Q&A: What Is the Measure of a Crumb?
What Is the Measure of a Crumb?
Question
Hello,
Is a crumb that one must be careful not to eat on Passover literally a crumb—like tiny little crumbs that are found in many places—or does “crumb” mean, for example, something the size of a sesame seed, meaning something with some tangible substance?
A practical difference would be, for example, if I place matzah on Passover in some room on a surface that I did not clean especially well, and at a quick glance there is no chametz crumb at all, but theoretically there could be very tiny chametz crumbs there from eating during the year (say, about one millimeter by one millimeter). Do we need to be careful about such crumbs, or only about something with some actual substance?
I hope the question is clear, thank you
Answer
The question is clear. Chametz on Passover is forbidden for eating and benefit, and its formal measure by law is an olive-bulk. But there is a rule of a partial measure, as with all Torah prohibitions, and therefore eating less than an olive-bulk is also prohibited. There is also a separate prohibition regarding a chametz mixture.
Still, logically it seems that there is some minimum size, and there is no need to become hysterical. But one should clean as much as one can. I once heard in the name of Rabbi Ben-Zion Abba Shaul that he was asked whether it is permissible to drink water from the Kinneret despite the concern that someone may have thrown a bit of bread into it, and he answered that even “the slightest amount” has a measure. But of course it is impossible to set a fixed cutoff here, and the rule of thumb is to clean as much as one can without hysteria.
Discussion on Answer
Regarding “it shall not be seen,” it is not clear that there is a prohibition of a partial measure. There is a contradiction about this in the Shulchan Arukh (in the law of dough in the cracks of a kneading bowl), and the halakhic decisors disagreed about it. But assuming that a partial measure applies there too, common sense decides. You decide for yourself whether there is or is not a difference. There is no way to answer this question.
Rabbi Eliyahu Zini once said that “when they spoke about ‘the slightest amount,’ they were not talking about the quark level.”
For Rabbi Zini’s information, Quaker is also chametz
https://www.quaker.co.il/
Is there no difference in the size of a crumb between the prohibition of eating and the prohibition of “it shall not be seen”?