The Not-So-Bitter Herb

There’s this trend at Passover at my house every year where all the kids will fight over the Maror, or bitter herbs. This takes the form of horseradish at most seders, but can be any variety of supposedly unpleasant tasting herb. Every year, the children in attendance at the seder will ask for more horseradish and complain when their parents say they need to save room for dinner. But this begs the question, if the bitter herb is meant to be, well, bitter, then why do so many people enjoy it? This process happens again with the Karpas, or salt water. We dip parsley in a small bowl of salt water that is supposed to represent the tears of Jewish people who were forced to suffer through slavery and death at the hands of Pharoah. Though yet again, people will take large clumps of parsley, throw it on their plate, and munch away at the salt water drenched greens throughout the rest of the seder. Again, if the karpas represents something so terrible and is meant to be manifested in an unpleasant dining tradition, why is it so enjoyable for some?

There are a few different ways we can take this. One possible answer is that children are so incredibly bored during the admittedly long Seder that they are forced to resort to snacking on bitter herbs or wet vegetables to get themselves through the night. But I find this unlikely to be the sole reason, as you’ll notice I didn’t mention charoset, a sweet, tasty fruit and cinnamon blend, as part of the seder tradition. Charoset is another important part of the seder plate that arguably tastes much better, and yet is left in the dust after the Hillel sandwiches have been gobbled down. No, I think there is a separate element that is at play here. To illustrate why I think this is, I want to briefly touch on Matzah’s role in Passover. 

Matzah is a flat, hard, tasteless “bread”. There’s really not much enjoyable about it that would ever make it a reasonable alternative to any other bread. That said, it holds an important place in the rituals of Passover. During Passover, Jews adhere to a relatively strict diet, one of the rules being that you cannot eat leavened bread for the duration of the holiday (or just for the length of the seder if you’re not a masochist.) There are many specific rules about what grains you can and cannot eat but what this essentially amounts to is that Jews can only eat matzah bread during passover. It is… not the best. What starts out as an exciting new diet quickly becomes grueling, repetitive, and unappealing. While this is pretty much the worst possible thing you could be doing for someone who includes bread and grains in almost every meal of the day (moi), that’s also the entire point of the fast. We are supposed to be looking back to the past, serving remembrance of a time where our people did not have the same culinary repertoire as we do now. Where the only bread they had was matzah because they did not have time to bake leavened bread. It’s hard to explain the feeling, but as this fact starts to set in, the matzah diet starts to become not so bad, little by little. You learn to be creative with the matzah. Matzah french toast, matzah crack, matzah pizza, deep fried matzah balls, you name it. Your diet becomes a challenge, and more than that, an opportunity. And when Passover is finally over and you go back to eating normal (good) food, you feel accomplished. Not just because you survived a grueling diet, but because you did it for a reason. You did it for your people.

It is this feeling that I believe contributes to the enjoyment of bitter herbs and karpas during the Passover seder. It’s not because the food itself is enjoyable, at least not entirely. If it were, you would see people eating straight horseradish and salt dipped parsley throughout the entire year and not just at Passover. No, these foods are enjoyable because there is meaning behind eating them. There is meaning behind the pain in eating them. When you eat the bitter herb you are paying respect to your ancestors who suffered through the bitterness of enslavement. When you taste the salty water you are acknowledging the tears shed by your kin as they witnessed horrors you will never come close to seeing. It is not an enjoyable experience, but it is without a doubt a powerful one.