The Talmud teaches that 30 days before Passover, we should start learning about the holiday and its meaning. In that spirit, I humbly offer "30 Days of Liberation." For each of the next 30 days, I will offer a brief message drawn from the wisdom of Passover. I hope you find these messages meaningful and inspiring. Feel free to share/forward.
30 Days of Liberation: Day 29 OK, let’s face it: Haroset is weird. Delicious, of course, but strange. This sweet dip is supposedly meant to remind us of something bitter, the brick mortar used by our enslaved ancestors in Egypt. How to explain this dissonance? While fanciful allegory is possible - we may, for example, understand the Haroset as inviting us to see the sweetness in our suffering - a better explanation can be found in the food’s origins. According to scholars of ancient Judaism, Haroset becomes a standard Seder food not because of its religious significance, but of its utility. The Seder is adapted from Greco-Roman symposia, and it was common at such meals to have a sweet dip made of fruit, nuts, and wine as an appetizer (or, possibly, as a kind of antiseptic wash for vegetables). Once it became a common Seder food, people began to ascribe Haroset with symbolic meaning, linking it to the brick mortar, or to the apple orchards where Israelite women brought their husbands to conceive babies in defiance of Pharaoh’s decree, or to the blood of the paschal offering. Haroset, in this sense, embodies the essence of what it means to be Jewish: to take the stuff of this world and make it heavenly, to turn the ordinary into the sacred, and to transform the regular into the holy.
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