Keep on Chopping
“When you think you’ve chopped enough, keep on chopping.” I’m ten years old with a bag of apples, a bowl full of nuts, and a bottle of Manischewitz before me. “Very fine, picadito, picadito,” my mother says sternly. This is my first time making haroset, an apple and nut chutney that resembles the mortar enslaved Jews used to build the pyramids of Egypt, but which tastes as sweet as freedom. The task ahead is painstaking, of great import and solemnity. There’s the polishing of silver, and dusting of china, setting of tables, and cooking of Seder meals, but haroset will always be my pièce de résistance. The dish I’m known for, forever and ever.
“When you think you’ve chopped enough, you keep on chopping. That’s what your great – grandmother used to say to me, and so I’m telling you, Elena!” I’m 16 years old and attempting to use a food processor instead of hand chopping because I just can’t even. But it turns out mushy, and so I reluctantly chop.
Every year at Passover, we seek to compress time and space so as to relive the entirety of Jewish history in one night. And so does my life seem to compress and unfurl each year in this dish. After many iterations, I’ve settled on a mix of sweet red apples and tart granny smiths, chewy dried figs, Texas grown pecans, and rich walnuts. I add fresh grated ginger for depth, cinnamon for warmth, pomegranate juice in a nod to Mesopotamia, and deep red wine for savoriness. A healthy dose of golden honey brings home the sweetness.
“When you think you’ve chopped enough, keep on chopping,” I tell myself. I’m 35 years old sitting in the sun dappled kitchen of my childhood home. The wind blows through the open windows. The cardinals and blue jays vie for the feeder on the back deck. The little life in my belly stirs, and the magnitude of that Seder looms large. Half-packed boxes, and dusty outlines where paintings used to hang steal my focus. This Seder will be our “last supper.” My parents have sold the house and are retiring to Mexico. I core the apples and chop the nuts. The green fragrance of freshly cut grass wafts in through the back door, and I imagine my future son. I wonder what his first Seder will be like. Will it be in Mexico? In New York? Wherever it is, it won’t be here in this old house. He won’t know the creaky hardwood floors of my childhood. He won’t know the awe of opening the door for Elijah to a Texas sized wrap-around porch drenched in moonlight.
“When you think you’ve chopped enough, keep on chopping” I’m 36 years old, and the sounds of sirens punctuate the air, all the more frequent now than before. Tomorrow is Passover, and as I prepare the haroset, I look out the window at the long line of masked New Yorkers, six feet apart, waiting to buy their groceries. Death tolls and insecurity rise as leadership fails. Tomorrow is Passover, and we won’t be wondering how we can squeeze an extra chair around our table or worry about having enough place settings for our growing family. But we have created a digital Haggadah, shared recipes, and set up a virtual Seder table. And amid the turmoil, my son’s babbles illuminate the home we are now confined to with a sweetness I’ve never known. He plays on the new hardwood floors in the old apartment his father rebuilt for him on the Lower East Side. We are safe and healthy, cocooned in that “miraculous interweaving of life, the great bond of our tradition.”
I could have never imagined this would be our son’s first Passover, but tomorrow night, we will lift him in our arms to open the door for Elijah. And so I core the apples and chop pecans, and think of my great-grandmother and her legacy. I chop, and chop, and chop through the magnitude of this moment and this unique time. And when I think I’ve chopped enough, I keep on chopping.
Find the recipe inspired by the tale HERE.
