Life is always hard, but over the past few years, it has been harder for many American Jews. Even for those of us who are privileged to have enough food, shelter, and physical safety from illness, bombardments, and other violence, life feels harder than we might expect. As our American society churns with upheaval and the Jewish community suffers from attacks from all sides and tensions within, we fret about our collective future.   

Judaism has developed over centuries through many difficult periods, and our tradition excels at providing structure and comfort through hard times. As Passover approaches, the role of maror, of bitter herbs, is worth examining. Tradition has us place maror at the very center of our seder plate. In Mishnah Pesachim 10:5, Rabban Gamaliel explains that the purpose of eating bitter herbs is to recall the bitterness of our ancestors’ lives in Egypt as was described in  (Ex 1:14): “Ruthlessly they made life bitter for them with harsh labor at mortar and bricks and with all sorts of tasks in the field.”

While today many Jews use horseradish as bitter herbs, the early rabbis allowed for a great deal of choice for bitter herbs. The Mishnah lists five plants that one can use to fulfill their obligation.(1) One of the plants was called maror, but it was not horseradish.(2) The Babylonian Talmud Pesachim 39a mostly continues this expansive approach.  Playing on the fact that the word “herbs” itself in Ex 12:8 is plural, Rabba bar Rav Chanin suggests that many different types of plants can be used for bitter herbs. A baraita states quite succinctly, “The rule of the matter is: everything that tastes bitter fulfills the mitzvah, and everything that does not taste bitter does not fulfill the mitzvah.”  

But a short (likely very late) story in the Talmud seems to undermine this flexibility regarding bitter herbs and complicates our understanding of their very purpose at the Passover seder.  Ravina discovered that his contemporary Rav Acha son of Rava was searching for maror.(3)  Ravina challenged him to explain his reasoning, and Rav Acha explained that maror was the most bitter plant.  Ravina responds that the Mishnah, as well as other earlier authorities, preferred lettuce for bitter herbs.(4) He notes that Rava, who was Rav Acha’s own father and Ravina’s teacher, also preferred lettuce and stated, “we call lettuce ‘chasa’ because God protected us (chas) in Egypt.”(5)  Ravina (or maybe the narrator) brings a quote by Rabbi Yonatan with another word play, “Just as lettuce starts sweet but becomes bitter, so the Egyptians behaved towards our ancestors in Egypt.” Under the force of these arguments, Rav Acha concedes that lettuce is optimal.(6)

This story is perplexing on its own and in its context in the Babylonian Talmud. It expresses a strong preference for one plant, lettuce, over others, and the reasoning for this preference is counterintuitive. The obvious argument against using lettuce as bitter herbs is stated succinctly in the Palestinian Talmud version of this text: “But lettuce is sweet!”(7) Similarly, the stated purpose of eating bitter herbs at the seder is to recall the bitterness of our ancestors’ lives in Egypt, but Rav Acha is condemned for striving to find the most bitter plant.(8) In addition, Rav Acha would have observed his father’s use of lettuce at seders of his youth and known that he was veering from his family’s tradition even before Ravina informed him. Which of Ravina’s arguments convinced Rav Acha to come around to his father’s position? Did he appreciate the metaphor that lettuce reminds us of the disappointment our ancestors must have suffered as their treatment at the hands of the Egyptians transitioned from sweet to bitter?(9)  Or was he convinced by Ravina’s invocation of Rava’s explanation that lettuce reminds us both of the bitterness of our ancestors’ lives and of God’s protection, even in Egypt, all at once?

This year, I find Rava’s explanation that the bitter herbs remind us of simultaneous suffering and protection, sweetness and bitterness, to be most poignant. In Exodus 15, the Israelites have just escaped from Egypt and crossed the Sea of Reeds when they are confronted with another existential threat: they are thirsty.  They find water at Mara, but they cannot drink it because it is bitter (“marim”). God shows Moses a piece of wood, which he throws into the bitter water, thus making it potable (literally sweet). In the midrash Mekhilta deRabbi Yishmael, Rabbi Shimon ben Gamaliel notes that God’s ways are different from our own.  “For mortal beings, sweet heals the bitter. But for the One who spoke and created the world, it is different: he heals the bitter with the bitter. How is this? He places a damaging thing within a thing that has been damaged in order to create a miracle in it.”(10)

At our seders, we taste our bitterness, center it, grieve it. But our task is also to let the bitterness heal us, to taste the promise of our own liberation, and to remember that our hope for better days springs eternal.  As we say at the seder, “In every generation a person is required to see himself as if he went out from Egypt… God took us from slavery to freedom, from despair to joy, from mourning to festival, from darkness to a great light, from servitude to redemption, and let us say before God, ‘Halleluyah!’”

Jastrow translates it as “probably Chichorium Itybus, chicory.”

The text uses the Aramaic form “merirata.”

Here I use Rashi’s gloss to make sense of Ravina’s statement about the mishnah.

 I have used the version attributed to Rabbi Chiyya in the name of Rabbi Hoshaya (this attribution may be flipped) in the Palestinian Talmud here for clarity (PT Pesachim 2:5). Anyone who has attempted to grow lettuce in the northeast and had it bolt and turn bitter as the weather shifts from cold to searing heat overnight understands this metaphor well. 

Using the Aramaic form of the same root as chazeret, perhaps preserving the word play contained in the Palestinian Talmud (see note 9).

Many years later, Chacham Zvi similarly expressed grave concerns regarding Jews using horseradish as their bitter herbs because of its bitterness. He was distressed that the extreme bitterness led many Jews to eat less than the required amount to fulfill the mitzvah and conversely those who did eat the full amount endangered their health.  It is so quintessentially Jewish to have a rabbi bitterly complaining that Jews are using a vegetable that is too bitter and thus not properly fulfilling the mitzvah of bitter herbs… (Responsa 119)

In the Palestinian Talmud, Rabbi Hoshaya uses word play (chazar to mean change) to express that the essence of bitter herbs is their transition from sweet to bitter. (Pesachim 2:5)

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