Charoset חרוסת

🌀 Distribute more Maror and Charoset for all to place on pieces of Matzah.

Charoset is a smooth mixture of various chopped fruits including apples, and nuts, as well as wine and spices. It represents the mixture of clay and straw from which we made the mortar during our slavery. It also calls to mind the women of Israel who bore their children in secret beneath the apple trees of Egypt,¹ and, like the apple tree that first produces fruit and then sprouts leaves to protect the fruit, our heroic mothers first bore children without any assurance of security or safety. This beautiful and militant devotion sweetened the misery of slavery, even as we dip our bitter herbs in Charoset. The pattern of our celebration is the mixture of the bitter and the sweet, sadness and joy, of tales of shame that end in praise.

And when we see the tragedies of our own time, we sweeten this bitter taste with the thought of the liberation that is yet to come.

Hillel, a rabbi who lived during the first century of the Common Era, invented the sandwich. This sandwich is Hillel’s foundation² of the Seder, a concentrated version of the three symbols Rabban Gamliel stressed according to the biblical command: “Together with unleavened bread and bitter herbs they shall eat the paschal lamb (the last replaced by the Charoset).”

🌀 All eat the Hillel Sandwich.

Beitzah ביצה

Rabbi Meir ben Tzipporah v’Nechemia haLevi was often asked about the meaning of the roasted egg. It remains on the Seder Plate, yet never discussed.

The egg reminds us of many things. Its presence on the Seder Plate represents the holiday sacrifice our ancestors made when the Temple stood. But, as with any good symbol it is rich with meaning. The egg itself is symbolic of life and reminds us of the blossoming world around us. The egg’s roundness reminds us of the unending nature of life.

But why is it roasted? Some tell us that, like the roasted egg, the Jewish people gets harder and stronger the more they are tested.

Footnotes

¹ The problem here is that the apple seems to have originated in Rome (i.e. much later).

² Nathan Hurvitz’s pun: “Hillel; The foundation for Jewish Campus Life”