Like an Orange on a Seder Plate: Balancing Tradition and Innovation

What do you think of when you think of the Passover Seder?

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A poem by Yehuda Amichai

Rabbi Mike Uram, author of Next Generation Judaism: How College Students and Hillel Can Help Reinvent Jewish Organizations

The simplest way I’ve found to describe what it means to “activate a Jewish life” is to think about a Yom Kippur paradigm and a Pesach paradigm. A Yom Kippur paradigm is when you try to get the largest number of people together in a room to feel like they’re part of a large, macro community. The Pesach paradigm, a seder paradigm, is where people host their own because they want to. Every seder is customized based on who’s there and who’s leading it, and the gap between the leaders and the participants is much smaller. I think that the organized Jewish community has come to rely almost solely on the Yom Kippur paradigm. We need more people hosting Shabbat dinners, more people organizing Jewish-style community service, more people getting together in small groups to read Torah...In other words, success is not just how many people come to services on Friday night, it’s also how could a synagogue inspire three times as many people to light Shabbat candles.

Part of what makes the seder great is that everyone makes it their own

בְּכָל־דּוֹר וָדוֹר חַיָּב אָדָם לִרְאוֹת אֶת־עַצְמוֹ, כְּאִלּוּ הוּא יָצָא מִמִּצְרָֽיִם

B’chol dor vador chayav adam lirot et-atzmo, k’ilu hu yatza mimitzrayim.

In every generation, everyone is obligated to see themselves as though they personally left Egypt.

The Roundabout Tale of the Orange on the Seder Plate

Rabbi Elisa Koppel, https://ravblog.ccarnet.org/2018/03/roundabout-tale-orange-seder-plate/

The orange on the seder plate is a newer tradition in the Passover seder, which especially speaks of the balance between the old and the new. This tradition has come to symbolize for some feminism and the equality of women in Judaism.

I remember the first time my aunt put an orange on the seder plate. I think I was in rabbinical school at the time, and it was a powerful symbol, as we perceived at the time, of women in the rabbinate. I was extremely appreciative of the gesture at the time—and that my family was embracing the idea (and not just when I insisted on my parents putting one there when the seder was at our house). And I’ve come to be increasingly appreciative of the orange on the seder plate, even as I’ve learned more about how it came to be—and what it truly symbolizes.

The story, though, is not as we first heard it. The actual tale, from Susannah Heschel’s point of view, comes from an experience she had at Oberlin College in the 1980’s, where she was shown an early feminist Haggadah which suggested including a crust of bread on the seder plate, as a sign of solidarity with Jewish lesbians. She changed the tradition to an orange—symbolizing the fruitfulness of Jewish life when all are included and contribute to the community—and also the pits of hate that should be spit out. She broadened the definition to include all who are marginalized in Jewish life. To her, the crust of bread implied that those who were other were somehow chameitz—that they violated the spirit of Judaism like bread is forbidden on Pesach.

Over time, the story itself transformed into the legend of a women speaking in Florida, at which a man heckled from the audience, saying, “A woman belongs on the bimah as much as an orange on the seder plate.”

As Heschel reflects, “A woman’s words are attributed to a man, and the affirmation of lesbians and gay men is erased. Isn’t that precisely what’s happened over the centuries to women’s ideas?”

But the story of this story gets even more interesting—the women who wrote that Haggadah at Oberlin wrote recently about their version, in which they shared that they had never put the bread on the seder plate.

Instead, they took the crust of bread concept from a short story, and transformed it into leaving a blank space on the seder plate, “A Makom (place) on our seder plate for all who have been condemned and excluded because of fear or ignorance.”

In Heschel’s telling of the story, the act of the students was erased, even in an act of attempting to be inclusive. And so this orange becomes a symbol of those who have been erased…and also the idea of how stories change over time…a symbol, perhaps, of the very idea of the balance of our sacred obligation not to change and that which demands change.

We add an apple to represent this moment—this year. This has multiple meanings (like most of the seder plate). First, it represents the doctors and other medical professionals who are literally risking their lives to help us all (an apple a day keeps the doctor away, after all) during this time of a global pandemic. It also stands for the teachers and all education workers, who have made learning possible throughout the pandemic. And it also represents the food service employees who are also putting themselves at risk so we can have food. It also represents the technology (for many, apple products) have truly been liberating and life saving for many, in several ways, during this pandemic. And it is through this technology that we are able to gather tonight. Perhaps we will continue to include the apple in future years, to remember this year when seders were disordered, when everything was different, and when we adapted every day, in order to continue to thrive, as best we can.

How do we both form and Re-Form our own Jewish life that is, on the one hand true to ourselves and on the other hand true to our heritage...a Judaism that is both unique and authentic?