Haggadah: Karpas Six: Rav Kook Continued

Transcribed and prepared by Anna Beller: So Rav Kook explains that the most powerful indication of freedom from eating is a vegetable, even more so a vegetable dipped in salt. Why?

Because the Gemara always says that vegetables increase your hunger. So in the house of Rav, whenever they were broke they wouldn’t eat vegetables, because the Gemara says they increase your appetite. It doesn’t fill you up the same way, you something solid inside of you. In Gemara terms they create need more than satisfaction. The need to have constant sustenance.

Therefore if you eat something salty you cant just stop, you need water or something after eating something salty. What do we do, we take a vegetable that’ll make me hungry and take salt which will make me need more. I take the vegetable and dip it in salt and that it. I am so free that even the things that compel me to eat more, I am even free of that. A sense of freedom is in that. That’s Karpas.