|
Feeding Hametz to a Pet
Ilana Kurshan
Adventures in Mishnah with my Kids
Pesachim 2:1
Each year I start thinking about the approaching holiday of Pesach in January, as soon as we begin reading the book of Exodus in the Torah reading cycle. Reading the Exodus story puts me in the frame of mind to think about the holiday, and so perhaps it’s appropriate that Matan and I recently began learning Pesachim – the tractate of the Mishnah that deals with Pesach preparations, the Paschal lamb sacrifice, and the festive meal that came to be known as the Passover Seder.
Matan and I are up to the beginning of the second chapter, which is about the status of hametz on the day before Pesach. We’ve already learned that there’s a disagreement about how late in the day you are allowed to eat hametz on erev Pesach – how late can you sleep on the morning before the Seder and still eat a muffin for breakfast? This is an especially relevant question for Matan, who enjoys his leavened breakfasts almost as much as he enjoys sleeping in.
I remind Matan that a halakhic day is divided into twelve “hours” – each “hour” corresponds to 1/12 of the time between sunrise and sunset. According to Rabbi Meir, you are allowed to eat hametz for the first five hours of the day. According to Rabbi Yehudah, you may eat it only for the first four hours of the day; in the fifth hour, you may still own it, but you may not benefit from it. Both agree that by the beginning of the sixth hour, all Hametz in one’s possession must be destroyed.
Our mishnah is about those early hours of the day on Erev Pesach, when you’re still allowed to eat hametz. The mishnah teaches that as long as you are allowed to eat hametz, you may benefit from it; once you can’t eat it anymore, you’re forbidden to benefit from it. This mishnah follows the opinion of Rabbi Meir, who holds that there is no period of time in which you can eat hametz but not benefit from it. But how does one benefit from Hametz without eating it? The Mishnah explains that one could sell it to a non-Jew, or feed it to one’s animals. Matan is intrigued. “How come I didn’t know about feeding hametz to pets? You never taught me that before!”
I look at Matan quizzically. “It never really came up. We don’t have any pets,” I told him.
Matan looks at me in exasperation. I knew I had said something wrong. “That’s because you don’t let us get a pet! Ima, when can we get a turtle?”
“Matan, can we talk about this later? We’re learning Mishnah now.”
“But I really want a turtle. A real turtle, like Dribble. Don’t worry, I won’t let anyone swallow it.” He is alluding to Judy Blume’s novel Fudge, which we recently read, about a nine-year-old boy, Peter, whose pet turtle, named Dribble, is prematurely disposed of by his younger brother, who is nicknamed Fudge. Matan is determined that he will protect any turtle entrusted to his care from such a fate.
“Well, it’s good to know that if you did have a turtle, you’d be allowed to feed it Hametz for only as long as you’re allowed to eat hametz, right?” I say, trying to steer us back on topic. “Unless you follow Rabbi Yehuda, who says that there’s one hour when your turtle can still eat hametz even though you can’t.”
“We should definitely get a turtle to eat our hametz,” Matan tells me. “You hate when we waste food.” But as we learn in the second part of the mishnah, the rabbis don’t all agree about acceptable ways to dispose of hametz. Rabbi Yehudah insists that you have to burn it, but the other rabbis say you can cast it into the sea or crumble it up and throw it to the wind.
“What about flushing it down the toilet?” Matan asks. “Don’t you remember we did that during the pandemic, when we couldn’t leave the house? We searched for hametz and then we put all the crumbs in the toilet, and Abba poured some disgusting poisonous cleaning liquid on it, and flushed it. That’s OK, right?”
“Well, it’s OK according to the rabbis, but not according to Rabbi Yehudah. Rabbi Yehudah would say you have to burn it.”
“Ok,” says Matan, and I can see the wheels turning in his mind. “So what if they add a burning hot pipe that everything we flushed has to pass through. The pipe would be so hot that anything that went through it would burn up immediately. Then Rabbi Yehudah could flush his hametz, right?”
“I suppose so,” I concede, relieved that we are no longer arguing about pets.
“But it only counts as hametz if a dog is willing to eat it,” says Matan, recalling what I’d taught him previously. “So it would really help to have a dog to know whether you need to flush your hametz down the toilet, or whether you can assume it’s so gross that it doesn’t count as food anymore.”
“Right,” I said.
“So maybe instead of a turtle, we should get a dog and name it Turtle.”
I smile wanly. After Fudge swallows his older brother Peter’s turtle, his parents buy him a dog as a new pet, and Peter names it Turtle. Turtle the dog still sounds awfully confusing to me. And I can’t justify owning a pet year-round just because it might come in handy when trying to determine if something is Hhametz or not.
While Matan is still imagining his future pet, I flip ahead to the next couple of mishnayot, where we will learn that if an avalanche falls on your hametz, you are exempt from getting rid of it, so long as it is so deeply buried that even a dog would not bother to search for it. I don’t think I can bear to have another conversation about pets with Matan. Maybe, for now, we’ll skip over that Mishnah.
| 
