guide to the jewplexed

On Passover, What is the Bean of our Affliction?
 
The real flavor of Passover is matzah, which is referred to in the haggadah as the "Bread of affliction." But have you ever tasted chocolate covered matzah? Taste-wise, not afflicting at all. So why is the cocoa bean, the stuff that chocolate is made from, being called by some in the Jewish community, "the bean of affliction"?
 
After all, for many households, chocolate helps to sweeten the celebration. passover beanA box of dark centers, or nutty chews makes a popular seder hostess gift that is often empty by evening's end.
 
Chocolate also helps me get through the holiday. After about five or six days of eating Passover food, I start to crave the dark sweet stuff. Fortunately, to get me through, there are several companies whose chocolate products are kosher for Passover.
 
Yet, Ilana Schatz, of the Fair Trade Judaica organization (FTJ) has darkened my holiday with news that turns it bitter sweet. For the Jewish community, she has opened the box on the chocolate trade, sending the message that, "Around fifty percent of all chocolate comes from the Ivory Coast, and there is documentation about the role of trafficked and sometimes enslaved children, in the cocoa fields."
 
According to the FTJ website, "The children in Africa who still experience slavery, trafficked from their homes to work in the cocoa fields to bring us our bitter-sweet dessert. They spend long hours, working in hazardous conditions, not going to school, and losing their childhoods."
 
Schatz, who I spoke with recently said that, "Currently there in no Fair Trade kosher for Passover chocolate on the market," causing a personal holiday panic, and calls from concerned congregations around the U.S.
 
According to the FTJ web site, fair trade is a worldwide movement that connects consumers in the west with certified producers whose workers "enjoy freedom of association, safe working conditions, and living wages. Forced child labor is strictly prohibited."
 
Fair trade coffees like those available from Trader Joe's and other outlets are probably the best known examples of a food product that has received certification.
 
So, as we sit down to celebrate the going out from Egypt, we don't have a fair trade kosher for Passover chocolate product on our tables: one that is certified not to be a product of slavery, or of exploited child labor. That's a dark and not very sweet message for our great holiday of freedom.
 
Schatz and her organization are taking several steps to correct this injustice. For a night when food symbolism is on the menu, they have photos of cocoa beans to put on your seder table to symbolically remind you of child labor.
 
There is also a petition that encourages kosher food manufacturers to begin sourcing fair trade cocoa beans for their chocolate Passover products.
 
To connect with the seder's liturgy, they have prepared an insert for your haggadah that puts the message into a Passover context. For the text of the haggadah's, "Avadim Hayinu," "we were slaves," they suggest the following...
 
"The haggadah reminds us that 'We were slaves to pharaoh in Mitzrayim and then Adonai brought us out of there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm.' We were freed from slavery yet slavery in not an institution only of the past; it still exists among us.
 
Slavery does not end through hope and passivity, but by powerful action. Our action to end slavery is not only important for our own time but also for its effects on future generations."
 
Each year the seder ends with the words, "Next year in Jerusalem," and in the next year Schatz and her organization are looking for a willing manufacturer to create a fair trade certified kosher for Passover chocolate.
 
"I am already planning a chocolate charoset cook-off," she said.


Edmon J. Rodman has written about making his own matzah for JTA, Jewish love music for the Jerusalem Post, yiddisheh legerdemain for the Los Angeles Jewish Journal, a Bernie Madoff Halloween mask for the Forward, and what really gets stuck in the La Brea Tar Pits for the Los Angeles Times. He has edited several Jewish population studies, and is one of the founders of the Movable Minyan, an over twenty-year-old chavura-size, independent congregation. He once designed a pop-up seder plate. In 2011 Rodman received a First Place Simon Rockower Award for "Excellence in Feature Writing" from the American Jewish Press Association."