Hey friends! As Pesach approaches I want to remind you a thing:
You may be familiar with the practice of including an orange on the Seder plate. If you are, you probably think the origin of this is a douchey old male rabbi saying “a woman belongs on the bimah like an orange belongs on the Seder plate.” What a nice story about the progress that women have made! Women can be rabbis now, so of course we should have an orange on the Seder plate!
But this is not the real story!
The real story comes from Susannah Heschel, daughter of Abraham Joshua Heschel. She read a story about someone asking a rabbi “what place do lesbians have in the Jewish community?” The rabbi replied “Gays and lesbians belong in Judaism like a crust of bread belongs on the Seder plate.” In response, some college students (Oberlin students, if I’m correct) started putting crusts of bread on their Seder plates.
Susannah liked the thought behind that, but putting a crust of bread on the Seder plate renders everything on it chametz. It ruins Pesach. She didn’t like the implication that being queer was somehow transgressive or ruinous to Judaism.
Nu? She started the practice of putting an orange on the Seder plate instead, to represent the fruitfulness and diversity that LGBTQ people and other marginalized groups bring to Judaism.
She spread this around, but as time went on, the story shifted and changed in the way that folklore often does, until the version of the story she was hearing was the “old douchey rabbi says that women belong on the bimah like an orange belongs on the Seder plate” version.
See what happened? A woman’s words got put in a man’s mouth. Something a woman brought into the world ended up getting attributed to a man.
Don’t let it happen! Tell the real story about why we put an orange on the Seder plate.
