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 got 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 on the above 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.