Time to eat the Hillel Sandwich!
When the Temple stood in Jerusalem, the biggest ritual of them all was eating the lamb offered as the Passover sacrifice. The great sage Hillel would put the meat in a sandwich made of matzah, along with some of the bitter herbs. While we do not make sacrifices any more – and, in fact, some Jews have a custom of purposely avoiding lamb during the seder so that it is not mistaken as a sacrifice – we honor this custom by eating a sandwich of the remaining matzah and bitter herbs. Some people will also include charoset in the sandwich to remind us that God’s kindness helped relieve the bitterness of slavery. He would place a small portion of bitter herbs and Paschal sacrifice (according to some versions, just bitter herbs) on a piece of matzah, creating a small open-faced sandwich. Because he was the first known person to do this, and because of his influence and stature in Palestinian Judaism, this practice was added to the Seder and the sandwich was named after him.
Just as a point of #JewishPride from your #FoodBlogger hostess, it should be noted that while the Earl of Sandwich, a British nobleman who lived in the mid-seventeen hundreds, claimed to have invented the sandwich, Hillel popularized this method for serving food almost two millennia before the Earl.
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