"The Background to the Background of the Orange on the Seder Plate and a Ritual of Inclusion" by Deborah Eisehnbach-Budner and Alex Borns-Weil (which is featured on the Ritualwell website -- www.ritualwell.org) provides the connection of how the Univ. of California Hillel story made it into the Oberlin feminist haggadah. The women who created the 1984 haggadah used a short story written by Susan Fielding (now Shifra Lilith Freewoman) that was inspired by a news clipping which seems to have been about the encounter between the hasidic rebbitzin and the Berkeley students (Eisenbach-Budner and Borns-Weil say the clipping was about a hasidic rebbe). It was in their haggadah that Susannah Heschel encountered the story about bread on the seder plate, which she more widely publicized as an orange on the seder plate... The story of the Oberlin students' haggadah also encompasses their own struggle over whether or not their desire to challenge tradition in favor of inclusiveness should involve actually putting bread on their seder plate.
If anyone knows more about this story... particularly about how a ritual meant to demonstrate the importance of acknowledging the legitmate place of lesbians in Judaism became transformed into a story about inclusion of women rabbis, please add your own comments. By next Passover we hope we'll be able to offer the definitive narrative of this classic example of ritual change in our own time... a.k.a. "the orange on the seder plate"!
"The Background to the Background of the Orange on the Seder Plate and a Ritual of Inclusion" by Deborah Eisehnbach-Budner and Alex Borns-Weil (which is featured on the Ritualwell website -- www.ritualwell.org) provides the connection of how the Univ. of California Hillel story made it into the Oberlin feminist haggadah. The women who created the 1984 haggadah used a short story written by Susan Fielding (now Shifra Lilith Freewoman) that was inspired by a news clipping which seems to have been about the encounter between the hasidic rebbitzin and the Berkeley students (Eisenbach-Budner and Borns-Weil say the clipping was about a hasidic rebbe). It was in their haggadah that Susannah Heschel encountered the story about bread on the seder plate, which she more widely publicized as an orange on the seder plate... The story of the Oberlin students' haggadah also encompasses their own struggle over whether or not their desire to challenge tradition in favor of inclusiveness should involve actually putting bread on their seder plate.
If anyone knows more about this story... particularly about how a ritual meant to demonstrate the importance of acknowledging the legitmate place of lesbians in Judaism became transformed into a story about inclusion of women rabbis, please add your own comments. By next Passover we hope we'll be able to offer the definitive narrative of this classic example of ritual change in our own time... a.k.a. "the orange on the seder plate"!