Making matzah

This year for the first time, we tried making matzah.  Crackers are easy, and matzah ought to be especially easy as it is made of only flour and water.  What better project to do with the kids, right?  

I knew from the get-go that our matzah would not be kosher-for-passover.  For that, the flour needs to be watched from harvest to kitchen to assure that no moisture touches it, and the water needs to be spring water, not tap or bottled.  Not to mention that your whole kitchen needs to have been changed over to meet Passover standards of purity, which mine was not.  But I figured we would at least honor the rule that there should be a maximum of 18 minutes from when the water hits the flour to when the matzah emerges from the oven.  The whole point of matzah, after all, is to remind us that the Israelites had to leave Egypt in a great big hurry and so their bread didn't have time to rise.

The 18-minute thing was more challenging than I would have expected.  The kids are slow stirrers and slower kneaders, and the dough was pretty stiff.  Toward the end I was frantically rolling out the dough and shouting, "The Egyptians are coming!  Quick!  Quick!"  The boys thought this was wonderful and spent the next half hour running around the house in a mock panic.

The resulting matzah was more like shoe leather than a thin cracker, but we enjoyed it, as much as one can really enjoy the bread of affliction.  While I was chewing, I reflected on the meaning of the rules for producing true matzah.  The thing about watching the flour from harvest to kitchen, I like; it seems like it would build your awareness of where your food was coming from and what happens to it along the way, a little like Michael Pollan did for the Omnivore's Dilemma.  In my own life it is possible to almost simulate this by at least buying wheat from the people that grew it.  The thing about getting water from a spring, though... I don't have access to a spring.  Would rainwater be spiritually similar?  If not, then I'm annoyed, because I think that these things should be accessible to someone like me, who is willing to do things from scratch but who lives in a city.  If I really can't do it myself, then I am being told that food produced by a factory is more spiritually elevated than anything I could possibly make myself.  How can that be right?  

Don't get me started on the Passover industry, which puts out all manner of highly processed bread and cake and cookie substitutes that conform to the letter of the law.  There is too much delicious real food in the world for that, chametz or no chametz.  And it's only a week.