On Charoset
Friday night, March 12, 2021
Congregation B’nai B’rith, Santa Barbara CA
I’d like to begin this evening with an old Passover recipe written down over 800 years ago by the 12th century rabbi Moses Maimonides:
וְכֵיצַד עוֹשִׂין אוֹתָהּ. לוֹקְחִין תְּמָרִים אוֹ גְּרוֹגָרוֹת אוֹ צִמּוּקִין וְכַיּוֹצֵא בָּהֶן וְדוֹרְסִין אוֹתָן וְנוֹתְנִין לְתוֹכָן חֹמֶץ וּמְתַבְּלִין אוֹתָן בְּתַבְלִין כְּמוֹ טִיט בְּתֶבֶן
How is charoset made? We take dates, or dried figs, or raisins, or anything similar, and mash them, and add vinegar, and mix them with spices, as clay is mixed with straw.
Maimonides put that recipe in writing about 800 years ago. I imagine it had been passed down in Jewish kitchens from one generation to another, for hundreds of years before that. Another famous charosetrecipe is from Rabbi Ovadiah of Bertinoro, born in northern Italy in 1445. In his commentary on the Mishnah, the rabbi writes “we make the charoset from figs and hazel nuts and peanuts and almonds and other kinds of fruit, and we add apples, and pound it all in a mortar and mix it with vinegar, and we add kinds of spices, strips of cinnamon like long, thin stems, which are a reminder of the straw. The charoset must be thick, as a reminder of the clay.
These old charoset recipes from medieval Spain and from renaissance Italy make sense. They produce a thick paste, mixed with threads of spices, which as both rabbis point out, actually do evoke clay mixed with straw, the fundamental building materials of our slavery in Egypt. Remember the story: when Moses and Aaron first go to the Egyptian Pharoah and say “Let my people go!” he responds by requiring them to gather for themselves the straw which had previously been provided to them. Our enslaved ancestors were working in clay and in straw. Here in Santa Barbara, by the way, it is worth remembering that when the Spanish came and took this land from the indigenous Chumash, there were very few trees here, so they built all of their buildings with bricks made of clay mixed with straw, which they called adobe. And the word adobecame into Spanish from the Arabic, al-tob, which came into Arabic from the Coptic and came into Coptic…from ancient Egyptian.
So we Jews of Santa Barbara might seriously consider making our charoset from the recipes ofMaimonides or Bertinoro, which remind us of the adobe mixture of clay and straw, a back-breaking process used in building this town, exactly the same process that broke the backs of our ancestors enslaved in Egypt over 3,000 years ago. I make both, Bertinoro’s recipe and the very different apple, nut and wine mixture that my mother passed down to us from her Polish Jewish ancestors.
Charoset has been part of the Jewish Passover for at least two thousand years. It is mentioned in the Mishnah and discussed in the Talmud, but unlike matzah and maror, the symbolic meaning of charoset was originally uncertain. One rabbinic opinion in the Mishna says that the charoset has no symbolic meaning at all, but is simply to counter the poisonous effects of the bitter herb. That must have been some powerful bitter herb! The most well-known explanation for the charoset is that cited by Maimonides and Bertinoro, which is that it reminds us of the clay of slavery. The third reason given in the Talmud for charoset is the one I want to discuss in the remainder of these remarks. Rabbi Levi taught that the charoset is a reminder of “the apple.” But there is no apple in the Passover story! There was slavery, and genocide, and 10 plagues and the sea parting. But what apple?
To find the apple in the Exodus story, we need to go deep into Jewish folklore….beyond the written Torah….to stories of Egypt that were told by word of mouth, across the centuries, around campfires, by storytellers. There, in that bottomless well of Jewish memory and imagination, there was an apple tree in Egypt, and it is remembered in a verse from the Biblical book of love poetry, Song of Songs. “Under the apple tree, I aroused you.” Tachat hatapuach orarticha. “Under the apple tree, I aroused you.”
In Jewish folk memory, Egypt was not only a place of back-breaking labor, but it was also a place which crushed the human spirit and destroyed sexual desire. The apple tree in Egypt was a secret place, in the hills, where enslaved Israelites met and re-awakened each other’s love and desire, sexuality and the creation of new life. Passover is our festival of freedom, and it is also our festival of birth and new life…..all of which began under the apple tree.
That apple tree of sexual awakening, according to Rabbi Levi, is why charoset must be made with apples.
When I think about the challenges facing our society, the list is long: The pandemic. Climate change. Racial inequality. Hunger and poverty in the midst of our immense wealth. A world in which grinding poverty and fear of violence leads vulnerable women, men and children to leave their homelands and families. Gun violence. Political hatred and polarization. The list goes on and on. Each one of these is a kind of slavery, from which we are trying to free ourselves.
But let me add one more, in honor of the charoset: a sadly broken relationship with our sexuality. Andrew Cuomo is just the latest in a long, depressing string of accused sexual predators in high places.….in the arts, in the clergy, in entertainment, in the media and in government on both sides of the political spectrum. We owe immense gratitude to the courageous women who are risking everything to speak out and to hold these men accountable. But all these revelations, one after another after another, leaves me wondering: what are we doing wrong as a society? Where are we teaching young men and women about healthy, ethical sexuality?
I think we all realize that we are handicapped in teaching sexual ethics by the fact that sexuality has been, and in many ways continues to be, a taboo subject. Highly charged, intensely emotional, fraught with dangers and pitfalls. Many parents demand that schools say nothing about sexuality, not trusting that teachers will deliver the right message. And other parents wish desperately that some wise and skilled teacher would do the teaching for them. Even some of the most wise and skilled parents don’t quite know how to speak about sex with their children, and most children I know definitely do not want to speak about it with their parents!
What about right here at CBB? What sexual wisdom does Judaism offer to our children?
First of all, our old Jewish sources are not afraid to speak about sex. In some cases, the rabbis two thousand years ago expressed the most offensive ideas you can imagine, and in others they were deeply wise and compassionate when discussing the ways that people use sex to hurt others, and how sexuality can heal. Remarkably, a Jewish source from two thousand or three thousand years ago can sometimes teach us something that we might never learn from a contemporary teacher.
In the Torah portion this week, we come to the end of the Book of Exodus, and the construction of the mishkan, the sacred tabernacle which stood at the center of the Israelite camp, the first system of Jewish worship. These chapters are full of wood planks, ram skins and curtains, and precious metal. Detail after detail….and it is hard to find much of real interest. But in the midst of all those details, one item jumps out. The copper water basin which stood at the entrance to the Tent of Meeting. That copper basin was made, we are told, from the mirrors of the women who gathered in vast numbers at the entrance to the tent.
It’s a mysterious comment. Women? Mirrors? Large numbers? The Torah itself says nothing further about the basin or the mirrors or these women, but later Jewish readers have a story to tell about them. An imagined story of sexual awakening. Those mirrors were used, said the later storytellers, under the apple tree. The Israelite men had been beaten and oppressed so badly that they lost all sexual desire, but the women met them out there, and would hold up a mirror in front of them both, playfully, and say “look at that! I am so much better looking than you!” From that mirror play, they would be aroused to loving sexuality….and a new generation was born, as the verse says Under the apple tree, I aroused you.
The storytellers continued in their remembering and their imagining: When Moses summoned the people to bring their cloth, their wood, their animal skins, their oil and their jewelry for the building of the tabernacle, the women brought their copper mirrors. When Moses saw those mirrors he said “not those! You used those for vanity and for desire! This is going to be a house of holiness. We can’t use those.” Moses in that story is the authority who sees sexuality only as something to be controlled and hidden away.
At that moment, said the ancient storytellers, God interrupted and corrected Moses, saying, “those mirrors are what I love the most, because they were used for mirror play, under the apple tree. From those mirrors, new life became possible. Love and new birth.”
I think we can tell that story to our children, of any age, and with that story teach them about love, and play and compassionate, ethical sex. They are children; they know more than we do about play. At our Passover seder this year, may our charoset remind us of the back-breaking clay and straw adobe work of slavery, but also perhaps of an ancient Jewish story of two human beings playing with each other, caring for each other and arousing each other to passionate love, under the apple tree.
Shabbat shalom