We spend a lot of time thinking about food during Passover-perhaps more than any other week.
Yet, even if this week does take its toll, and we are eager to snack on pizza and pasta, what we eat remains significant this week. Very shortly, we will reminisce about the charoset and the chicken soup, the horseradish and the brisket.
Because the food of Passover is more than food-it is liturgy come to life. Each food morsel means something. Let's take my favorite food combination, the “korech”- the famous Hillel sandwich. I love the taste of the bland, crisp matzah, together with the sweet, crunchy charoset, and the surprise of the extremely bitter horseradish.
With the Korech we mix the sweet, the sharp, and the bitter. Perhaps I enjoy these flavors because they are so much like the experiences of our lives-bitter, dry, sweet. This morning is the perfect example: we gather on Yizkor, this last morning of Passover to remember our beloved dead even as we celebrate this joyous season of our freedom. The bitter and the sweet, mixed together. Our lives are like the korech, the mixing-of joy and pain; of sweet and sorrow, of celebration and mourning.
As the charoset is sweet, it reminds of us the times that we savored with our parent, spouse, child. The times that remain, as lingering sugar, in our mouths. Holidays spent together and traditions shared- sweetness fulfilled.
But as we chew the hillel sandwhich, our taste buds are jarred by the sudden burning of the horseradish. Suddenly the sweetness of the haroset disappears and we can only think about the sting of the condiment. That is much like our grief. We can smile one moment, and then-like a punch in the stomach-the sting of their absence returns. It is physical pain, like the taste of the horseradish. That we won't see our wife again. That we won't touch our father again. That we won't laugh with our son again. Yes, like the horseradish, at times it is too much to bear.
The haroset and the horseradish seem an unlikely combination- this sweet, moist treat, and the bitter stinging condiment. Even more unusual is what binds them-the matzah. It tastelessness should not help these flavors, yet it does. It is the blandness that brings balance to the horseradish and the haroset. Both so intense, the simplicity of the matzah is comforting. Yet when we snap the matzah for our meal, it cracks and makes a crumbly mess. So, too, are we: just as the matzah breaks, we feel we are splintered and broken. We feel messy and that we can't pull ourselves together. Looking at the crumbs left on the plate, know that in our grief, we are much like that splintered mixture of flour and water.
This Passover, this Yizkor morning, we remember the bitter, the brittle, and the sweet. Passover is the time for korech-for mixing. We mix the sweet and the sorrow. We mix the bitter and the bland. We mix grief and the joy. According to Halacha, Jewish law, we have to taste all of the flavors of the korech, hillel sandwich. One cannot overwhelm the other entirely. So, too, it is with our lives. We taste the bitter and the sweet; the joy and the pain. On this Passover, God, allow us to taste the sweet with the pain, to experience the joy of memory and the despair of grief. And let us know, that through you, O God, these tastes will come together to form a new whole, a new taste-a new reality.
Passover is the season of our liberation. As we grieve, we pray for a liberation of our own-from narrowness; from darkness; from pain; from anger.
E-mail Rabbi Bergman Vann
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