This past week, as you know, Passover and Easter converged on the calendar. We try to find time to talk about holidays of many kinds — their origin and meaning, the ways they are celebrated in our own community and in the wider world, and how they might connect to stories and ceremonies outside of the Jewish and Christian traditions. Our students have been exploring and discussing these two holidays and many others in their classrooms for quite a few years, so I’m always surprised when only a few students contribute what they know about them to our discussions. That was the case again this year. There was interest and there were questions, but the information itself was apparently sparse within the group.

We began talking about Christian period of fasting known as Lent several weeks ago, when Diane brought doughnuts for our building on the Tuesday before Lent began. We discussed fasting then — how and why it might be done, linked it to the daytime avoidance of food and water during Ramadan, talked about times in which Jews customarily fast, and what the Lenten connection was to Christianity as it led up to Easter. We talked about Mardi Gras (“Fat Tuesday”), Carnival, Pancake Day, Doughnut Day, and Fastnacht Day. As it was common in many places to avoid meat and all related products during Lent, the day before was often one of feasting and trying to use up all of the fat and meat in the house — hence, we have Carnival (carne = meat) and all those fried treats.

Several students shared information about Passover this week. We had talked about it before during our building sing, when we did some songs that had been created by enslaved black people before the Civil War. The songs linked the story of the captivity (and subsequent freedom) of the enslaved Jews in Egypt to the hopes that a similar emancipation would come to the slaves in the United States. We discussed the symbolic importance of food. What was on the Seder plate, and why? Interestingly, after one student discussed several of the usual items, another one said that there was always an orange on the plate at his house. An orange? Why? He told a story similar to this one that is shared by Anita Silvert at the website of the Jewish United Fund of Chicago:

It started with Dr. Susannah Heschel. The story you may have heard goes something like this: After a lecture given in Miami Beach, a man (usually Orthodox) stood up and angrily denounced feminism, saying that a woman belongs on a bima (pulpit) the way an orange belongs on a Seder plate. To support women’s rightful place in Jewish life, people put an orange on their Passover tables.

However, she goes on to say that the story is false and provides a different origin:

Heschel herself tells the story of the genesis of this new ritual in the 2003 book, The Women’s Passover Companion (JPL). It all started with a story from Oberlin College in the early 1980’s. Heschel was speaking at the Hillel, and while there, she came across a haggadah written by some Oberlin students to bring a feminist voice into the holiday. In it, a story is told about a young girl who asks a Rebbe what room there is in Judaism for a lesbian. The Rebbe rises in anger and shouts, “There’s as much room for a lesbian in Judaism as there is for a crust of bread on the seder plate.” 

Though Heschel was inspired by the idea behind the story, she couldn’t follow it literally. Besides the fact that it would make everything — the dish, the table, the meal, the house — unkosher for Passover, it carried a message that lesbians were a violation of Judaism itself, that these women were infecting the community with something impure. So, the next year, Heschel put an orange on the family seder plate, “I chose an orange because it suggests the fruitfulness for all Jews when lesbians and gay men are contributing and active members of Jewish life.”

(You might enjoy reading more about this at the website linked above.)

We moved on to Easter. Like most Christian holidays, it carries with it many elements that are much older than and entirely unconnected to Christianity. After we talked about the execution and belief in the resurrection of Jesus, we talked a bit about foods commonly eaten on Easter Sunday and other times that there were traditional foods. One child asked about meat loaf. Meat loaf? He said yes, that he had heard that there was a holiday on which people were supposed to eat meat loaf. That left us all scratching our heads, but perhaps it’s true.

Finally, one child asked about all those eggs and the Easter Bunny. We explained that those were part of springtime celebrations and rituals that had their beginnings in Northern Europe long before anyone there had heard about Christianity. As often happened, Christians were able to connect local practices to their own teachings in order to support their efforts to convert people to a different world view. In this case, they linked their belief in the resurrection of Jesus to the resurrection of life in the earth after the bleakness of winter, so the traditions merged. There’s an interesting article about all that and more here.

Following tangents, as we often do, we compared notes about foods that most of our students find familiar but were perhaps not part of the diet of many of their parents or grandparents, depending on their own ethnicity and neighborhoods. Asian food, fresh produce that we can get out-of-season, food from Mexico and South America . . . pizza, sushi, fast food chains, tofu, quinoa, hummus . . . it goes on and on. When Mark and I said that those things were not part of our own childhoods, students were stunned. What did we eat?

We also discussed earlier influences on specific cuisines. Italians didn’t have tomatoes until they were brought back from the so-called New World and probably didn’t have pasta until travelers brought the idea of noodles back from Asia. It was Spanish conquistadores who found potatoes in Peru and started growing them back home, and it was the Elizabethan Sir Walter Raleigh who first planted them in Ireland. Diets change when we venture out of our own neighborhoods.

We encourage you to talk with your children about what you ate when you were growing up and what things were probably not part of your parents’ childhood food choices. It’s evidence that supports the many ways in which our students are growing up in a much more global community than previous generations did.

And one more thing about the Easter bunny —

In case you don’t recognize him, that’s Donald Trump’s press secretary, Sean Spicer, in the bunny suit at the White House Easter Egg Roll ten years ago . . .