Why is there an olive on the Seder plate? Why is there an orange on the seder plate? And how can the liberation story of Passover relate to our modern-day struggles against oppression? Traditional Passover haggadot (the books of readings used at seder services) are full of answers but not to these questions. But then again, most seder plates don’t have olives and oranges on them …

I’m always interested in efforts to reclaim, reinvent, or renew religious holidays in ways that make them newly sustaining and politically energizing, so I was excited to learn through my friend Traci of a radical, anti-racist haggadah full of poetic writing and ideas about how to find new relevance and depth in the rituals of Passover: “The Love and Justice in Times of War Haggadah Zine” by Micah Bazant and Dara Silverman. The authors intentionally did not copyright the piece and have made it available for free on the web, encouraging people to print it out and use it as the basis for a “choose-your-own-adventure progressive seder.” Traci used the zine as the basis for a joyful and politicized seder that I had the pleasure of participating in earlier this week.

The zine, which draws on thirty-three different sources, including “A Palestinian Liberation Haggadah,” the “Comedy Trans/gender Queer Liberation Haggadah,” “A Seder Our Foremothers Could Never Have Imagined” from Congregation Beth Simchat Torah’s Annual Feminist Seder, “Next Year in Freedom! Taking our Seder to the Streets,” by Jo Hirshmann and Elizabeth Wilson, “The Courage to Resist: The Boston Workmens’ Circle 2002 Haggadah” by Alice Rothchild, and dozens of others, persistently draws connections between the liberation story of Exodus and contemporary struggles against racism, sexism, and economic exploitation. Drawing from the “Silverman Family Haggadah,” it invites participants to place an olive on the ritual seder plate (which usually includes a boiled egg symbolizing the circle of life and death, a bone or beet to symbolize the offering made at the Temple in ancient times, a bitter herb to symbolize the bitterness of enslavement, charoset to symbolize the mortar that Jewish slaves used to build the structures of Mitzrayim, and a green vegetable to symbolize hope and renewal) to stand witness to the destruction of Palestinian farmers’ olive groves in the occupied territories. Why is there an olive on the seder plate?

Because, for slavery to be truly over, for a people to be truly free, we must know that we can feed ourselves and our children, today, tomorrow, and into the following generations … In the lands of Israel and Palestine, olive groves provide this security. When olive groves are destroyed, the past and future is destroyed. Without economic security, a people can much more easily be conquered, or enslaved … 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. And this is why Passover means the emancipation of all people in the world from the tyranny of kings, oppressors and tyrants. The first emancipation was only a foreshadowing of all the emancipations to follow, and a reminder that the time will come when right will conquer might, and all people will live in trust and peace.

The haggadah zine also includes a speech by Susannah Heschel inviting participants to put an orange on the seder plate in solidarity with lesbians and gay men, and others who are marginalized within the Jewish community. According to Heschel:

I felt that an orange was suggestive of … 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 of Judaism. When lecturing, I often mentioned my custom as one of the many new feminist rituals that have 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 said to me that a woman belongs on the bimah as an orange on the seder plate. 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?

The haggadah zine creates ritual space for children to answer adults’ questions asked by adults, “to remind us that as adults we have a lot to learn from youth. From the U.S. to South Africa to Palestine, young people have been, and are, at the forefront of most of the social justice movements on this planet.”

Traci used the zine to create a powerful and politically engaged seder that was accessible and personally meaningful to all of us non-Jews in attendance, as well. As a Jewish atheist, she said she struggled sometimes with language about “the Source” in the haggadah but still found it compelling. Here are a few words from Traci about what she was trying to do with the seder:

In the Maxwell House Haggadah (I’m serious, it’s the most commonly used haggadah in the U.S. according to the internet, and it’s certainly the one I grew up with and that my family continues to use), the point is that God (singular boy pronouns, capitalized) saved the Jews from slavery. Moses (singular boy pronouns, lower case) played a part because he had a vision from God and God told him what to do. No other Jews are credited with having anything to do with the end of Jewish slavery. So it’s not really a story of successful resistance so much as paternalistic kindness (why this all-powerful God allowed Jews to be enslaved in the first place is left out). The most important thing I wanted to do was to re-imagine the story as collective (and successful) resistance. And to imagine the collective of Jews who resisted as including women. The next thing I was trying to do was to make space for us all to connect to this story with our own stories, and thus for the night to be a celebration of all of us as folks committed to creating positive social change. And if we live in communities of people who have different lived experiences and have dealt with different kinds of oppression, the stories we each bring will be different. I wanted it to serve as a reminder that “another world is possible.”

The part of Traci’s seder during which we each shared a story about successful resistance (however momentary or partial) to oppression was the most powerful part to me. I was excited that the seder I attended the following night at Rabbi Lerner’s Beyt Tikkun Jewish Renewal synagogue also made space for stories such as this (Tikkun intern Tim Rath is putting together a Tikkun Daily post about that seder, so I’ll leave it to him to describe it).

At Traci’s seder, one person told a story about a successful campaign for affordable housing in a gentrifying area of Chicago. Another told a story about a feminist intervention she and some friends made to start a conversation among student activists about how to counter the tendency for sexism and racism to suddenly shape the decision-making dynamics in leftist activist communities in times of crisis. I told a story about how, years ago, back when I was an intern at a journalistic organization in DC, other interns and I collectively organized to demand an end to sexual harassment in our workplace.

We resist oppression so often, whether in small or big ways, but we so rarely share success stories about it. It’s easy to lose heart and hope when the world is so violent and the gains seem so small. It was surprising how rare and powerful this story-sharing space felt, and I would love to find ways to incorporate this ritualized space for resistance stories into holidays that my family celebrates (Easter? MLK Day? Labor Day?) the way Traci incorporated them into her Passover.