Journey of the Spirit, Journey of the Body
There's something captivating about ritual food. It looks beautiful on a table. It’s meaningful and time-honored, and it tastes good. Passover is the holiday that most epitomizes the celebration of ritual food. Every year I love setting out the items on the seder plate one by one. These simple dishes – the matzah, parsley, lettuce, bitter herb, egg, charoset, shankbone (or nowadays a beet for vegetarians) – tell the story of Passover in an embodied way and physically represent the Passover story, from the beginning of the Hebrews’ enslavement to their triumphant escape from Egypt.
They also represent a kind of sensual gateway through which we pass to another world, a world in which past, present, and future come together. The contemporary Jews sitting at the table become identical with the Israelites of the past, breaking matzah with one another, tasting the bitterness of slavery, and offering the paschal sacrifice. They also become the rabbis of old, debating the many meanings of the story, and eating matzah with bitter herbs and charoset just as Hillel did. The people at each seder even become the Jews of the redemption, opening the door to welcome Elijah the prophet, who will herald the messiah and the age of peace.
How does this timeless moment become possible? It occurs because of the telling of the Exodus story. It occurs because we make the declaration that we are our ancestors, and their story is ours – “in every generation you are obligated to regard yourself as if you yourself left Egypt.” It happens also because we eat the ritual food that turns us into time travelers: the matzah and maror that bring us back to Egypt, the wine that reminds us of the promise of freedom. “Halachma anya,” we chant. “This is the poor bread that our ancestors ate in the land of Egypt.” As we eat it, we transform ourselves into the slaves about whom we sing. Later, as we raise Elijah’s cup, we become the Jews of the distant future, finally freed from exile and restored to a peaceful existence. The change from ordinary people to representatives of the timeline of history occurs not only in our minds, but in our bodies, through the food itself.
This is why it is so interesting that only half the ritual foods on the table are ever explained. The egg sits in its place on the seder plate without a single reference in the traditional haggadah, mentioned only in a margin or a footnote. The charoset (sweet fruit paste) gets similar treatment. While tradition holds that it represents the mortar that cemented the bricks in the pyramids, it hardly makes sense that mortar should taste so good. There is no explanation for the parsley or leafy green, only a tale about the salt water representing the tears of the Hebrew slaves. What transformation do these ritual foods symbolize? Why do we eat them without comment?
I suspect that all three of these symbols represent a different spiritual transformation, one that Jewish tradition made implicit but not explicit. On Passover, at the same time that we timelessly identify with our ancestors, we also timelessly identify with the spring and its abundant new life. The egg is a symbol of life in the Jewish tradition, eaten in houses of mourning to remind the bereaved that life somehow will continue. In cultures all over the world, the egg represents the potential for life. The Easter egg, native to Europe and older than Christianity, is only one example of this. The Chinese serve red eggs at celebrations of a newborn baby, and Parsi wedding ceremonies in India include an egg ritual to insure the couple’s fertility and happiness.
The parsley, the green stem we eat early in the seder, and the hazeret, the lettuce, carry a similar meaning. Green reminds us that Passover takes place as life is in full swing; in the Northeast flowers are beginning to bloom, while in the land of Israel (and on the North American west coast) the harvest already is beginning. As we eat the egg and greens, we acknowledge that just as we are one with the Jewish people past and present, we are one with all life, rejoicing as spring begins and life continues. The reading of the Song of Songs, which some people include in their seder, emphasizes this message: “Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away, for look, the winter has passed, the rain is over and gone, the time of the singing of birds has come.”
The charoset is in some ways the most interesting case. The Talmud mentions this sweet paste, made of apples, nuts, and raisins, or of dates and almonds, saying the following about the Passover meal: “They set before him matzah, hatzeret (lettuce) and charoset and two dishes, though the charoset is not compulsory. R. Elazar son of Rabbi Zadok said: it is compulsory” (Talmud, Pesachim 114a). There appears to be a disagreement about whether charoset is a Passover obligation or only a custom. But no sage reports what the charoset is meant to symbolize.
Maimonides, the renowned 11th-century scholar, attempts to fill in the gap, offering both a meaning and a recipe: “The charoset is a mitzvah ordained by the words of the sages, to commemorate the clay with which they worked in Egypt. How is it made? We take dates, dried figs, or raisins and the like, and crush them and add vinegar to them, and mix them with spices, as clay is mixed with straw” (Maimonides, Hilchot Chameitz U’Matzah 7:12). Maimonides reports the now-traditional interpretation that charoset represents the mortar used by the slaves. But is this the true explanation? And if it is, why is it not mentioned in the haggadah?
The Talmud scholar Ruth Fagin first suggested to me that the charoset might represent the Hebrew women who gave birth in Egypt. A midrash relates that the slave women, terrified that their sons would be killed, could not give birth at home. Instead, they went out of the cities and into the apple orchards, and gave birth there. “God then sent an angel from on high to cleanse and beautify them, like a midwife who makes the child look beautiful… God then provided for them two nipples, one made of oil and the other of honey… As soon as the Egyptians saw them they tried to kill them, but a miracle occurred and they were swallowed into the earth. They then brought oxen and ploughed upon their backs… but after the Egyptians left, they burst forth and came out of the ground like the grass of the field” (Exodus Rabbah 1:12). In this beautiful midrash, the Hebrew children are suckled by God and sheltered by the earth. Even when the Egyptians plow them under, they grow out of the ground like new green plants. They are symbols of spring itself, of birth’s victory over death.
Notice how many of the symbols in the story remind us of charoset. Many of us put apples in charoset. The apple orchards are where the Hebrew women give birth against all odds. Indeed, apples and other fruit trees represent eternal life in cultures from Ireland to Norway to China. In the Zohar, the Shekhinah, the feminine divine presence, often is called “the holy apple orchard”; souls grow, sustained by Her, the way apples grow on trees.
As Maimonides points out, dates are an even older ingredient in charoset, and they, too, figure in this story. The honey that flows forth to the infants from nipples in the earth probably is date honey, not bee honey. (In the Middle East date honey was a staple of life, and the honey in the “land of milk and honey” was date honey, not bee honey.) In this midrash written in the late rabbinic era, charoset does not symbolize the slaves’ mortar exclusively. It is also a sign of the power of birth. Charoset, like the greens and the egg, is a symbol of the strength and beauty of life – and it is a symbol of the Exodus as well. It is the charoset on the seder plate that binds the Jewish story with the story of all living things. In that sense, it is a kind of mortar after all.
So as you enter the mysterious time-traveling world of the seder and once again confront its ritual foods, remember that you are not only becoming one with all Jews past and future. You are becoming one with life itself. Passover is the Jewish story of our national deliverance, but as you open the door for Elijah, take a moment to notice the sights, smells, and sounds of spring wafting in behind him. Those spring awakenings are as much a part of the Passover celebration as the Exodus itself.
Rabbi Jill Hammer, PhD, is the author of The Jewish Book of Days and Sisters at Sinai: New Tales of Biblical Women and the director of Tel Shemesh (www.telshemesh.org).
