Rabbinate: Clear Your Browser Cookies Before Passover

Even a single byte is forbidden.

Jerusalem, April 9 – Israel’s ranking religious officials issued a reminder to Jews today to make sure they remove all the cookies from their computers by Monday morning, before the Passover prohibition against possessing leavened grain products goes into effect.

The Biblical practice of not owning, let alone eating, products made of grain flour, is part of the observance of Passover, the festival of redemption from Egyptian slavery, that begins at sundown Monday evening. However, the prohibition kicks in on the morning before, and practicing Jews are careful to remove, eat, or sell any such products, called Chametz, by that time. Noting that cookies are a grain product, the Chief Rabbinate warned those wishing to observe the festival to rid their domains of all browser cookies.

“The prohibition to possess Chametz begins at approximately e-leaven o’clock on Monday,” said a statement by the Rabbinate. “Eating even a single byte is forbidden.” The statement was signed by both the Ashkenazic and Sephardic Chief Rabbis, who reminded their constituents that although they formally differ on the permissibility of using soft unleavened bread – matza – for Passover, they agree on the importance of maintaining a Chametz-free computer. Traditionally, Ashkenazim insist on using only hard matza, baked to a crisp, while Sephardic authorities allow their followers to choose whether to use software or hardware.

Earlier authorities were silent on the issue of this type of cookies, but the trend in recent centuries, and especially in recent decades, is toward increasing stringency in Passover observance. Religiously liberal Jews have decried that tendency, even calling it a plague, but others hail it as fulfilling the spirit of the Biblical precept itself, which did not stop at barring the mere consumption of Chametz; even having it in one’s domain is prohibited.

In keeping with the prohibition of possession, Jews scan their domains the night before Passover, and quarantine whatever Chametz they find, to delete it the following morning and declare what might remain in the home directory ownerless and void.

Those who would find it to difficult to dispose of all their Chametz are permitted to sell it to a non-Jew. The broker of such transactions has usually been the community Rabbi, who would open a dialog box with a local gentile willing to put a deposit on the entire community’s Chametz, explains Rabbi Chumra Yetera of Congregation Minhag Shtut.

“Many Rabbis didn’t traditionally receive a formal salary,” he noted. “Instead, people would compensate them for their time. If someone came to the Rabbi to rule on the the kosher status of, say, a chicken, he or she would bring along a chicken for the Rabbi, for example. People would give the Rabbi a small sum to sell their Chametz, and that was his biggest single source of income all year.”

“You might call it our bread and butter.”