Today is Friday, April 15, 2022, the first night of Passover for Jews worldwide. Tonight we gather around the dinner table for the first seder. So for those who mark this holiday in some fashion, I wish you all a “chag sameach” (translated to “happy holidays” in Hebrew). Elliot and I have just returned from our good friend, “Mark,” where we celebrated the first glimmerings of the holiday in our own inimitable style with a culinary potpourri concocted by Elliot, including his own “haroseth” (a pastelike mixture of apples, nuts, cinnamon, and wine used during the seder meal at this holiday, which is symbolic of the clay from which the Israelites made bricks during their Egyptian slavery) and pea soup, where I bought two well-done chickens from Boston Market along with two sides of sweet potato, since we couldn’t use all of our kitchen just yet. For dessert, Mark provided us with Goodman’s macaroons and we also had watermelon slices and mango pieces. Tomorrow we motor to Cherry Hill, New Jersey, to spend the second seder night with our friends, “Harold” and “Rachel,” along with their son and daughter-in-law, and an assortment of animals consisting of two dogs and one cat.

With the observance of Passover, there is an online CNN analysis by Brandon Tensley who writes about how to celebrate the holiday; he comes to the conclusion that there is no “right” way to celebrate the holiday, and that’s OK. He begins his analysis by saying that the Passover seder that he’ll be attending tonight will include an orange on the ceremonial plate, as a means of acknowledging gay and lesbian struggles during the holiday that commemorates Jewish people’s liberation from bondage in Egypt. Traditionally, including an orange on the ceremonial plate is not a usual thing – except for now.

Tensely notes that including the orange is a “relatively recent addition to the seder plate.” He cites this addition as being the brainchild of Susannah Heschel, a Jewish studies professor at Dartmouth College and the daughter of the civil rights leader Abraham Joshua Heschel, who added the piece of fruit in the early 1980s.

In 2001, Heschel wrote that she asked everyone at the table to make the blessing over fruit and to eat the orange as a gesture of solidarity with Jewish lesbians and gay men and others who are marginalized within the Jewish community. She made sure that each orange had a few seeds that had to be spit out – “a gesture of spitting out, repudiating the homophobia that poisons too many Jews.”

The inclusion of the orange on a traditional seder plate “shines a light on a wider pattern,” Tensely writes, which is that “many celebrants have used Passover to signal their support for a variety of freedom struggles – to ask and answer questions about the world around them and the role they want to play in it.”

The first Freedom Seder then was held in the basement of Lincoln Temple, a Black church in Washington, where some 800 people – Jewish, Christian, Black, white – joined together to celebrate the holiday. The event marked the one year that had passed since the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. and also underscored Black-Jewish kinship bonds.

Rabbi Sandra Lawson, the director of racial diversity, equity, and inclusion at Reconstructing Judaism, talked to Tensely about the evolution of Passover. Tensely also speaks to Emily Tamkin, a senior editor at The New Statesman and the author of the forthcoming book, Bad Jews: A History of American Jewish Politics and Identities. She is the host of the seder that Tensely will attend tonight.

In a short conversation with both women, it’s Lawson who says says that Judaism is constantly evolving and that “there are many people who think that there’s a right way to observe any Jewish anything.”

The second woman admits she just wrote a book that basically says there is no one correct way to be Jewish. She believes this holiday is one “about knowing who you are and not letting anybody take that away from you, and also extending that same right to everyone.”

So however you celebrate this holiday, you have the right to commemorate it any way you are comfortable with as long as you recognize the larger context of the holiday on the present and our outer world. If you want to add a tomato to the ceremonial plate to represent farmworkers, highlighting the lack of awareness and the lack of pay and the poor conditions for people who pick tomatoes, go right ahead. This is what Lawson is thinking of doing, actually, this year. Tamkin says that interfaith families may want to include an artichoke to highlight their reality and even add olives to represent peace in the Middle East or Palestinian solidarity. The list of things to include is just limited by one’s imagination in this case.

Tamkin wants to emphasize that it’s important “not to get so hung up on any one song or piece of fruit that you lose sight of the fact that questioning and changing and doing things a little differently and deciding what to keep and what to shed are part of the Passover tradition, too.”

In the meantime, let’s think of Ukrainian Jews coping with Russian brutality amid a holiday that celebrates freedom. There was a video segment on my smartphone featuring CNN’s Jake Tapper interviewing Jewish leaders in that war-torn country as preparations were being made to commemorate the holiday. It was very poignant, to say the least.

So let me repeat a “zissen Pesach” (“have a sweet Passover!”) to all of my Jewish readers out there. I will not be writing my blog tomorrow since I will be away. I hope to write again on Sunday if we’re not stuck in traffic. As we all know, Sunday is Easter for all those Catholics and Christians out there who celebrate this momentous holiday. This year, both holidays almost fall out at the same time, which is nice in a way.

Stay safe and be well.