Thoughts on Hillel’s Sandwich and Ours

Posted March 20, 2026 - Nissan 2, 5786

The last item on our agenda at the Passover Seder just prior to dinner is designated as “Korech,” better known as “Hillel’s Sandwich.” After completing the mitzvah of telling the story of the Exodus in various ways, we offer praise to God with the opening two Psalms of the Hallel prayers and a concluding blessing leading into the drinking of the second of the four cups of wine. At this point, we prepare for the festive meal. First, we wash our hands in the usual ritual fashion with the appropriate blessing this time. Directly after that, without interruption, we uncover the matzah, lift up the top and bottom whole sheets with the broken matzah in between and recite the hamotzi blessing, thanking God for bringing forth bread from the earth. Before eating any of it, we then let go of the bottom piece, letting it drop gently back onto the plate, and still holding the top full sheet and the broken piece beneath, known as the lechem oni, the bread of affliction, we recite the blessing designated for the mitzvah of eating matzah, after which we eat some of the matzah from both pieces as we recline to the left. Eating matzah at the seder is a mitzvah d’oraita, required by the Torah. The rest of the week we abstain from eating leavened bread, but there is no specific requirement to eat matzah except at the seder.

         In Temple days, before the Temple was destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE, maror, the bitter herbs, was also a Torah mitzvah to be eaten along with the Pesach, the Paschal lamb, that each family would sacrifice on the eve of Passover. Since we no longer offer the Pesach, the maror is now a mitzvah d’rabanan, a rabbinic injunction recalling Temple days, thus on a lower plane than the mitzvah of matzah, so we say its blessing and then eat it, sweetened by charoset, separately from the matzah so that the taste of matzah will not be covered up by the sharp or bitter taste of the maror. It is at this point that the Haggadah provides a historic note.

In remembrance of the Temple, we follow Hillel’s practice. Hillel lived around the beginning of the first century CE when the Temple was still standing. Instead of eating the matzah and maror separately, he would follow the literal instructions from the Torah and eat his slice of the Paschal lamb “al matzot umerorim,” on top of matzah and maror. Now, in the absence of the Passover sacrifice, we have only matzah and maror. Matzah does double duty standing in for the sacrifice also, so we place the maror on top of the matzah and another piece of matzah on top of it and, voilà! we have created Hillel’s sandwich which we proceed to eat, again reclining. There is some discussion among the sages as to whether or not to add charoset, most people vote “yes.”

         Usually, we are used to following Hillel’s view, or that of the School of Hillel, on most matters of Jewish law and practice where there is a disagreement. You may recall that the School of Hillel required lighting Chanukah candles beginning with one the first night and adding one more each night, while the School of Shammai did the reverse: eight candles on the first night and one less each succeeding night. We follow the school of Hillel and that is generally the case when these scholars differed. The Talmud provides numerous examples. Here, though, the dispute was not resolved. The majority of the sages held that we should eat the two items, matzah and maror separately, particularly since matzah was required by the Torah and maror was only rabbinically required. It seems that the Pesach lamb in Temple days was also eaten separately with its own blessing. Hillel was an outlier in this case, yet in deference to his stature, his practice is recalled, but only after we have followed the practice of his halakhic opponents. It is as if to say, “Sure, now that we’ve made the appropriate blessings, go ahead, make a sandwich, knock yourself out.”

         The word “korech” means wrapping or binding. A book binder is known in Hebrew as a korech. A bound volume is a kerech from the same root. In light of Hillel’s “invention,” in modern Hebrew, we call a sandwich a k’rich, though generally today the word used on the street is “sanvitch.” If we recall that matzah originally was more like pita than a cracker, we can imagine Hillel receiving a slice of lamb meat from the sacrifice, placing it and a piece of lettuce (maror) on the matzah and making more of a wrap than a sandwich. Some suggest wrapping the matzah and the Pesach in the lettuce leaf instead. Either way, Hillel may have dipped it into the charoset as well and ate it as he reclined. The blessing he recited prior to this would have reflected the multiple mitzvot fulfilled by this sandwich. In the absence of the Temple and its sacrificial offerings, the custom in most places now is not to serve roasted lamb at the seder and, in fact, some people abstain from any roasted meat that might be mistaken for part of a sacrificial offering.

         In the Cairo Genizah, that storeroom in the old synagogue in Fostat, where for centuries worn out books, letters, papers, anything which might have the divine Name on it, were put away until its discovery at the end of the 19^th century, we have fragments of the liturgy used in various communities throughout the region. Apparently, there were a few places where, in spite of this interdiction on eating roasted meat at the seder, people still served some sacred barbecue in remembrance of the Temple and the Paschal lamb. Whether or not they included meat, they ate the matzah and maror together, not separately, following Hillel’s minority opinion, and offered a single blessing: “Praised are You, Lord our God, sovereign of the universe who sanctified us through His mitzvot and commanded us to eat matzah and maror this night to recall the might of the King of Kings of Kings, blessed be He, who performed miracles  for our ancestors at this season for the sake of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Praised are You, Lord, who remembers the covenant.”

         When we make Hillel’s sandwich today, however, we do not offer a blessing, for we have already done so through the separate blessings over matzah and maror. Some mystics suggest that if we use this opportunity to recall the ancient Temple, and to put ourselves into the proper spiritual frame of mind, we might even imagine as we bite into this sandwich that we are tasting the flavor of the Paschal lamb between the sheets of matzah. The Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidism, believed this was possible.

         What then is the significance of this combination, aside from linking us with our ancient heritage and the glory of the Temple in Jerusalem. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks in his Haggadah suggests that perhaps Hillel was “reminding us of the Jewish experience of history. Within the bitterness of slavery there also was the hope and promise of freedom. Within freedom, we also are commanded each year never to forget the taste of slavery, so that we should not take liberty for granted, nor forget those who are still afflicted.” That’s a message that certainly resonates for many of us this year.

         Rabbi Norman Lamm writes, “Why do we create a maror sandwich? Because life is all about balance. Life is about taking various extremes and blending them together into a balanced unit.” Lamm further elaborates on this theme and writes, “Any one value when taken to an extreme, can be corrupted. We need a dialectic of virtues. We need freedom and responsibility, peace and self-defense, love and morality. Patience and toughness, discipline and independent thinking.” Rabbi Shalom Rosner in his Haggadah cites Rabbi Lamm and adds that “as optimists, we take the bitter maror and coat it with sweet haroset. What supported us through thousands of years of exile is the attitude of reciting blessings over our maror, our challenging times, while yearning and believing that our sweet haroset is soon to follow.”

         These ritual foods are in themselves symbols of contradictory values. Why do we eat matzah? It is to recall the divine intervention that suddenly brought slavery to a halt and forced the Israelites to depart from Egypt b’chipazon, in haste, pulling their bread from their ovens before it could rise and heading out into the unknown future with faith in Divine protection, that God would provide. Yet what did we call this matzah at the very beginning of the seder? We announced that it was “lachma anya,” the bread of affliction which our ancestors ate in the land of Egypt. This was the bread of poverty, a symbol of the difficult plight of the Israelites as slaves to Pharaoh. When we break the matzah early in the seder, we put a smaller piece back in the stack to remind us of that period of impoverishment. The larger piece is set aside; we wrap it up in a napkin and take it out after the seder meal to represent the hope of future redemption. It is understood to be the replacement for the Paschal lamb which was to be eaten on a full stomach, “al hasova.” That matzah, the afikomen, represents our hope for the redemption of our people and of the world. We send out our children to search for it and we get a fore taste of that future redemption and leave that taste on our lips throughout the night.

         Maror too has a dual association. The midrash claims that the enslavement of our people came on gradually. At first our labor was voluntary, a way of offering our thanks to the Egyptians, to Pharaoh for providing a refuge for our ancestors from the famine of that time. Only gradually, things began to change. The new Pharaoh arose and somehow forgot who Joseph was and what he had done in saving Egypt from starvation. He claimed not to know Joseph as he later claimed not to know God. He enlisted his people to build his cities, Pitom and Ramses. It was not an unusual demand for a king in those days. King Solomon did something similar, drafting workers to build the Temple and his palace. But this king of Egypt went far beyond that. Exodus tells us he embittered their lives with mortar and brick, he oppressed them, and worked them with “farekh,” hard labor. He set taskmasters over them to enforce his decrees. According to the rabbis, maror, the romaine lettuce leaf, captures this gradual process. Its tender tips are sweet and tasty but as one bites in further one hits the bitter, hard stems at the bottom of each leaf. Such is the path of tyrants, gradually imposing harsher rules upon their subjects until they are working them to death. If that doesn’t work, perhaps drowning their newborn babies will convey the message.

         Charoset which we use to sweeten the maror is often described also as symbolizing the mortar used in building Pharaoh’s cities. Yet in most formulations it is a sweet combination of nuts and fruit, further sweetened with wine and perhaps sugar or honey. These symbols all reflect our lives, a combination of good and bad, sweetness and bitterness, life and death. Naomi Shemer sang of this human condition in her beautiful piece, “Al Kol Eleh” “For All These,”. “For the honey and the stinger, for the bitter and the sweet, for our baby daughter, sh’mor Eli Hatov, guard over her my good God.”

         In the new Reform Haggadah, Mishkan HaSeder, a poem by Tony Hoagland is printed opposite the Korech section. Hoagland writes of a “spreading shrub with large white waxy blossoms whose stalks are climbed and woven through simultaneously by a different kind of vine with small magenta flowers…the white and purple combination of these species, one seeming to possibly strangle the other, one possibly lifting the other up – it would take both a botanist and a psychologist to figure it all out, but I prefer not to dientanlgle it, because it is more accurate.” So, we wrap matzah around maror and maror around matzah, bitterness around redemption, and redemption around our bitterness. For this is life, this is the history of our people, this is the nature of our world. We are strengthened by adversity, and we sweeten it with optimism and hope.

         Our sages teach that one is to offer thanks to God for the good and the bad in life. We know how to thank God when things go well and celebrate with a festive meal. Too often, though, we find ourselves also tearing black ribbons at graveside and praising “Dayan HaEmet,” the Judge of Truth.

The Matzah and the Maror, the honey and the stinger, we sweeten it in charoset and take a bite out of Hillel’s sandwish as we celebrate our Festival of Freedom. The seder meal marks our Festival of Life with hard-boiled eggs (the mourners’ meal), gefilte fish and chrain (horseradish, more maror), and chicken soup with kneidlach (matzah balls), a healing broth with the symbol of redemption and hope floating on top.

Shabbat Shalom,

Rabbi Edward Friedman