March/April 2009

Talk of the Table
The Sweet Story of Charoset

Click here for charoset recipes from around the world

Charoset, that aromatic ensemble of fruits, nuts, spices and wine, may be the tastiest traditional food on the Seder plate, but why it is there is a matter of debate. The Torah does not command us to eat it, and, in fact, never mentions charoset at all. Nor is there a blessing for it in the Haggadah. Yet its connection to Passover is ancient.

Charoset first comes up in the Mishnah, the authoritative transcription of oral laws written around 200 CE, when describing items on the Passover table: “unleavened bread and lettuce and charoset, even though the charoset is not a commandment.” David Arnow, author of Creating Lively Passover Seders, and others believe that charoset may have come to the Passover ritual through the influence of ancient Greek civilization. The Greeks held symposiums during which free men consumed large quantities of wine while discussing philosophical issues and “dipping” food in mixtures of pounded nuts and spices—key ingredients in charoset.

Talmudic sages, of course, sought religious reasons to explain the presence of charoset on the Seder table. The symbolic meaning most often mentioned is that charoset reminds us of the mortar Hebrew slaves used to build clay bricks. The fact that Hebrew for clay is charsis or ceres is frequently given as proof for this interpretation. In his 11th century Mishneh Torah, Moses Maimonides gives one of the first written recipes for charoset in which it is said to look like clay mixed with straw: Crush “dates, dried figs, or raisins and the like...add vinegar, and mix them with spices,” because, before being ground, spices are long and stringy like straw.

The clay interpretation saw its most extreme expression in 1862 when some 20 Jewish-American Union soldiers in an Ohio regiment put a brick on their Seder plate. One of them, Joseph Joel, recalled the experience in the March 30,1866, Jewish Messenger, a New York weekly. He writes that although stranded in the “wilds of West Virginia,” the men in his regiment were able to obtain matzos and Haggadahs and successfully foraged for a weed “whose bitterness…exceeded anything our forefathers enjoyed,” as well as lamb, chicken and eggs. But they could find no suitable ingredients for charoset. “So, we got a brick,” Joel wrote, “which rather hard to digest, reminded us, by looking at it, for what purposes it was intended.”

Although the Union soldiers’ brick made an excellent stand-in, properly prepared charoset tastes sweet so that it can soften the harshness of maror, the bitter herb. Reasons for dipping charoset in maror are explained by Rabbi Akiva: According to this second century CE Talmudic scholar, charoset is a reminder of the Egyptian apple orchards where Hebrew women secretly made love to their husbands and bore children, thus defying the pharaoh’s ban on procreation. Akiva says that Israel was delivered from slavery in Egypt because of these “righteous women’s deeds.” His inspiration is the verse from the Song of Songs recited on the Sabbath of Passover week: “Under the apple trees, I roused you. It was there your mother conceived you.”

Another Talmudic Midrash adds a different twist. Egyptians, it says, found and tried to kill some of the newborn male babies, but the earth swallowed them. After the Egyptians left, the babies emerged from the ground like fresh green plants. Some believe this story represents how God brought forth the new generation that would grow in freedom; others say that the Midrash symbolizes spring rebirth out of apparent death.

These various Talmudic commentaries can be linked, says Jill Hammer, rabbi and director of spiritual education at the Academy for Jewish Religion in New York. Charoset, she explains, is “a dual symbol of birth and death, freedom and oppression,” the remembrance of what binds “the Jewish story with the story of all living things…a kind of mortar after all.”—Joan Alpert

Click here for charoset recipes from around the world