Kosher for Passover matzo must be made in 18 minutes or less, from start to finish. The result is the basic matzah you know and either love or hate—flat, dry, and reminiscent of cardboard. Shmurah matzah, or matzah that has been guarded, is made the same way that regular matzah is made—except that it's watched from the day the grains are planted in the field to the moment it comes out of the oven. And while there’s certainly a long tradition of eating this kind of matzo, it’s not what is described in the Bible as the Jews left Egypt.
Manischewitz: not the original matzah
First of all, bread made in ancient Egypt would almost certainly have been something like the sourdough bread of today. A starter piece of bread was kept from an old loaf and used to make the dough for new loaves. (For more information and instructions on how to make your own bread this way, click here.) This process did take a reasonable amount of time—certainly a few days—but if you bake sourdough bread before it’s fully risen it will just be denser and sourer. The result would likely be something like a heavy pita, not shmurah matzah.

This isn’t the only discrepancy between the story we’re told and the particulars we can deduce. If you look closely at the text of the Exodus story, the Jews had a full two weeks to prepare for their departure. They didn’t eat unleavened bread because they had to get out quickly, they ate unleavened bread because it’s commanded in Exodus 12:8: And they shall eat the flesh in that night, roast with fire, and unleavened bread; and with bitter herbs they shall eat it. This eating of matzo happened well before the Jews actually left Egypt. It’s part of the eating of the pascal sacrifice, which comes before the final plague, the killing of the firstborn sons. This implies that the Jews were specifically told to make matzah, it wasn’t just an accidental result of their flight. Later in Exodus 12:34, and again in Deuteronomy 16:3, the Torah explains that we eat matzah to remind us of how quickly we went out of Egypt, but the actual eating of matzah happened before the Exodus.

I haven’t been able to find much on the history of matzo, so I don’t know when the matzo we know today became the standard unleavened bread for Passover, but what you pull out of your Manischewitz box probably has very little resemblance to what was eaten in the desert as the Jews fled Egypt.

Previous: Jews Don't Do Polygamy

Related: Five Things to Know About the Fast of the Firstborn

While the French are preoccupied with a new law that will prohibit smoking in public places, their president’s foreign policy is taking a strange turn. Remember how Sarkozy defended his invitation of Gaddafi through contracts that he did not end up getting? And how those contracts included “civilian” nuclear technology (which, we still don’t know for sure, he might have given off against the release of some prisoners)? Well, here’s a new twist.

Purportedly to retaliate for its role in messing up the latest Lebanese presidential elections, Syria was hit with a suspension of diplomatic relations with France -returning to its previous policy. WhileHa’aretz’s Daniel Ben-Simon is probably right to point out that the initiative is part of FM Bernard Kouchner’s personal investment in the resolution of the Lebanese crisis, and while indeed is it to be feared that further terrorist intervention from Syria in Lebanese internal affairs is to be seen again shortly, this move takes place in a larger and much more sinister Middle Eastern context.

Sarkozy’s announcement of diplomatic rupture with Syria might have come around one of his and Kouchner’s protected jogs -in Egypt, freedom of the press doesn’t exclude breaking journalists’ limbs-but it also came while Sarkozy was trying to sell French nuclear technology to the Egyptians… This is becoming a nasty habit, albeit sometimes humorous (as in when Sarko offered a baffled Angela Merkel some French nukes).

Why a possible connection to the Franco-Syrian diplomacy?  Because Syria is both an Iranian stand-in and a possible actor itself in the nuclear rise of the Evil Axis. And what did Iran offer to Egypt right about the same time France did, if not assistance with nuclear projects?

All the while, Egypt is appearing ambiguous in its alliances, probably to emphasise its pivotal role between the two blocks and to appease both sides in order to avert an internal crisis.

As I noted before, there is little new in French presidential foreign policy. However, this continued pragmatism -Sarkozy’s new friend now has the presidency of the UN Security Council- falsely sold as idealism (who can believe that France’s refusal to enter the latest Iraqi conflict had nothing to do with its petroleum needs?) means that Napoleon’s heirs are ready to wreck the world again by contributing to the dissemination of nuclear technology to less than tasty partners -we all remember the Osirak case.

Hamas, he said Hamas!: Hummus, he said hummus!I was reminded of last year's Oscar-winning short West Bank Story when I stumbled upon this article today. Amidst the tense discussions at Tuesday's Middle East peace conference in Annapolis, Maryland, the Israeli diplomat noticed - and relished - the fact that "one member of the Egyptian delegation grabbed a sandwich from the kosher table set up especially for the Israeli side."

What is it about food that can, even in the middle of the world's most difficult peace negotiations, shift our attention from the serious to the comical? Perhaps it's the simple, usually subconscious fact that in the end - after all of the conflicts, accusations, and wars - we're all just people who need to eat.

For those who somehow missed Ari Sandel's hysterical film, it's "a musical comedy about David, an Israeli soldier, and Fatima, a Palestinian fast food cashier - an unlikely couple who fall in love amidst the animosity of their families' dueling falafel stands in the West Bank."

Do yourself a favor and Netflix it.

I still haven’t seen Rendition, but I don’t need Reese Witherspoon to tell me that there’s some shady shit going down in Egypt-land. And of course, American tax dollars are paying for it. Here’s some info from a recent NY Times article:
Muhammad Al-Sharqawi protests in front of the Press Syndicate in Cairo, May 25, 2006, about an hour before his arrest.: The sign reads "I want my rights!" and calls for the release of detainees held over the course of the previous month's crackdown

The shift is not so much that American officials no longer mention human rights and democracy; it is more that they do not follow up to ensure results. Instead, there seems to be a tacit understanding whereby Washington criticizes Egypt’s human rights failings, Egypt takes umbrage at the “interference” in domestic affairs and little changes.

For example, last June, President Bush singled out a handful of political dissidents as “unjustly imprisoned,” including Ayman Nour, the onetime presidential candidate and opposition political leader here in Egypt, and greeted democracy advocates, including Saad Eddin Ibrahim, also Egyptian.

Yet Mr. Nour remains in prison, a year into a five-year sentence. Mr. Ibrahim has been living in self-imposed exile, fearful that if he returns to Egypt he will be put in prison, again, for his political activities.

Emphasis mine.

Full story

So if you want to make sure that human rights in Egypt gets taken more seriously I recommend a couple of things. First, there’s Human Rights Watch, and their excellent page that thoroughly covers all kinds of issues going on in Egypt lately. You can of course contribute to HRW if you feel so moved. (Charity Navigator gives them three out of four stars).

If you don’t have spare cash, but still want to speak out, I recommend calling your senator and mentioning that you’ve been really disappointed in Egypt's human rights record, and you’d like for your senator to look into it and find out why we continue to give them tons of cash. Find you senator’s contact info here.

If you just want to be more educated so that you can start conversations about this kind of thing with friends and neighbors, and raise awareness across the board, check out the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies which gives you a sense of the view from inside Egypt.

The house that Hossan al-Banna built has laid down its foundation for the 21st century. Surprise, surprise, it's still in the 7th: 

"It establishes a religious state," said Abdel Moneim Said, head of the leading Al Ahram Center for Strategic and Political Studies. "It's an assassination to the civic state."

The program calls for the formation of a commission of senior religious scholars, chosen in national elections, to advise parliament and the president, according to a copy of the program obtained by The Associated Press.

The commission's position on government and parliament decisions would be the "recommended one," suggesting it could veto those decisions. The platform says parliament could overrule the board but not in issues governed by "proven texts" of Islamic Sharia law, a vague phrase that could apply to a wide range of issues.

In a scene reminiscent of a Cold War-era, East-Berlin border crossing attempt, the crack Egyptian army last week murdered an Eritrean man trying to cross the border into Israel. The Egyptian government detained 4 others.

Egypt is not entirely to blame for this violent response. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, to his everlasting shame, has asked Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to increase patrols along the Sinai border with Israel so as to prevent an influx of African refugees, many of them fleeing the chaos of Darfur or the ongoing conflict in the Horn of Africa between Ethiopia, Eritrea and Somalia. So much for Israel being a light among the nations, a city upon a hill, and all that jazz...

Nevertheless, it would be nice if the Egyptians showed the same concern for the inviolability of national boundaries and the dangers of illegal immigration, say, when it comes to Hamas militants trying to smuggle themselves into the Gaza Strip. On Monday Israel complained to Egypt over the latter's aiding and abetting the safe passage of at least 80 Hamas members--many of them senior officials--into Jihadistan-on-the-Mediterranean. Egypt has control over the major crossing points into Israel following a 2005 agreement brokered by the American government.

This is not the first time Egypt has killed refugees trying to sneak into Israel. According to Ha'aretz:

"The third refugee began to climb the border fence and the IDF soldiers tried to pull him to the Israeli side. When the Egyptians resumed shooting, the IDF soldiers let go of the refugee, who was caught by the Egyptians. The IDF soldiers then witnessed the Egyptian police beat the injured refugee to death." 

So the IDF is collaborating in the capture of, and silently witnessing the murders of, distressed and desperate people trying to make their way into the only country in the region that has shown its willingness to take in refugees, a nation that was itself built by the surviving victims of genocide. Somewhere, Ben Gurion is weeping. 

Egyptian and Jordanian foreign ministers arrived in Jerusalem representing the only two Arab governments that have signed peace deals with Israel. They spoke today about the peace initiative and specifically avoided referencing the Arab League, which has never recognized Israel. Yet, without mentioning the League, the two foreign ministers are pushing the Arab League’s peace plan for the region which stipulates three main conditions for normal relations with Israel: 1. full withdrawal from land occupied in the 1967 war, including Jerusalem, 2. the creation of a Palestinian state, and 3. a just solution to the Palestinian refugee problem. [Debka] [The Washington Times]

Beijing’s Xinhua news service reported today that Taliban rebels have demanded that eight Taliban prisoners be released in exchange for eight South Korean hostages. The hostages are primarily female members of a Christian group who were abducted last Thursday in Ghazni, southwest of Kabul. [Xinhua]

The deadline for releasing the Taliban prisoners was set for Tuesday evening and then extended indefinitely. Debka reported this afternoon that the Taliban has killed one of the hostages. [Debka]

Shvitz editor Michael Weiss, posted yesterday on Libya’s release of six medical workers—five Bulgarian nurses and one Palestinian doctor—who were held for eight years under the dubious and unsubstantiated charge of deliberately infecting children with the virus that causes AIDS. [Jewcy]

Susannah Sirkin, deputy director of Physicians for Human Rights, said, “The charges were fabricated; the nurses were tortured into confessing; there was no due process.” [The New York Times]

In the aftermath of the prisoners’ release, the EU has no problem normalizing relations with Libya’s leaders: French President Nicolas Sarkozy will travel to Tripoli to boost the EU-Libya ties. [BBC]

President Bush’s lynchpin: personal diplomacy via frequent video conferences with Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki of Iraq. They chat on troops and leadership and God, which is all well and good, but where are the results? [The New York Times]

David Remnick writes the Letter from Jerusalem in this week’s New Yorker profiling Avraham Burg, a former Speaker of the Knesset, and a “Zionist politician who has lost his faith in the future” (of Israel).

“People are not willing to admit it,” Burg said, “but Israel has reached the wall […] We are already dead. We haven’t received the news yet, but we are dead. It doesn’t work anymore. It doesn’t work. . . . There is no one to talk to here. The religious community of which I was a part—I feel no sense of belonging to it. The secular community—I am not part of it, either. I have no one to talk to. I am sitting with you and you don’t understand me, either.”

“After some fifteen, twenty years in political life I had a feeling all of a sudden that, to use the Biblical term, Israel was the kingdom without prophesy. I realized that the three founding narratives of the national idea of Israeliness were over: the mass immigration to the land, aliyah; the security of the land; and the settling of the land. All three had served their purpose and were no longer the core of the nation’s narratives.”

On the Holocaust as a reference point for Israeli statehood, Burg told Remnick,

"We confiscated, we monopolized, world suffering. We did not allow anybody else to call whatever suffering they have ‘holocaust’ or ‘genocide,’ be it Armenians, be it Kosovo, be it Darfur. In the last years, Israeliness has confined itself for itself only and lost interest almost for what happens in the world. For me, Israel is shrinking into its own shell rather than struggling for a better world."

Otniel Schneller, a Knesset member from Ehud Olmert’s centrist Kadima Party, has said that when Burg dies he should be denied burial in the special section of Mt. Herzl National Cemetery reserved for national leaders.

Today, more than 600 French Jews made aliyah. [JTA]

Sometimes I like to close my eyes and try to imagine what I’d be like if I were a kooky feminist observant Muslim instead of a rockin’ feminist observant Jew. I would definitely subscribe to Muslim Girl instead of Lilith. I would cover my hair with neon purple hijabs instead of dying it purple the way I do now. I would probably kiss fewer boys (fewer, but not none). And where would I go for reliable sex education? Who would be the Muslim Dr. Ruth?

The last problem is now solved. Thanks to an awesome Salon.com article called Sex and the Married Muslim in which they interview Egyptian sexologist Dr. Heba Kotb. She has a popular TV show called “The Big Talk” during which she answers questions about sex and relationships for a huge Muslim audience. Here’s a little excerpt from the interview:

Heba Kotb: Will tell you how to get yours, girls
You've said you believe that by having more sex, married couples will please Allah. Why?

Whenever you have sex you get rewarded because you're avoiding the woman being prone to have sex outside of the marriage and vice versa. It's a way to please each other in our world and to please Allah.

Is the Quran concerned with female pleasure?

Yes, it is. The biggest chapter of the Quran is called "The Cow." There is a verse talking about the woman's rising pleasure. It's an order to the man to give the woman the right to have pleasure -- it orders the man to give the woman foreplay and also to get the wife to have sex repeatedly and to not wait for the woman to ask because sometimes she's too shy to ask.

You've blamed Egypt's high divorce rate on "bad sex." But why is the country stricken with "bad sex"?

I think that probably more than 80 percent of divorces in Egypt are from a lack of sex education. Sex is a taboo; it's not to be discussed or complained about. A lot of people didn't know that they could complain about sex.

Why is sex such a controversial topic in the Muslim world?

It's culture -- it's not Islam, whatsoever. Islam is a very liberal and progressive religion. It invites people to have sex, of course within the marital frame. Prophet Mohammed never showed any offense to anyone asking about sexuality. On the contrary, he responded to every single question. The thing is, the culture overwhelms this.

What do you think about the in-your-face American approach to sex and sexuality?

I'm totally against this. It's harmful -- sex loses its luster and its preciousness. God orders that sex remains precious, like a pearl -- it's not just for everyone. A balance has to be built: This is allowed, this is not allowed; this is halal, this is haram. Sex is one of the things that is forbidden before marriage and outside of marriage; on the other hand, it's allowed within marriage with a lot, a lot of freedom. This creates a balance. In the American approach everything is allowed -- you can have sex at any age, on any occasion.

Who do you think is having better sex -- Americans or Egyptians?

Well, I'm not a witness. [Laughs.] Believe it or not, I've been to several countries for various conferences and it's quite the same everywhere -- there are the same problems. I don't think one group is having better sex than the other, but there is great individual variation. Those who are open, clear with each other and confront the problems they are having are far ahead.

You have encouraged women to explore their bodies -- does that include masturbation?

The woman, by means of instinct, does not need masturbation. She's not like the man whatsoever. It's not a call of nature for her. So that's why I'm not very sympathetic with young women and girls choosing to masturbate. They're ruining their sexual future -- a woman has to remain blank until she gets married and by masturbating she's forming her sexuality.

I wish there was an Orthodox Jewish woman doing something like this. I’d do it except I bet I’d have to get married and wear a snood. No dice. I’ll watch, though.

There are now two competing revisionist narratives of how the 1967 war between Israel and Egypt unfurled. The first is Michael Oren's Six-Day War, which relied heavily on Arab memoirs and state documents -- scant though these may be -- and which, on the whole, came down on the side of Israeli self-defense as the casus belli. The second is Tom Segev's just-published 1967: Israel, the War, and the Year that Transformed the Middle East. Segev is a columnist for Ha'aretz and a ranking member of the so-called "New Historians" school of Zionism and the establishment of the Jewish state. His book, less reliant on the ideology of pan-Arab nationalism or post-war Arab inquests, uncovers the dark side of Moshe Dayan's sweeping victory. Here is David Remnick in an exceptional essay in the New Yorker:

In the second half of May, Nasser made one provocative move after another. Although his own intelligence officers told him that Israeli troops were not massing on the Syrian border, he pressed forward. On May 16th, he told the United Nations to remove from Sinai its international forces, which had maintained the peace since the Suez Crisis. U Thant, the Secretary-General, was ineffectual in his efforts to persuade Nasser to let the troops remain and, without consulting the Security Council, acquiesced. Once the international forces left, Nasser sent his own armored divisions right up to the Israeli border. On May 22nd, Nasser closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping, cutting off Israel’s access to the Red Sea. Since 1957, the Israelis had said that such a blockade would be considered a casus belli, but when Israeli diplomats appealed to the United States and Great Britain for help both maintained their neutrality. On the thirtieth, Nasser signed a defense pact with King Hussein, after having declared, “Our basic objective will be the destruction of Israel.” He said that Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon are “poised on the borders of Israel” and would be backed by Iraq, Algeria, Kuwait, Sudan, “and the whole Arab nation. This act will astound the world. . . . The critical hour has arrived.” It was this kind of language, coming little more than two decades after the Holocaust, that allowed Menachem Begin to call Nasser “the Arab Hitler.” The Syrian, Iraqi, and Palestinian leaderships all made similar declarations about erasing Israel from the map.

Nevertheless, even in late May and the first few days of June the Israeli leadership continued to debate Nasser’s ultimate intentions; the military almost unanimously favored a preëmptive strike against the Arabs, but others—including Eshkol, Abba Eban, and Ben-Gurion in his retirement––cautioned against overreaction. When Nasser spoke to the Soviets, he was counselled against striking first. “Nasser did not want war,” Eban later wrote. “He wanted victory without war.” After the war, even some right-wing politicians, including Menachem Begin, admitted that the Israelis had never been sure that Nasser wanted war. “The Egyptian Army concentrations in the Sinai approaches do not prove that Nasser was really about to attack us,” Begin said in a speech to the Israel National Defense College. “We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him.”

The aura of messianism that engulfed Israeli patriotism after the taking of Sinai, Gaza, East Jerusalem and the West Bank gave way to what I'll call the demographic coercion of the settler movement, which was ignored or tacitly approved by every Labour cabinet as it was later vigorously encouraged by ever Likud cabinet. 

Shall we add an appendix to the Segev and Oren texts and title it "Ironies of History"?  Yitzak Rabin, who led the Israeli Air Force's swift and categoric elimination of its Egyptian counterpart in '67, thus facilitating the project of Israeli expansion, was shot by a "Greater Israel" nutbag as he (Rabin) brokered for peace with Arafat. Meanwhile, the "Bulldozer" to Gush Emunim's brick-layers entered a coma shortly after engineering the first withdrawal of the settlements he'd once unequivocally supported.

Freud: Let my people go!There's a really interesting, if meandering, Op-Ed today at the JPost.  About Sigmund Freud's research and analysis of Moses, and the Exodus.  His thoughts on the Jewish people.

To me, it feels dated, as all things psychoanalytical feel dated.  Simplified.  Boxed in.

But it also feels smart, and curious, and it's not something I've thought much about:

So what was the essence of Judaism that Freud held on to? He believed in the chain of tradition which has to have an anchor, what he would call a collective repressed memory. The repression was due to the fact that the Children of Israel, according to Freud, eventually rose up and killed Moses, their harsh tormentor, and then regretted the act, but necessarily repressed the memory of it. Freud related that to the case of the first humans, who lived in small groups where the sons were totally subservient to the one dominant father, who alone has all the females and against whom the sons eventually rise up to kill and consume his flesh.

The question then remains as to how to focus on this whole drama of Moses and the Israelites. This is where Freud insists on the centrality of the Exodus. It is the one over-arching piece of folk history that binds all the sons of Israel together. It is the story of the coming out of Egypt that binds us to the story of Moses, and the belief in the one and only God that Moses, the giver of harsh laws, discovered for us.

It is the essential piece of mnemo-history that we believe and repeat together each year, and throughout the year - the going out of Egypt, when God and the Children of Israel had the purest of relationships in the desert, before the death of Moses and the temporary reversion to other cults.

And it resonates for me. Because it's true that the Exodus (however historically acurate it may or may not be) resonates for me.  Such a narrative-- a story about freedom from tyranny, the breaking of one's own chains, and also the assistance of a greater force--seems to me to be necessary.  We need it.

We need to believe in our own ability to free ourselves, to speak truth to power, to shout down Pharoah... and the same time we need to believe that we won't HAVE to free ourselves.  We want to think someone is watching over us, parting the sea at our feet.

But I also find myself ruminating about Freud's desire to believe in Moses.  About how Freud might have seen himself as a Moses-figure... setting his people free from a tradition he believed to be a falsehood. A liberator in his own right.  Living (as Moses lived) in a time of tyranny, fiercely aware of how much his people were tied to their myths.... how much they needed them.

Too complicated for me to unpack this minute.  Go read the story!

MubarakThe first guy in a group of Egyptian bloggers that were indicted by the government last year was given a four year jail sentence for insulting Islam and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.

Abdel Karim Suleiman, a 22-year-old former law student who has been in custody since November, was the first blogger to stand trial in Egypt for his Internet writings. He was convicted in connection with eight articles he wrote since 2004.

Rights groups and opposition bloggers have watched Suleiman's case closely, and said they feared a conviction could set a legal precedent limiting Internet freedom in Egypt, the Arab world's most populous country.

A fellow blogger who runs the "Rantings of a Sandmonkey" blog said: "It's a dangerous precedent because it will impact the only free space available now, which is the Internet. The charges were undefined and vague."

"Tell me. What does insulting the president mean? What is the difference between criticising religion and being in contempt of religion?" he added, asking to remain anonymous.

The Internet has emerged as a major forum for critics of the Egyptian government to express their views in a country where the states runs large newspapers and main television stations.

See no truth. Hear no truth.An Egyptian blogger is on trial for "on charges of insulting Islam and inciting sectarian strife for his Internet writing criticizing Muslim authorities and the Egyptian government."

Abdel Kareem Nabil, the blogger, has been detained in solitary confinement since November and could face up to seven years in prison. What's more, he's one of many bloggers in Egypt that have been arrested on the same charges.

Nabil, who uses the name Kareem Amer on his blog, frequently denounces the government of President Hosni Mubarak on his blog and is often deeply critical of Egypt's Islamic authorities, particularly Al-Azhar, one of the Sunni Muslim world's top religious institutions. Nabil, a resident of Alexandria, was former a law student at Al-Azhar University.

He was detained briefly in late 2005 after posting an article to his blog commenting on violent riots that erupted in October that year in which angry Muslim worshippers rioted and attacked a Coptic Christian church over a play put on by Christians deemed offensive to Islam.

Titled "The Naked Truth of Islam as I saw it," Nabil said of the riots, "Muslims revealed their true ugly face, and appeared to all the world that they are at full of brutality, barbarism and inhumanity."

We've witnessed the backside of this true ugly face and it ain't pretty...