The Origin of Matzah

I’m bare­ly old enough to recall being allowed to stay up late to watch the Tonight Show with Jack Parr.

I remem­ber on one of his pro­grams he played a news­reel of how spaghet­ti was har­vest­ed, show­ing peas­ants out in the fields col­lect­ing long strands of spaghetti.

I under­stand he received a lot of cor­re­spon­dence from his audi­ence astound­ed by what they had seen, and so, the fol­low­ing night he con­fessed that the process was real­ly dif­fer­ent… spaghet­ti was not har­vest­ed, and he had a dif­fer­ent news­reel to demon­strate that it was actu­al­ly mined. There does not seem to be a clip of this (and no men­tion of it this Web page about the news­reel).

I’ve always been a bit puz­zled by the tra­di­tion­al sto­ry of how Matzah came to be. I just don’t buy it. You real­ly have to go to a lot of effort to keep dough from ris­ing. I have my own sto­ry about how it hap­pened.

So, I was struck the oth­er day on my way home from shul to see Matzah grow­ing right there out of the tree in front of me.

Orig­i­nal­ly pub­lished Feb­ru­ary 22, 2007 ©Mark Hurvitz