A couple of weeks ago, we celebrated Purim: We overcame long odds to save ourselves from the villain Haman (boo!) and killed many of our adversaries in the process. Then, we took a remembrance of the villain (his pocket or hat?) and turned it into an eponymous pastry delicacy that is the defining edible of Purim.

There is a Purim tradition to get drunk enough that one cannot distinguish between “Blessed is Mordechai” and “Cursed be Haman.” (Pretty sloshed indeed!) Perhaps that was the inspiration for making something associated with the villain into the defining Purim pastry, inverting the expected — as opposed to, say, Mordechai mandelbroit.

Soon will be Pesach / Passover: Adonai our God liberated us from Egyptian oppression and set us free to develop a lasting relationship with Adonai. As with Purim, we’ve transformed symbols of our enslavement — matza and charoset — and turned them into delicacies.

In the haggadah, matza is called “lechem oni” which could be translated as poor, simple bread, or a type of bread that makes us aware of our oppression, of how easily we could have broken apart under Egyptian forced labor.

Charoset, mixtures of apples and nuts, or dates and nuts, along with sweet wine and a variety of other ingredients, symbolizes the mortar used with the bricks we were forced to make at Pharaoh’s order. We add charoset to maror (bitter herb) to temper its bite, we spread it on matza as a snack.

So it is that we eat our revenge. We take our near extermination and centuries of forced servitude and remember them, in part, with delicious foods, taking some of the long ago sting out of the tellings of these tales.

May you turn even the dreaded cleaning and cooking for Pesach into occasions of joy!

Shabbat shalom ! שבת שלום