On Minhagim

Conversation taking place in Somewhere, Earth.

He (newly married man): Honey, don't buy any flavored sodas for Pesach. It's my family's minhag not to use those flavored sodas on Pesach.

She: Is seltzer okay?

He: Yes, but only the kind you make yourself. You'll need to ask my mom where she buys those gizmos that put the fizz in.

TWO WEEKS LATER AT A YOM TOV TABLE

She: Zayde B, you would be so proud. Your grandson follows his father's and your minhagim for Pesach to the letter. We didn't buy any flavored sodas or bottled seltzer.

Zayde B: Why not?

She: What do you mean why not? We're keeping your minhag.

Zayde B(shaking head): Mamale, that was no minhag I was holding, that was necessity. We couldn't afford to buy those flavored sodas so we didn't have them on Pesach. They didn't have bottled flavored sodas in Europe but my father always had seltzer and wine spritzers on Pesach or seltzer and fruit syrup.

ALTERNATIVE SCENARIO #1

She: Zayde B, you would be so proud. Your grandson follows his father's and your minhagim for Pesach to the letter. We didn't buy any flavored sodas or bottled seltzer.

Zayde B: What? Did Mayim Chayim lose its hechsher?

She: Err, no, but it's your minhag not to use flavored sodas on Pesach.

Zayde B: Minhag, shminhag. Back when I was still making Pesach at home there were no flavored sodas with a reliable hechsher, so we didn't use them.

She: You mean you would drink flavored sodas today?

Zayde B: I would, but my son doesn't serve them in his house so I can't.

ALTERNATIVE SCENARIO #2:

She: Zayde B, you would be so proud.Your grandson follows his father's and your minhagim for Pesach to the letter. We didn't buy any flavored sodas or bottled seltzer.

Zayde B: Oy, so he got his grandmother's allergies did he?

She: What?

Zayde B: You didn't know? Babi was very allergic to something in the sodas so we didn't use them on Pesach for the rest of us so she wouldn't be tempted.

She: But your son, my father in law, doesn't use the sodas either.

Zayde B: We came to him for many years for Pesach and he didn't want to tempt Babi with something she couldn't have.

She: But Zayde, Babi is no longer living. Why is there still no flavored soda?

Zayde B: I guess we all just got used to it. Takeh, I should tell my son to bring home a bottle of black cherry soda. It tastes the best with the Pesach formula.

Does any of this sound familiar? It should. This scenario gets played out in places all around the globe. Something that someone once may have done in a far long ago past gets set down in stone, and future generations continue to do things in that same exact way. They don't know why this came about or how. Sometimes the minhag was not an intentional one at all: an action done by accident. Other times the minhag was a reaction to a particular circumstance, a circumstance that most likely does not exist for future generations or that definitely does not exist today. Sometimes no one has any idea how and why a particular minhag arose; it seemed to pop up out of thin air.

Obviously some minhagim have a perfectly rational explanation for being, a reason that continues today. Some minhagim have their basis in halachic issues. Some minhagim make complete good sense. And then there are the others.

Visit any frum family and you're going to see a wide variety of minhagim, particularly when it is yom tov time. Some of these minhagim are idiosyncratic to a particular person or family; others are held by groups that came from the same geographic area, or perhaps who attended the same yeshiva, or studied with the same Rav. There are family minhagim and there are community minhagim.

Here's the thing, a minhag, once begun, is not on the same level with one of the Aseres HaDibros. Our history is replete with rabbinic rulings that did away with minhagim that had been followed for a long time. Communities, as history shows us, changed their minhagim. Certainly individual families did so. This is particularly true where a minhag came into being due to a particular circumstance that existed in a particular time and place.



Many today will not use garlic on Pesach. What's the reason? It's not that there is a question of whether or not garlic is echt chometz or is kitniyos--it's not. So why the minhag, one that is held by many people of European extraction? Essentially it boils down to the garlic being shipped packed in flour or in wheat to keep it fresh and unbruised. Because there was a real possibility of chometz being attached to the garlic, people didn't use it. Except of course for those who did. Those, for instance, who grew their own garlic and kept it in braids hung from a cellar roof.

There are those who will not use any vegetable or fruit on Pesach that cannot be peeled. Again, the concern was because of the chometz that these vegetables and fruits might have come into contact with when they were transported or stored. Root cellars were routinely lined with straw and wheat gleanings. This was my friend's family minhag and she continues it today. She uses no herbs or greens on Pesach, because they cannot be peeled. She has made a concession and uses tomatoes on Pesach, but she peels off the skin. When I asked her why garlic was forbidden but onions were okay, she mentioned that she throws away the outer third of the onion and only uses the inside portion. She peels her celery stalks, inside and out. (Note--have you ever tried to peel the inside of a stalk of celery? What is basically left after peeling is not much.) I don't ask her but the question comes up in my mind: if you eat nothing that cannot be peeled then how are you drinking wine? I am pretty much certain that they don't peel the grapes.

In many cases the reason behind a particular minhag no longer exists, but the minhag continues. If your family likes the minhag then there is no harm in continuing it. But a lot of these minhagim have taken on a life of their own and have strayed into being a community standard. When people are questioned about the origins of the minhag or why it is still being observed, they shrug and give the standard "minhag Yisrael k'din."

Let me end with this little anecdote. To celebrate the 60th wedding anniversary of one family's founding parents all the descendants came together for a family reunion. It was decided by the organizers to create a book containing the family's treasured minhagim and treasured recipes. They asked all the various generations to submit items for the book. Many of the submitted items were duplicates, or at least sort of duplicates. It seems that when this couple's four sons married and started families of their own they brought with them their father's minhagim and their mother's recipes. Or at least what they remembered those minhagim and recipes were. And when their children left to homes of their own they, too, brought these minhagim and recipes with them. Sort of. What this family discovered, generations later, was that as the minhagim and recipes were passed down there were some slight variations that developed, maybe not intentionally, maybe intentionally, but there nonetheless. And what this family discovered is that while they claimed to all be following the minhagim passed down intact from generation to generation many of them weren't holding the same minhagim at all. Example: the great great parents did not eat fish on Pesach in Europe, going back generations. Minhag? Kashrus issue. The live fish were kept in wooden barrels and fed bread crumbs. The barrels were chometzdik, the water was chometzdik and this chometzdik water was inside and outside the fish--ergo no fish on Pesach. When they arrived in the US they simply had gotten used to not having the fish, had no pesachdik recipes using the fish, even though fish storage no longer used any chometz, so they still didn't use fish. Fast forward and three out of the four sons' families all use the fish on Pesach, because it is no longer a question of their being chometzdik. The fourth son's family holds the "minhag" of not having fish on Pesach, except that all the women who married into other families do use fish on Pesach.