Don’t Sell Your Haroset Short |
It is well known that the basic foods of the Pesah evening in Temple times were the Korban Pesah (Passover sacrifice), matzah (unleavened bread), and maror (bitter herbs):
“The bitter herb (ḥazeret), the matzah, and the pesah on the evening of Pesah are obligatory… Hillel the Elder would combine the three and eat them together.” (Tosefta Pesahim 2:22, Lieberman ed., p. 150)
Yet, in the final chapter of Mishnah Pesahim (10:3), we read:
“They brought before him matzah, ḥazeret, and ḥaroset… although eating ḥaroset is not a mitzvah but merely a custom. Rabbi Eliezer ben Tzadok says: It is a mitzvah.”
Here, the Mishnah introduces ḥaroset, a spiced mixture, into the festive meal, along with a debate regarding its status. The sages regard it as a custom, while Rabbi Eliezer ben Tzadok elevates it to the level of mitzvah, asserting that its consumption is obligatory.
Later sages in the Talmud offer explanations for these opposing views. Rabbi Ami suggests that the sages required eating ḥaroset together with maror as a remedy for the herb’s harmful effects. Rabbi Levi and Rabbi Yohanan, by contrast, attribute symbolic meaning to haroset in support of Rabbi Eliezer ben Tzadok’s position: one associates it with apples, recalling the tradition that Israelite women gave birth under apple trees in Egypt, while the other links it to the mortar used by the enslaved Israelites in their building labor (Pesahim 116a).
These explanations, while evocative, are relatively late and do not seem sufficiently weighty to justify granting mitzvah status to a practice not mentioned in the Torah. Professor Shamma Friedman offers a more substantial and intriguing interpretation, based on an analysis of parallel versions of a brief narrative about Rabbi Eliezer ben Tzadok found in the Tosefta, the Babylonian Talmud, and the Jerusalem Talmud.
Two of these versions read:
“A story: Rabbi Eliezer bar [Tzadok] said to vendors in Lod: Go and take for yourselves ‘mitzvah spices.’” (Tosefta Pesahim 10:10, p. 198)
“Rabbi Eliezer ben Rabbi Tzadok said: Thus, the spice merchants in Jerusalem would say: ‘Go, take for yourselves mitzvah spices.’” (Pesahim 116a)
According to Friedman, Rabbi Eliezer ben Tzadok lived during the period surrounding the destruction of the Temple, when the sages were compelled to reshape the Pesah meal in the absence of the Korban Pesah. Friedman proposes that the version in the Talmud was redacted to suggest that haroset was already eaten in Temple times. He asserts, however, that with the disappearance of the central sacrificial element of the meal, Rabbi Eliezer sought to elevate haroset to the status of a mitzvah, perhaps as a symbolic replacement. It was this, according to Friedman, that he attempted to convince the merchant class in Lod to adopt in practice. While the custom of eating ḥaroset endured, its designation as a mitzvah ultimately did not gain widespread acceptance (see Friedman, Tosefta Atikta, pp. 426–430).
Ultimately, haroset did not become a mitzvah in the formal sense, but its message endured. In the absence of what once stood at the center of the Pesah meal, we did not abandon the ritual; we deepened it. Haroset’s sweetness mixed with the bitterness of the maror ultimately came to represent for us the truest taste of redemption.