The sage Hillel began the tradition of eating a sandwich of bitter maror and sweet charoset between two pieces of matzah. For the literal-minded, this fulfills the letter of the commandment to eat these things together. For those who prefer symbolism, we are reminded that bitterness and sweetness come side by side in life.

This use of charoset also recalls its connection to the bricks and mortar made by enslaved Jews in Egypt. Though the charoset is sweet, the act of spreading it on the matzah takes us for a moment to the life of a laborer spreading mortar with a trowel, not at a festival of liberation but over and over again under the hot sun without a break. Then, as we eat the sandwich, we fast-forward to the time of Hillel, in 100 BCE when the Temple still stood. We may even have a dizzying moment of imagining being Hillel as he imagines being enslaved in Egypt. Feel the layers of nearly six thousand years of Jewish history all atop one another and mingled together, like the charoset and maror layered over the matzah.


haggadah Section: Koreich