Our Seder Plate | Passover haggadah by Progressive Jewish Alliance

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Kharoset-- A sweet mixture

Reader 1: Kharoset-- why do we eat kharoset?

Group: Apples, nuts, cinnamon, and wine are combined to make this sweet condiment!

Reader 2: It is the color of clay or mortar. It reminds us of the bricks and mortar that the Israelites are said to have made when they built the Pharaoah palaces and cities. Let us think of the labour of building. Then of point when one has enough of inequitable work and forms a union, a strike, a revolution, for this is our ancestry.

At the same time, the taste of kharoset is sweet and it reminds us of the sweetness of freedom.

Reader 3: Let us all eat kharoset on a piece of matzah

Korech: The Hillel sandwich

At your table: Place some maror and charoset between two pieces of

matzah and give the sandwich to the person on our left.

In doing this, we recall our sage Hillel (head of the supreme council of Yisrael, 1st century C.E.) who, in remembrance of the loss of the Temple, created the Korech sandwich. He said that by eating the Korech, we would taste the bitterness of slavery mixed with the sweetness of freedom. This practice suggests that part of the challenge of living is to taste freedom even in the midst of oppression, and to be ever conscious of the oppression of others even when we feel that we are free.

If I am not for myself, who will be for me? But if I am for myself only, what am I? And if not now, when? -Hillel

Baytsah-- Egg

Reader 1: Baytsah--- why do we eat baytsah?

Group: Baytsah is the egg of life. Each of us begins as an egg and grows to adulthood.

Reader 2: The egg reminds us of our evolutionary past and the gifts of human inheritance. But the egg is fragile. It represents potential that can be destroyed. Left alone, its life would perish.

Reader 3: Growing life needs warmth and love, security and guidance, hope and vision. To achieve their full potential, human beings need the support and encouragement of family and community. Beitzim symbolize the fragility and interdependence of life. We become dependent in old age, and return to a fragile state, showing the cyclical forces of nature.

(Pass around eggs, eat the egg)

Dipping of the Green in Salt Water

Reader 1: Salt water-- why do we dip our food in salt water two times on this night?

Group: The first time the salty taste reminds us of the tears we cried when we were slaves. The second time, the salt water and the green help us to remember the ocean and green plants and the earth, from which we get air and water and food that enable us to live.

(consume more parsley and salt water)

Beets

Reader 1: Blood of the lamb

Group: Z’roa means shankbone or thigh bone

Reader 2: The lamb’s bone takes us to the ancient times to the shepherd’s festival of Pesach. It was celebrated at the time of the full moon in the month that the lambs and goats were born. At that time, each family would slaughter a young lamb or goat for a spring feast. Today we represent this tradition with the beet, which stains our hands red like blood.

Reader 1:Blood symbolizes the lambs sacrificed during biblical times, and specifically the lambs slaughtered during the Pesach story to mark the doorposts of Jewish homes to indicate to the angel of death to exclude their homes from being stricken by the tenth plague, death of the firstborn. It also symbolizes God’s outstretched arm (זרוע) which delivered the Hebrews.

(pass around and eat beets)

Olives olive oil زيت زيتون zeit zeituun

Reader 1: What do these olives mean? Tonight we include olives on our seder plate for two reasons: 1) to give voice to the environmental and social justice issues with uprooting olive trees in this area and 2) because for millennia the olive branch has been the symbol of peace and new beginnings, each of us seeks to make peace where there has been war and create new alternatives with each ‘olive tree’ we plant.

Reader 2: In the land of Palestine, olive groves provide financial and food security, and sustain the health of the earth and families. When Palestinian olive groves are destroyed by the State of Israel, the past and future is destroyed. This practice of political oppression also destroys the earth and renders the land uninhabitable. Without economic security, a people can much more easily be conquered, or forced to flee their homeland.

Reader 3: And so this year, we eat an olive, to make real our understanding of what it means each time a bulldozer plows up a grove. Without the taste of olives, there will be no taste of justice, no promise of a peaceful future.

Keep one olive on the Seder plate, and pass out olives and eat with the orange after the prayer.

All say together the Blessing over Fruit from Trees!

Baruch atah Adonai, eloheinu Melech ha’olam boreh p’ri ha-eitz

Blessed are You, Source, whose spirit fills all creation and brings forth fruit from the trees.

Orange: برتقال burtuqaal

The Origin of the Orange on the Seder Plate

Susannah Heschel, April, 2001

Eli Black Professor of Jewish Studies Dartmouth College

"In the early 1980s, the Hillel Foundation invited me to speak on a panel at Oberlin College. While on campus, I came across a Haggada that had been written by some Oberlin students to express feminist concerns. One ritual they devised was placing a crust of bread on the Seder plate, as a sign of solidarity with Jewish lesbians ("there's as much room for a lesbian in Judaism as there is for a crust of bread on the Seder plate").

At the next Passover, I placed an orange on our family's Seder plate. During the first part of the Seder, I asked everyone to take a segment of the orange, make the blessing over fruit, and eat it as a gesture of solidarity with Jewish lesbians and gay men, and others who are marginalized within the Jewish community (I mentioned widows in particular).

Bread on the Seder plate brings an end to Pesach - it renders everything chometz. And its symbolism suggests that being lesbian is being transgressive, violating Judaism. I felt that an orange was suggestive of something else: the fruitfulness for all Jews when lesbians and gay men are contributing and active members of Jewish life. In addition, each orange segment had a few seeds that had to be spit out - a gesture of spitting out, repudiating the homophobia [all gender oppression: transphobia, cissexism, sexism, misogny] that poisons too many Jews.

When lecturing, I often mentioned my custom as one of many new feminist rituals that had been developed in the last twenty years. Somehow, though, the typical patriarchal maneuver occurred: My idea of an orange and my intention of affirming lesbians and gay men were transformed. Now the story circulates that a MAN stood up after I lecture I delivered and said to me, in anger, that a woman belongs on the bimah as much as an orange on the Seder plate. My idea, a woman's words, are attributed to a man, and the affirmation of lesbians and gay men is simply erased. Isn't that precisely what's happened over the centuries to women's ideas?

Open Space

Concept of open space:

Reader 1: No space is 'safe' or entirely inclusive. As hard as people may try, there is always someone left out, or someone who cannot be present, or is uncomfortable and so on. This space is to allow any one person or any group of people who are currently excluded to be considered. Who is in the room and who is not? What is symbolized on our seder plate and what are we forgetting? The space is open to allow it to be filled in whatever way the person/group determines is right for them. It is an open space to be welcomed and heard.

haggadah Section: -- Cup #2 & Dayenu