Eclectic, with a side of awesome

Have just returned from Seder with Ruth's family. It is the first one I have been to since the ones my Catholic school held lo these many years ago. See, the optional Religion class at said school was trying to be about All Religions Everywhere but with one entire semester of Catholic doctrine, and due to said semester nobody who wasn't Catholic actually signed up for the class. Except me, because my parents thought it would be good for me. As part of the Awareness Of Other Religions bit the Religion class had an annual Seder, which involved all the Catholics in the grade (and me), but did not actually include the four or five students who were actually Jewish, because they weren't in the course. There was an air of pathetic sincerity about the whole thing, and a lot of phonetically read Hebrew. And the same grape juice with which the Communion practices were held. But they did have an awesome charoset recipe, which I need to dig out and give to Ruth's family, assuming it turns out to be kosher for Passover-- I give it about a fifty-fifty shot.

This Seder was much more relaxed, due to more than ninety percent of the participants actually being Jewish and therefore not having the terrible fear of somehow getting everything wrong in an inadvertently disrespectful way. Anything that might be perceivable as disrespect is entirely intentional.

"Why do we place an orange on our Seder plate?" asked my mother-in-law, who was going through the shank bone (vegetarian) and the herbs and the matzo and had worked her way round to it.

"I know!" said Ruth, bouncing a little, as she does. "It's because once there was a rabbi, and he was asked by someone in his congregation 'What is the place of women in Judaism?' And he said, 'There is as much place for a woman on the bimah as there is for an orange on the Seder plate'."

"Correct," my mother-in-law said, setting the orange back down, and moving onwards.

I have this vague urge to call up my elementary school and tell them they're missing the orange.

Eclectic, with a side of awesome

Have just returned from Seder with Ruth's family. It is the first one I have been to since the ones my Catholic school held lo these many years ago. See, the optional Religion class at said school was trying to be about All Religions Everywhere but with one entire semester of Catholic doctrine, and due to said semester nobody who wasn't Catholic actually signed up for the class. Except me, because my parents thought it would be good for me. As part of the Awareness Of Other Religions bit the Religion class had an annual Seder, which involved all the Catholics in the grade (and me), but did not actually include the four or five students who were actually Jewish, because they weren't in the course. There was an air of pathetic sincerity about the whole thing, and a lot of phonetically read Hebrew. And the same grape juice with which the Communion practices were held. But they did have an awesome charoset recipe, which I need to dig out and give to Ruth's family, assuming it turns out to be kosher for Passover-- I give it about a fifty-fifty shot.

This Seder was much more relaxed, due to more than ninety percent of the participants actually being Jewish and therefore not having the terrible fear of somehow getting everything wrong in an inadvertently disrespectful way. Anything that might be perceivable as disrespect is entirely intentional.

"Why do we place an orange on our Seder plate?" asked my mother-in-law, who was going through the shank bone (vegetarian) and the herbs and the matzo and had worked her way round to it.

"I know!" said Ruth, bouncing a little, as she does. "It's because once there was a rabbi, and he was asked by someone in his congregation 'What is the place of women in Judaism?' And he said, 'There is as much place for a woman on the bimah as there is for an orange on the Seder plate'."

"Correct," my mother-in-law said, setting the orange back down, and moving onwards.

I have this vague urge to call up my elementary school and tell them they're missing the orange.