Throughout the play “Angels in America,” Tony Kushner examines the intersectionality between religious identity and sexuality. Joe Pitt is one of the protagonists in the play, and he is both a Mormon and a gay man. At first, he struggles to admit that he is gay, partly because he is married to Harper–a woman–partly because he is a republican politician, but also because homosexuality is seen as a sin in Mormonism. In the first act, Louis tells Joe, “well, oh boy. A Gay Republican,” to which Joe responds, “not gay. I’m not gay,” (Kushner 29). Joe cannot admit to his sexuality at first, not even to another gay man. But by the end of the play, Joe starts to accept his sexuality while still identifying as a Mormon.
When looking through this lens of homosexuality and how it is regarded in different religions, it made me think of the addition of an orange on a Passover seder plate and how this move is aligned with queerness. Passover is the holiday where Jews recall the exodus from Jewish enslaved life in Egypt, and this story is told at the Passover seder every year. At the seder there are different items placed on a seder plate to symbolize different objects. That being said, the holiday is thousands of years old, but the orange was only added in the 1980’s. So why an orange?
A Jewish feminist scholar named Susannah Heschel found a feminist Passover haggadah (the text that explains how the seder works) that told the story of a Hasidic rabbi. This rabbi had told a Jewish lesbian that there is as much room for lesbians in Judaism as there is space for bread on the Passover table (bread is the food that is forbidden to eat and even own during the holiday). So, this haggadah instructed people to put a crust of bread on the seder plate. But Heschel thought putting bread on the seder plate was too extreme, so she put an orange in order to show solidarity with gay and lesbian Jews. In this story, the Hasidic rabbi and Joe had the same thought process: they both thought that homosexuality has no place in their religions. However, Joe eventually learns that he can be both gay and a Mormon, and Jews learn that other teachings in Judaism are accepting of queer people.
https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/an-orange-on-the-seder-plate/
