1. A thread on my obsession with charoset: https://twitter.com/DanielBShapiro/status/1118985796948758535

2. As anyone who's hosted a Seder knows, the preparations are intense. So many symbolic &traditional foods to locate &prepare, so many topics to cover in the Seder discussion, so many participants of different ages w/different needs for how to get the most out of the experience.

3. So there is plenty of room to bring in personal touches that add meaning to the telling of our story, the Jewish people's story of the journey from slavery to freedom. The word Haggadah means "telling". And of course, special foods are part of the way we tell the story.

4. Charoset, a pasty concoction of fruit and nuts, symbolizes the mortar that the Jewish slaves in Egypt used to build Pharaoh's cities. It also has a connection to God's redemption of the Jews, as it is described in the Talmud as as substitute for the blood of the paschal lamb.

5. So charoset is very connected to Passover's theme of freedom. We make three varieties each year that touch on that theme.

6. Like many Ashkenazi Jews growing up in the US, all I knew was the traditional version of charoset our ancestors brought from Europe: chopped red apples & walnuts, mixed with sweet wine &cinnamon. It is tasty and serviceable, but nothing special once you have tried other kinds.

7. Nevertheless, we always make it (the one at the top in the photo) as a tribute to our great-grandparents, who in the early 1900s made the scary journey from their homes in Poland, Russia, Belarus, & Lithuania to a new land, crossing an ocean & saying good-bye to all they knew.

8. @JulieFisher4 & I were lucky: our families were well-ensconced in the US decades before the Holocaust. So that voyage to America was nothing less than a passage to freedom from history's worst horrors. Any traditions of those ancestors that we can honor, we should do so.

9. But when I lived in Israel during a gap year in 1987, I discovered the joys of charoset done the Sephardic/Mizrachi way. With a much wider variety of fruits &nuts, the results are considerably more lively &flavorful, & much more authentic to the inspiration substance: mortar.

10. I lived with an Algerian/Moroccan Jewish family in south Jerusalem, adopting their customs as my own, even a Moroccan-accented Hebrew. I learned the story of their own journey to freedom in Israel from lands that had been their families' home for centuries,but turned hostile.

11. So to honor their stories, we add a Moroccan charoset (on the left in the picture). Our preferred version, from Tetouan in northern Morocco, comes from Sephardic Holiday Cooking by Gilda Angel, and includes apples, pears, bananas, dates, and almonds in a mouth-watering puree.

12. Finally, we make a Guatemalan charoset that we discovered while in the process of adopting our 2 younger daughters from Guatemala. Our daughters were not born Jewish, but while spending time there in the course of the adoptions, we got to know members of the Jewish community.

13. Guatemala, like other parts of Latin America, was a refuge both to Sephardic Jews fleeing the Inquisition from Spain, and later for Ashkenazi Jews fleeing persecution in Europe both before and after the Holocaust. There are stories of freedom embedded in their history.

14. The completion of our family was a different kind of journey, but we cannot imagine our lives without the two girls Guatemala blessed us with, and that completeness is another kind of freedom. So we try to honor Guatemalan traditions when we can, including at our Seder.

15. This charoset (on the right in the picture) is sweet & spicy, and simply amazing. Its base is green apples & cashews, with honey, wine, and cinnamon, but that is blended, unexpectedly, with a hot salsa made from tomatoes, onions, garlic, cilantro, & green & red chili peppers.

16. The recipe reached us from someone we met online in the course of our adoptions, but sadly we have lost the original contact so I cannot give proper credit for it.

17. Every Passover, each daughter honchos the making of one of these charosets. This year we are guests at the Seder of dear friends -- always bittersweet: less frantic preparation to do and a lovely Seder, but losing some of what we do at home that makes our Seder unique.

18. But at their request, we'll bring all three charosets with us to their table. And two of them, we made enough to eat at home throughout the rest of the week. (Sorry, ancestors.)

19. I feel a lot better having devoted my attention to charoset today than to the goings on in Washington. Wishing everyone who celebrates a Hag Pesach Sameach!