The Frozen Orange: A Seder Symbol for People Who Struggle with Mental Illness in Our Community

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Pass the frozen orange around. Have each person hold it until they can’t hold it any longer.

Placing an orange on the seder plate is a widely observed contemporary Pesach tradition. A common story circulates along with this ritual, which goes something like this: a Jewish woman is studying to be a rabbi. An old misogynist rabbi tells her, “A woman belongs on the bimah like an orange belongs on the seder plate.” So what does she do? That year on Pesach, she puts an orange on her seder plate.

The only problem with this story is that it’s false. The tradition of putting an orange on the seder plate actually originated with feminist scholar Susannah Heschel. While visiting Oberlin College in the early 80s, Heschel was introduced to a feminist haggadah that included a ritual of putting a piece of chametz on the seder plate to represent our need for including lesbians in Jewish spaces. Heschel felt that to put bread on the seder plate would be to accept that queerness violates Judaism like chametz violates Pesach. So instead, she put an orange on her seder plate that year. To her, it symbolized the fruitfulness of Jewish life when gays and lesbians are able to contribute. The oranges also had seeds which had to be spit out, which teaches us to repudiate homophobia in Judaism.

Heschel wrote, about the story about women not belonging on the bimah, “The typical patriarchal maneuver occurred: my idea of an orange was transformed. A woman’s words are attributed to a man, and the affirmation of lesbians and gay men is erased.”

On Tu Bishvat, the Jewish New Year for trees, the orange is associated with the Kabbalistic realm of Assiyah—the world of bodies, action, and our relationships with ourselves. Oranges’ tough protective peels symbolize kelipot, the ‘shells’ or ‘peels’ that surround our soul and prevent us from connecting with the divine light. Hopelessness and heartbreak cause our souls to hide from love, to isolate themselves from community and refuse help when it is offered to us. In order to live fruitful lives, we must peel away the kelipot from our souls, even though doing so leaves us vulnerable. Through radical vulnerability, we not only allow our souls to heal, we become a blessing.

But why a frozen orange on the Seder table? The affirmation of queer Jews is still here, as is the Kabbalist meaning of vulnerability. But through freezing our seder’s orange, we add a new layer of meaning to this rich ritual: uplifting the people in our lives who struggle with mental illness.

Holding frozen oranges is a common coping skill among those who struggle with their mental health. Many people with disorders like anxiety, borderline, and PTSD practice holding something very cold to distract themselves from extreme stress or overwhelming emotions. Holding cold things like frozen oranges is also an excellent grounding skill for those who are having flashbacks or dissociating. When holding a frozen orange, it’s hard to think about anything other than how cold our hands are. They have the power to put us back in our bodies when we feel like we’re watching ourselves from far away. Tonight, we hold a frozen orange in our hands to experience the world around us more fully, to feel our feet planted firmly on the earth, and to feel more connected to each other.

Frozen oranges don’t melt the same way as ice melts. Holding an ice cube in our hands is a fleeting experience—within minutes, sometimes seconds, the ice cube melts away, and we are left with a feeling of wet emptiness. We can hold frozen oranges for longer without hurting our hands or melting the ice away, but the experience is more subtle than that: if we hold them long enough, we can feel them change in our hands as they start to thaw inside. Like winter slowly becoming spring, the frozen oranges we use ground ourselves and distract from acute distress quietly remind us that transformation is possible.

Even among communities that struggle together, mental illness is all too often a private, lonesome struggle. The stigma around it ensures that people who are struggling stay quiet. Mental illness and its stigma make us feel alone, and lead to us isolating ourselves out of hopelessness and shame. So often mental illness is considered a personal problem—a chemical imbalance at best and a character defect at worst, when in fact most mental illness is caused by environmental factors. The medical care and social supports we have access to, our housing status, the quality of air we breathe and water we drink, the care our communities provide, the adversity we face as children, the trauma we survive: all of these factors cause and worsen mental illness.

The seder asks us to relive the trauma of slavery and the bitterness of oppression, not to wallow in our misery but to heal the wounds these traumas left, by imagining liberation. Tonight, we welcome vulnerability and encourage all of us to accept our brokenness and the brokenness of our world, so that together we may heal.

haggadah Section: Introduction

Source: Min Ha-Meitzar: An Abolitionist Haggadah from the Narrow Place by Noraa Kaplan