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The Orange on the Seder Plate
Contributed by Sivan Butler-Rotholz

  • TOP HAGGADAHS FOR 2023

The story goes something like this: Around the time of the Jewish feminist movement in America--the 1970's--a rabbi plublicly stated that “A woman belongs on the bimah like an orange belongs on a seder plate.” In order to show that women DO belong on the bimah —that women have the right to a place in Jewish ritual and in Jewish leadership—people began to place oranges on their seder plates. 

But recently I found out that this popular story is an urban legend that sprung up around a real and different experience. Here is an excerpt from Professor Susannah Heschel in her own words, from an article that she wrote for The Jewish Daily Forward in 2013:

“At an early point in the seder… I asked each person to take a segment of the orange, make the blessing over fruit and eat the segment in recognition of gay and lesbian Jews and of widows, orphans, Jews who are adopted and all others who sometimes feel marginalized in the Jewish community.

“When we eat that orange segment, we spit out the seeds to repudiate homophobia and we recognize that in a whole orange, each segment sticks together. Oranges are sweet and juicy and remind us of the fruitfulness of gay and lesbian Jews and of the homosociality that has been such an important part of Jewish experience, whether of men in yeshivas or of women in the Ezrat Nashim.”

To honor both the history and the legend that sprung up around it, I invite each of you to take a segment of the orange as we make the blessing over fruit that grows on trees:

Baruch atah adonai eloheinu melech ha'olam, borai p'ri haetz.

Now please eat the segment in recognition of gender equality, of LGBTQIA Jews, and of widows, orphans, Jews who are adopted, interfaith couples and families, and all others who sometimes feel marginalized in the Jewish community.
haggadah Section: Koreich

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