Passover is a holiday celebrating the Jew's escape from their enslavement in Egypt with the help of their God. This year, Passover begins on the evening of March 25 and ends on the evening of April 2.
On the first two nights of Passover, there are Seders, ritual feast ceremony things, during which the Haggadah, which tells the order of the Seder (it's kind of like a program. In it, there are prayers, poems, the story of Passover, etc.) is read. One of the elements of the Seder is the Seder plate, a plate with different foods that represent different aspects of the holiday.
On a traditional Seder plate, there are:
- Maror, or or bitter herbs, to represent the suffering of the Jews when they were enslaved in Egypt
- Charoset, chopped up fruits and nuts, to represent the mortar used by the Jew to build pyramids, and storehouses, and the likes, when they were in Egypt
- Parsley dipped in saltwater to represent the tears of the slaves
- A shank bone, to represent the Pesach (Passover) offering at the Temple (which was destroyed a long time ago)
- A hard boiled egg, which I was always told stood for rebirth, but apparently it's a sign of mourning over the destruction of the temple.
- Matzo, unleavened bread (you're not allowed to eat anything leavened, like regular bread, on Passover), to represent the bread that the Jews made in the dessert because they left Egypt too quickly for their bread to rise)
For the few of you who read this and have heard of putting an orange on the Seder plate, you've probably heard this story to go with it:
Susannah Heschel, a Jewish feminist scholar was giving a lecture, when a rabbi stood up and shouted that a woman belonged on the Bimah (the alter at which the Torah is read) as much as an orange belonged on the Seder plate.
So as a way to show support for the changing role of women in Judaism (and as a way to laugh in that Rabbis face), people put oranges on their Seder plate.
The thing is, that's not what actually happened. Its a much longer story than that, and I promise that the orange on the Seder plate didn't originally mean what you think it does. This is the real story*:
In 1979, A rebbitzin (Rabbis' wife) was speaking about women and Jewish law at a Jewish Women's group at University of California Berkeley. Someone asked her about her thoughts on lesbians in Judaism. She said that she saw it as a minor transgression, like eating bread on Passover (which you're not supposed to do, but in the scheme of things, isn't that bad). The woman's group was later writing a Haggadah for a Seder, and the comment was brought back up. They decided that what the rebbitzin said didn't match up with the experience of the Lesbians in the group. Rather, they decided that being a Jewish lesbian was a much larger issue, closer to putting bread on the Seder plate (an enormous transgression on Passover, which effectively brings an end to it). So that year, the group put a piece of bread on their Seder plate, in solidarity with Jeish lesbians, to represent the way that they felt that lesbians were treated in Judaism (the idea that "there's as much room for a lesbian in Judaism as there is for a crust of bread on the Seder plate").
Susannah Heschel came across this group's Haggadah a few years later, and decided that instead of putting bread on her Seder plate, which she felt suggested that being a lesbian violated Judaism and a sense of hopelessness, she would put and orange on her Seder plate to represent the fruitfulness that lesbians and gay men brought Judaism when they are allowed to contribute and participate. She also had the people at her Seder spit out the orange seeds to represent the homophobia that had to be spit out of Judaism. She mentioned the tradition at many of her lectures.
From there, the story somehow evolved into the aforementioned one about the sexist rabbi.
Bet you didn't know that, did you?
I find it funny that Jews around the country are going to put an orange on their Seder plate next week and they're not going to have any idea where this tradition really came from. I also find it twistedly ironic that the story got changed in this way. It took something that symbolized the marginalization of gay and lesbian Jews and sanitized it, twisted it into something more acceptable (I'd say that its a lot more acceptable to be a Jewish woman than a Jewish lesbian). What happened to the tradition is exactly what the tradition originally meant to protest.
That really frustrates me. The change just shows that there still isn't really tolerance for the LGBTQ+ community in Judaism.
The current tradition is still nice. It's wonderful that it supports women in Judaism, as a lot of Jewish tradition is very sexist. But it would be nice if there was some acknowledgment of what this all started as. It is not something that deserves to be swept under the rug and ignored.
Photo link: http://www.flickr.com/photos/photos_by_laurence/5636789948/
*if you click on the link, look at the first few pages of the first chapter of the book
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