Reply To: Shmura Matzah: Hand or Machine

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#937665
twisted
Participant

Let me stipulate that even after pesach, this is a machlokes leshem shamayim, and let me also declare my biases as a home (hand matza) baker.

For the far greater part of those 3500 years, matzo baking was done by the individual household, or later in communal groups and communal ovens. Read the halacha in depth and read between the lines. You will get a sense of the great tragedy of commercialization of matzo baking. There is a comment of (not sure) maybe the Sochochover gaon, on the advent of the matzo machine. He said (requote from foggy memory) that he never saw the machine, but that who would dare contest the gedolim of the previous dor (50 years) who thundered about this. He then writes a pithy poignant lament about ” those who now buy matzos from others that baked them, and to shun this practice and bake individually was to “grab a mitzvah from the shuk”