Every few years, someone asks me whether I eat kitniyot on Passover.
It’s usually not a charged question. In most liberal Jewish spaces, the default assumption today is that it is now permissible to do so. The historic Ashkenazi prohibition has been widely reconsidered. In 2015, the Conservative movement formally permitted kitniyot. In Reconstructionist communities, the permission has long been assumed. Sephardic Jews, of course, never prohibited them in the first place.
So when I say that I choose not to eat kitniyot — no rice, no beans, no corn, no lentils — people sometimes assume I’m staking out a halakhic position.
I’m not.
My decision does not come from rejecting modern rabbinic rulings. It does not come from a suspicion of Sephardic practice. And it certainly does not come from a desire to perform stringency.
It comes from my wife.
Every year, as Passover approaches and the grocery aisles fill with an almost comic abundance of “kosher for Passover” substitutes — pizza, bagels, cakes engineered to near-perfection — she gently reminds me: The point of this holiday is not culinary creativity.
The point is constraint.
Kitniyot, for those unfamiliar, are legumes and similar crops — rice, beans, lentils, peas, corn, soy. They are not hametz — leavened foods that are halakhically prohibited on Passover. They never were. The medieval Ashkenazi custom to refrain from eating them likely emerged from agricultural realities and concerns about cross-contamination with grains. Over time, the custom solidified into practice. In modernity, with industrial food systems and clear labeling, many authorities have reasonably concluded that the original concern no longer applies.
That logic makes sense to me.
Inhabiting a Narrower Existence
But Passover is not only an exercise in logic.
The Torah’s command is not simply to avoid leaven. It is to remember what it feels like to leave in haste. To eat bread of affliction. To inhabit, if only symbolically, a narrower existence.
The Torah’s command is not simply to avoid leaven. It is to remember what it feels like to leave in haste. To eat bread of affliction. To inhabit, if only symbolically, a narrower existence.
And here is the uncomfortable truth: In 2026 America, at least in a culinary sense, Passover is rarely narrow.
You can walk into a supermarket and find Passover cereal, Passover waffles, Passover hamburger buns. There is a “kosher for Passover” version of almost everything you eat the rest of the year. Food science has made liberation from hametz nearly frictionless.
We can keep the rules without feeling the disruption.
That, to me, is a problem.
The Hebrew word for Egypt — Mitzrayim — means narrowness. Constriction. The Passover table is supposed to press in on us a bit. Not traumatize us. Not impoverish us. But inconvenience us. Limit us. Make us notice.
If I can eat rice bowls, corn chips, peanut butter sandwiches on matzah and soy-based substitutes that mimic the rest of my diet, I have technically kept Passover. But I have not necessarily stepped into its discipline.
Refraining from kitniyot is not about purity. It is about pressure. It is one small way of allowing the holiday to interrupt my habits instead of accommodating them.
The Purpose of Passover
In a world in which almost every discomfort can be engineered away, there is something spiritually clarifying about choosing not to optimize. About allowing ritual to be less efficient than it could be.
I do not believe that Jews who eat kitniyot are missing the point. I do not think stringency is more authentic than leniency. Jewish law has always evolved in conversation with material reality. The permission to eat kitniyot today is thoughtful and grounded.
But Reconstructionist Judaism, at its best, teaches that ritual is not only about precedent. It is about purpose.
If the purpose of Passover is to help us taste constraint so that freedom is not abstract, then I have to ask myself: Where is the constraint in my observance?
For me, abstaining from kitniyot creates just enough friction to matter. The meals are simpler. The options narrower. The week feels different. I notice what I reach for and cannot have. I feel, in a small and manageable way, the limits.
Reconstructionist Judaism, at its best, teaches that ritual is not only about precedent. It is about purpose.
That feeling is not slavery. It is not supposed to be. But it is a reminder that freedom is not our default setting. It is a condition sustained by discipline, memory and collective responsibility.
The irony, of course, is that I did not arrive at this practice through halakhic argument but through marriage. Liz’s insistence that the holiday should cost us something, and we know those K-for-P products certainly do, reframed the question for me.
Cultivating Gratitude That Is Earned
Passover is not about re-enacting deprivation for its own sake. It is about cultivating gratitude that is earned, not assumed. If the week passes without inconvenience, without adaptation, without even mild frustration, then the story risks becoming decorative.
We are very good, as modern Jews, at maintaining ritual while minimizing its demands. We are less practiced at allowing ritual to shape us.
Choosing not to eat kitniyot is a small resistance to that instinct.
It is not a statement about who is right. It is not a judgment on other tables. It is simply an acknowledgment that in an age of abundance, we may need to choose our constraints more deliberately.
The Exodus story insists that liberation begins in narrowness. That memory must be embodied. That gratitude requires contrast.
I do not need Passover to be harder than it was meant to be. But I do need it to be different enough that I notice.
For me, that difference begins with what is not on my plate.
