The Secret Inside the Charoset

Some people like to add an orange to the Seder plate—but they don’t realize that the symbolism was on the Seder plate all along.

Mud on Your Plate

Charoset. What is it made of? What ingredients belong in it?

That depends on whom you ask.

An Ashkenazi Jew will tell you charoset has to include apples, and preferably wine as well. A Sephardi Jew, on the other hand, is likely to say that charoset is made from dates and nuts, with various spices mixed in—but apples? Not part of the picture.

Apparently Jews can argue about anything. Even over a simple charoset recipe, no one can quite agree.

Why do we eat charoset on Passover? What is it supposed to represent?

The standard answer is familiar: charoset symbolizes the mortar, the mud and clay used by the Israelites during their slave labor in Egypt. In that sense, it continues the theme of the maror, the bitter herbs, both of them reminding us of the harshness of slavery.

But once Jews disagree about how to make the charoset, it is no surprise that they also disagree about what exactly it is meant to recall.

The Talmud records the opinion of Rabbi Yochanan, who says what most of us already know—that charoset is a reminder of the mortar. But then it gives a very different view: “Rabbi Levi says: a remembrance of the apple” (Pesachim 116a).

An apple? How did an apple get onto the Seder plate?

This week, when I asked people what apple came to mind, many immediately thought of the “apple” that Adam and Eve supposedly ate in the Garden of Eden. But that is a well-known mistake. The Torah never says that the Tree of Knowledge was an apple tree. That whole image of the “forbidden fruit” as an apple comes from outside Jewish sources.

In the Torah itself, Eve says only: “Of the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the garden, you shall not eat” (Genesis 3:3). It never identifies the tree.

Only after Adam and Eve eat from it, when their eyes are opened, does the Torah mention a specific tree: “They sewed together fig leaves” (Bereishis 3:7). On that verse, Rashi comments that this was the very tree from which they had eaten: “By the very thing through which they were ruined, they were repaired.” And Rashi adds a striking explanation for why the Torah never states the identity of the tree openly: G-d did not want to shame it, so that people should not point and say, “This is the tree that brought ruin into the world.”

So when people hear “apple,” some think of that mistaken association with Eden. Others think of the apple dipped in honey on Rosh Hashanah.

But according to the Talmud, there is another apple we need to think about—the apple that belongs, somehow, at the Seder table.

The Quiet Campaign of the Israelite Women

What apple is he talking about?

Rashi explains that it refers to the Israelite women, who would give birth in secret so the Egyptians would not discover them, as hinted by the verse, “Under the apple tree I aroused you” (Rashi to Pesachim 116a, citing Shir HaShirim 8:5).

Rashi is pointing us to a remarkable passage in the Talmud. The Gemara says, “It was in the merit of the righteous women of that generation that Israel was redeemed from Egypt” (Sotah 11b). What was so extraordinary about those women that the redemption is credited to them?

The Gemara paints a vivid picture. When the women went to draw water, G-d caused small fish to appear for them. They would return with both water and fish, cook food, and bring it out to their husbands in the fields. There, in quiet corners of the fields, they cared for them, fed them, encouraged them, and sustained family life under impossible conditions. And when the time came to give birth, they would go out into the fields and deliver their babies there, “under the apple tree” (Sotah 11b).

It is an extraordinary story, because it reveals the strength and determination of the women in Egypt. The men, crushed by slavery, had begun to lose hope. They did not want to bring children into such a world. In Parshat Shemot, this despair is reflected even in Amram, the leading figure of the generation, who separated from his wife Yocheved because of Pharaoh’s decree (see Rashi to Exodus 2:1). And if that was the reaction of the greatest leader, one can imagine how ordinary people felt. As the Midrash says, they all followed suit and withdrew from family life.

The logic was grim but understandable: Why bring children into the world only for them to be thrown into the Nile? And even if they survived, what kind of life would they have? Why give birth to children destined for slavery and misery? That, in a sense, was exactly what Egypt wanted—to break the Jewish people’s spirit so completely that they would stop imagining a future.

But the women did not give up their faith. They were certain that this darkness would not last forever, that redemption would come, and that the Jewish future had to be protected even in the worst of times. So they found ways to keep hope alive, to keep their husbands going, and to continue building families.

When labor began, they would leave the populated areas and go out to the fields, because in the cities the Egyptians were hunting down newborn boys. Out there, beneath the apple trees, they gave birth in secret.

The Rebbe explained that this defiant determination—to continue bringing Jewish children into the world despite all the suffering—was itself what cast fear into Pharaoh and Egypt. No matter how hard they tried to crush the people, the Jewish nation kept growing and enduring (Hisvaaduyos 5743 vol. 2, p. 1088). That, according to Rabbi Levi, is the “apple” remembered by the charoset on the Seder night.

The Women’s Mirrors

We see the importance of this story in another place in the Torah as well. In the account of the building of the Tabernacle, the Torah describes how the entire people brought donations for its construction. The women, if anything, were even more eager than the men to contribute.

Among the items they brought were what the Torah calls “the mirrors of the women.” Rashi says that when these mirrors were brought, Moses recoiled from the idea of using them. A mirror belongs perhaps in a bedroom, but doesn’t seem like something that belongs in a sacred space. In Rashi’s words, Moses rejected them because they were associated with physical desire. But G-d said to him: accept them, because these are more precious to Me than anything else. Why? Because through these mirrors, the women “raised up multitudes” in Egypt. Thanks to them, Jewish children were born—the very generation that would later leave Egypt. Without those mirrors, there would have been no one to redeem. (Rashi to Exodus 38:8.)

So when the sages say, “It was in the merit of the righteous women of that generation that Israel was redeemed from Egypt,” they do not mean that the women simply sat and prayed and thereby earned redemption. The Rebbe explains that their righteousness expressed itself most of all in their determination to continue building Jewish families, and to do so with joy, cherishing every Jewish child who was born (the Rebbe, Hisva’aduyot 5743, vol. 2, p. 1162).

Rashi also repeats this story, but with one important added detail. When the men came home broken by slave labor, the women brought them food and drink. Then they took out their mirrors, looked at themselves together with their husbands, and drew them back into life and hope.(Rashi to Exodus 38:8; see also Sotah 11b and Rashi to Pesachim 116a).

It was all part of the same story. The women brought warm water, they brought food, and they brought something else as well: the ability to remind their husbands that life was not over, that the future was still possible, and that Egypt would not have the last word. Even the mirrors became part of redemption. That is why the Torah treats them not as trivial objects, but as instruments through which the “tzivos Hashem” came into being—a hint, as the Rebbe notes, in the phrase mar’ot hatzov’ot, the mirrors through which the future generations of Israel were brought forth.

A Powerful Reminder Right in Front of Us

So when we sit at the Seder table, the charoset is meant to remind us of the strength of the Israelite women, who kept bringing children into the world even under unbearable conditions.

In recent years, some people have begun placing an orange or a cup of water on the Seder plate as a way of recognizing women and, especially, Miriam’s role in the story of the Exodus. But in truth, Jewish tradition has been doing something like that for thousands of years already—with the apple in the charoset (see Pesachim 116a; Sotah 11b).

Charoset holds two memories at once. When we look at it, it recalls the mortar, the suffering, the backbreaking labor of Egypt. But when we taste it, it recalls the apple—the courage, resilience, and quiet confidence of the women of that generation.

Kabbalah teaches that the generations living just before the coming of Moshiach are, in some sense, a return of the souls of the generation that left Egypt. And just as the redemption from Egypt came in the merit of the women, so too the final redemption will come in the merit of the women.