Remember when President Reagan received much scorn for suggesting school lunch ketchup qualifies as a vegetable (for the full story go here)? Well, that’s nothing compared with the recent decision of Rabbi Dov Lior, one of the most creative and authoritative halakhic deciders of the National Religious community, that the proper blessing for chocolate is “Boreh pri ha’etz” – the blessing for fruits, as Srugim reported Sunday.
During his regular class at Beit Orot yeshiva in Jerusalem, Rabbi Lior suggested that since chocolate is made from cacao beans, it should be considered a fruit. Rabbi Elkana Lior, his son, explained the unusual decision based on the 1906 halakhic tome by Rabbi Yisrael Meir Kagan “Mishna Brura” (Heb: Clarified Teaching), who held that the fruit of the tree blessing is not conditioned on maintaining the original shape of the fruit, but rather on the manner with which people usually consume it, even if, through processing, the final product does not resemble the fruit at all — so long as some of the characteristics of the original fruit are maintained. This would cover apple sauce, for instance, and since the common way of consuming the fruit of the cacao tree is in chocolate packages, the proper blessing must be Fruit of the Tree.
During the same class, a student asked why the blessing for sugar, made from beats or cane, is “shehakol” (the blessing that covers almost literally everything one consumes that isn’t otherwise defined as coming from a tree or a bush — meat, chicken, fish, eggs, milk, gum and cheese). Rabbi Lior responded that sugar really should have had the “Fruit of the earth” blessing, but it has been so common to refer to sugar as “shehakol” that it is acceptable, which is supported by Maimonides’ view that if the fruit product is unrecognizably changed from its original appearance it will have become like a chunk of salt and so its blessing is “shehakol.” However, chocolate, which retains the color of the original bean, should be treated as fruit of the tree.
Nevertheless, when asked why we shouldn’t allow the equally common practice of endowing chocolate with the “shehakol” blessing, Rabbi Lior responded that if a custom is rooted in an error it should be changed. He noted that the late great halakhic decider Rabbi Shlomo Zalman Auerbach attempted to correct the errors of the multitudes but the latter wouldn’t heed his call. And so, Rabbi Lior insisted, since the majority of religious Jews are making the erroneous “shehakol” blessing on chocolate, we should become used to making the fruit of the tree blessing, until we no longer consider it an odd thing.