quinoa was huge for us.) I'm a person who believes in tradition, and I think it might feel wrong to go against what I've done for 25 years.

But, and I'm saying this with all due respect to our rabbis and sages, I think the kitniyot rules are utterly stupid. And my use of that word isn't unprecedented - as quoted in a Jerusalem Post blog entry from 2008, a 14th-century rabbi from Provence used the same word (well, probably in French) to describe the custom of not eating rice or kitniyot.

Take this prime example: potatoes are okay to eat on Pesach, but not rice, corn or other foods that can be used to make a flour and therefore might be confused for one of the flours(wheat, rye, spelt, barley and oat) that are named by the Gemarah to be chametz when not used for matzah. But potatoes can be used to make a flour - it's called (are you ready?) potato flour.

According to the Jerusalem Post blog, the reason why the potato is not forbidden is that it "was unknown to those who created the kitniyot list and has become such a staple for so many." The Orthodox Union website backs this up: "Iggeros Moshe explains that the minhag to not eat kitnios developed differently than other minhagim and therefore rules that only foods which we know were specifically included in the minhag are forbidden ... With this he explains the generally accepted custom to not consider potatoes to be kitnios even though logically they should be, as follows: the minhag of kitnios can be dated back at least until Maharil, who died in 1427, and potatoes didn't come to Europe until the 16th century, so potatoes were a 'new' vegetable which wasn't included in the minhag."

By that logic, soybeans, which didn't come to Europe until the 18th century, should be fine for Pesach. Yet soybeans (and soy products like tofu) have been deemed kitniyot. Am I really expected to accept the idea that potatoes are kosher because they fall under X category, but soybeans, which also fall under X category, are not? Please, people - we're not that dumb.

This argument is just part of the proof, to me at least, that the rules about kitniyot are utterly arbitrary and therefore useless. If I'm going to eat potatoes, there is absolutely no reason why I shouldn't eat soy. And if I'm going to eat potatoes, which could hypothetically be made into potato flour, there's no reason not to eat rice, corn, etc. A drash by Richard Israel in 1997 further elucidates the kitniyot issues, even noting that some foods, like green beans, are only kitniyot because their name includes the name of a kitniyot product. Huh?

I respect the general dietary laws of Pesach, but I feel that in recent years the practice of eating kosher for Passover has gone very awry. On the one hand, more and more products (peanut OIL?!?) are being deemed kitniyot/chametz, yet at the same time, there are more and more products on the market that are meant to imitate chametz. I particularly love this line in Richard Israel's drash: "Our rabbis were very worried about whether we might mistake a caraway seed for a flour product, but no one seems to have any concerns about whether Jews will become puzzled about pesadig noodles or pancake flour."

I haven't yet done my Pesach shopping (I know, I know), but this year I am seriously considering introducing certain types of kitniyot into my Pesach diet. As a non-meat eater (I'm a pescetarian), my options are already limited. And given the arbitrary and even downright hypocritical nature of today's Pesach food "laws," I don't really see any reason to continue following the outdated practice of restricting kitniyot.

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