More about Passover

I was at my first Passover seder on Monday. It was a really multitude of experiences for me. At the end of the meal, we sang songs. We were serenaded by Ari – a young man that just graduated from Grinnel college and was playing the guitar wearing a kippa made of colored aluminum of soda cans. He was singing in English and Damara-Nama along with Elsita, a young woman is at once Jewish and Latin American, having being adopted by her mother Lucy Steinitz, who invited me to her house. The dinning room where we were seated listening to this song came alive with warmth as they sang this “Passover !Tyre, Passover ! Tyre, Passover !Trye, !Trye mamma !Ta ! Ta ! Ta” The exclamations are a but a poor substitute for the clicking sounds that are made at the start of the word that we heard. This is a popular Namibian song where !Tyrae means good “We are just saying good at the start of every word,” explained Ari after he strummed his has chord having included “Passover”, “Marov (the bitter herb)” “Elijiah” and “Dayenu” in the song.

Did your Passover have any local variations based on where you live?

What I want to ask you though, is whether you have heard of adding an orange to a seder plate? I am not familiar with how the plate should be, but I was told that unlike the parsley, the egg, the bone (we had a sweet potato) , the orange is a strange addition. Apparently, the orange represents the lesbians and gay men within the Jewish community who are “marginalized” according to the letter that was read at the table, a letter from a woman Rabbi of the Hillel movement written sometime at the end of the 1970s. The organe is peculiar yet it is not chamitz so it can still be added to the plate, I think the reasoning goes. I felt a mixture of discomfort and humor when Dianne, an expat American, was reading the letter, especially when she mentioned that the orange is peeled, shared, eaten and the seeds are spat out so as to reject prejudice and homophobia within the Jewish community. It was funny because it reminded me of the talk about homosexuality at the CJL two years ago, the one Isaiah derided jokingly saying “there is no-one there that will say anything from the Orthodox perspective” when I asked him whether he would go to the talk. It was uncomfortable because in Namibia homosexuality is a taboo and though I wanted to come out to everyone in the subsequent discussion, I knew I could not because I knew some of the guests very well and they knew my family, to whom I was not out to.