We had a fantastic Seder this year. Engaging, inspiring, relevant.

After collecting all the resources, reviewing the Haggadah and planning the Seder activity/discussion inserts, I am always amazed at what actually does and doesn’t happen at the Seder. Since the Seder is an organic gathering – part keva/fixed traditional text; part kavannah/inspiration – the plans for the evening give way to inspired discussion, activities used while others are shelved, and more. Read on for this year’s favorites, including:

1. Deal or No Deal: Passover Edition
2. Where’s Your Egypt? Game
3. What Doesn’t Belong on the Seder Table, and
4. Progressive Seder: Moving Around during the Seder

Deal or No Deal: Passover Edition
My youngest son created a game, based on the successful TV show. In 18 numbered envelopes (briefcases) taped to a board, he placed post-it notes with dollar values. Each dollar amount was accompanied by a mathematical problem. The bolded number defined the actual number in play. So it might say “$4,000,000 – 4o x 100,000”. The seder participant who chose that briefcase (envelope) had to explain the connection of the bolded number to Passover. In this case, 40 might represent either the number of years wandering in the wilderness, the number of days Moses was up top Mt. Sinai, or one third of Moses’ lifetime (120/3). Some numbers were easier; some more difficult. Almost everyone at the seder got to pick a briefcase.

The numbers included:

• $10,000,000 = 1 x 10,000,000 = One God
• $4,000,000 = 4 x 1,000,000 = 4 children, 4 cups of wine, 4 questions
• $2,000,000 = 2 x 1,000,000 = 2 times we dip, 2 times we wash our hands
• $603,550 = 603,550 x 1 = number of Israelite males of fighting age who left each, according to the census (which, if you include the same number of females plus children, elderly and the infirmed, yields 2 million people leaving Egypt)
• $400,000 = 40 x 10,000 = 40 years Moses in Pharaoh’s court, years Moses in Wilderness, years wandering in Wilderness, days Moses on Mt. Sinai
• $400,000 = 400,000 = 400,000 people murdered during the continuing Darfuran genocide
• $120,000 = 120 x 1000 = 120 years that Moses lived. Extra points for the 3 period of 40 years (according to tradition, he spend 40 years in Pharaoh’s court, 40 years in the desert after killing the taskmaster before the Burning Bush, 40 years wandering after the Exodus before the Israelites entered the promised land)
• $98,000 = 49 x 2,000 = 49 days of Counting the Omer, 49 days between leaving Egypt and receiving Torah at Mt. Sinai
• $61,300 = 613 x 100 = 613 mitzvot (commandments) in the Torah
• $48,000 = 48 x 1000 = 48 or 1948, the year that Israel was reborn
• $10,000 = 5 x 2,000 = 5 books of Torah
• $72 = 36 x 2 = 36 Ladmed Vavnikim, 36 righteous people of each generation because of whose acts of justice and kindness the world continues to exist
• $18 = 18 x 1 = 18 minutes the flour can be in contact with water when making matzah
• $13 = 13 x 1 = 13 things that Who Knows? (also age of Bar/Bat Mitzvah)
• $3 = 3 x 1 = 3 pieces of matzah in the matzah holder during the Seder
• $2 = 2 = 2 zuzim used to buy a goat in Chad Gadya

Where’s Your Egypt? Game
To introduce guest to each other as a way to begin the seder, we played “Where’s Your Egypt. We told everyone that we are taught b’chol dor vador chayav adam lirot et atzmo k’eelu hu yatzah mimitzrayim – that in each and every generation, we each must see ourselves as if we went forth from Egypt. Egypt or Mitzrayim is that narrow, darkened place, from where it is difficult to venture forth, where (initially) you see only pain, problem or hopelessness. Your Egypt could be something personal, something in the world, something in between.

Anyone could answer in any order, but we could not begin until everyone shared their Egypt. They should say their name and answer “Where’s Your Egypt?” Answers included:

• The pressure of school
• The economy, no jobs, people getting laid off
• The genocide in Darfur
• The anxiety of SAT’s and ACT’s
• The earthquake that hit Italy
• The threat from Iran
• So much homework
• The rockets that were being shot from Gaza into Israel
• Friends struggling with cancer
• The speed with which grandchildren were growing up

What Doesn’t Belong on the Seder Table?
This year, we placed a variety of unholy objects on our seder table: fancy sunglasses, a frisbee, a Guitar Hero guitar, pineapple, watermelon, funny winter hat, extension cord, and more. Before we sang Mah Nishtanah or The Four Questions. I taught that the number and types of questions asked in Mah Nishtanah actually changed over the course of history (the reclining question was added in the Talmud because the rabbis liked the number 4 but, since the destruction of the Temple, it no longer made sense to ask the Mishnah’s question about why we eat certain meats). I explained that the great scholar Maimonides would even remove a table from in front of the children so that they would recognize something unique and different. This would provide the entre into the Maggid, or telling the story.

So we divided everyone into teams (mixing people up with people they did not know). Each team received a piece of paper and pen. They had to find at least 6 things on the seder table that did not usually belong. They then needed to decide what this object taught about Passover or the lessons of Passover. After ten minutes of moving around (including the opportunity to eat some of the foods that we dip – veggies, fruits, artichoke dip, sweet dips, etc.), everyone shared something from their list as well as their explanation. If someone had a different interpretation of the object, we shared that as well.

Some of their explanations included:

• fancy sunglasses: the sun was overpowering during slavery, the fanciness shows that overindulgence that threatens to overpower our focus on our basic needs
• pineapple: though can cause pain from its outside but is sweet inside, it reminds us that even though we experience pain, we can move inward to find the sweetness to sustain ourselves
• frisbee: we sailed out of Egypt once the exodus began
• extension cord: Passover connects Jews around the world and throughout history, our central story of going from slavery to freedom empowers us to change the world

Progressive Seder: Moving Around During the Seder
We are taught that we recline (or lean left) during the seder because free people would recline on couches when they ate (think “Roman salon”). But even leaning left, a few hours around the Seder table (eating, reading, singing) can seem oppressive. Too uptight. Too formal. So we bring freedom and relaxation to our seder.

Because we live in California, we can take advantage of the beautiful weather to sit outdoors in nature (like the springtime represented by the Karpas). Because we are supposed to be free people, we shouldn’t have to sit in one place around a table for however long it takes to go through the haggadah and eat. So in our home, we felt free to enjoy a progressive seder:

Part One: Chairs in a large circle around two coffee tables. On the coffee tables were seder plates, things to dip and munch on, and other non-traditional items. We enjoyed the beginning of the seder through the Mah Nishtanah outside in nature. The only downside was that a bunch of knats plagued our seder, even dive-bombing our kiddush cups.

Part Two: We brought the food into the kitchen, grabbed our wine cups, and retired to the comfort of the living room. In the living room, chairs and couches surrounding a coffee table with a seder plate, we enjoyed the Magid (story), the symbols explanation (Pesah, Matzah, Maror), read the Jewish World Watch seder inserts, and made our Korech (Hillel Sandwiches).

Part Three: We sat around tables for the Shulchan Aruch, the meal.

Part Four: We returned to the Living Room for the last part of the seder. Relaxed on couches to sing about Elijah, to sing songs, and to enjoy the last two cups of wine.

Four daughters worth mentioning at Pesach

Professor Rachel Elior,who teaches Jewish philosophy and mysticism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, offers in Haaretz a new ritual for Passover: mentioning four daughters. Instead of the traditional – wise, rebellious, simple, and one who does not know how to ask – Professor Elior suggests we talk about four women who are: silenced, forgotten, ignored and excluded.

The Book of the Generations of Adam (Genesis 5) describes the world’s 10 male forebears, from Adam to Noah; but not one word is devoted to their mates, the world’s mothers. The Haggadah, too, speaks of four sons without mentioning the daughters. And these are not the only examples: Jewish memory usually focuses on the history of men, while female experience is doomed to oblivion.

She decides to

celebrate the memory of four 20th-century female authors, who undid the generations during which women were relegated to silence and obscurity and illuminated unknown corners of men and women’s physical and emotional lives…

Her four daughters:

First I might mention Dvora Baron (1887-1956), who wrote wonderful stories and was the first to show that a woman could write literature in Hebrew, although no woman before her had done so, from the end of the biblical period to the early 20th century. When she began to write, she shed light on previously unseen aspects of Jewish family life in the Russian townships and described moments of human torment and grace as they had never been described before.

The second is the mystically oriented poet Yocheved Bat-Miriam (1901-1980), whose enigmatic language captured both the visible and the hidden world and whose poems contained prayers about the eyes of the spirit opening in the depths of the material world. Bat-Miriam wrote the lines that inspired my study of mystical thought regarding the unity of opposites: “And greater than visible is the invisible, and more wonderful than ‘being’ is the secret of infinite nothingness on high, command me, Lord, and I will see / what lies beyond the border of the eye.” Her poetry fell silent after her son, Zuzik, died in the 1948 war, leaving her inconsolable.

The third is Dahlia Ravikovitch (1936-2005), who sang wonderfully from a woman’s perspective of happiness in the depths of pain in the poem “Hemda,” which appeared in the 1959 collection “The Love of an Orange.” She dared to speak of the affront and pain felt by a girl, an outsider, who comes to live on a kibbutz, thereby shattering the idealized, unreal image of kibbutz childhood, in her 1976 book “Death in the Family.”

Ravikovitch wrote penetratingly of women’s unheard-of plight in her chilling poem “Hovering at a Low Altitude,” challenging society for remaining silent about the anguish of raped and murdered women. Her far-reaching, probing, critical gaze and the depth of her compassionate, iconoclastic humanity found expression in her poems about the pain of Arab mothers who lost their children in the first Lebanon war: “This is the history of the child / who was killed in his mother’s belly / in the month of January 1988 / for reasons of national security” (“A Mother is Walking,” from the translation by Rachel Tzvia Back, published in the collection “With an Iron Pen”). In her writing about the fate of war casualties and the victims of human society, she expressed human empathy beyond all accepted boundaries.

Fourth I will mention Amalia Kahana-Carmon, who brought forth a new voice and a unique viewpoint while at the same time creating an unprecedented language in her 1966 book “Under One Roof.” Thus, for example, in her story “Naima Sasson Writes Poems,” written from a double perspective, of a child and of a grown up, she created a new language and paved the way for gender-focused criticism long ahead of its time.

The “four sisters” I have commemorated here were artists who sought freedom and knowledge and refused to accept the place tradition accorded them. All four broke through male-decreed conceptions of knowledge, truth, equality and justice as these relate to women’s place in society, and they did so while making audible the silenced female voice that had been excluded from written memory.

(Daily News, 4/3/07): The dinner table at Rabbi Paul Kipnes’ house was topped Monday night with more than the ceremonial food associated with commemorating the Exodus from Egypt. The arrangement of bitter herbs, parsley and matzo also included a football, history book and corkscrew. The purpose of Passover, which began at sundown Monday, is to remind Jews of their deliverance from Pharaoh and to educate Jewish children about the seminal story of their people. So Kipnes, leader of Congregation Or Ami in Calabasas, regularly uses props to spark discussion on Passover.

Dressing in Drag, Getting Stoned, Pillow Talk, Feeling the Beat! Passover Like You’ve Never Considered Before!

Pesach, the story of our people’s ancient flight from slavery to freedom, reminds us that ours is the way of freedom. The Haggadah, more than a backward-looking book, calls upon each and every one of us, in each and every generation, lirot et atzmo k’eelu hu yatza meemitzrayim, to see him/herself as if he/she went out of Egypt.

Judaism compels us to translate into reality the sacred ideal of the humanity of each individual and the Divine spark within us. Judaism not only condemns all racial bigotry; it affirms the belief in the sanctity of humans created in the image of God. Judaism thus places a moral responsibility upon its adherents to affirm the equality of all human beings as children of the One Universal God.

The Jewish community has been the quintessential victim of religious persecution, and of all people, we understand the duress of persecution and will devote ourselves to any measures designed to lessen its impact. It is our duty and obligation to prevent any future persecution. The most repeated commandment in the Torah, appearing 36 times, is that we must not discriminate against the stranger in our midst, for we were strangers in the land of Egypt.

Our evening around the table calls us to reenact on that very night – through symbolic foods, dramatic readings, and intense discussion – the quest for justice and freedom. Throughout history, Jews have creatively reengaged our traditional story, creating new rituals, to teach ever new messages.

Dressing in Drag 1: In 1853, Yisrael ben Yosef Benjamin described a ceremony in Asia before the recitation of the Haggadah in which a young person dressed up in kley golah (from Ezekiel 12:3 meaning “gear for exile”) and appeared before the participants with a walking staff in hand and a satchel over the shoulder. An adult asked, “From where do you come, O pilgrim?” “From the land of Egypt,” answered the lad. “Did you go out to freedom from the bondage of Egypt?” “Yes indeed,” replied the lad, “and now I am a free man.” “And where are you going?” “I am going to Jerusalem,” he responded. Then with great joy the participants begin to tell the story of the Exodus… When possible, invite new immigrants to your home so that they can tell their stories.

Civil War Bricks: During the American Civil War (1860-1865), a group of Jewish Union soldiers made a Seder for themselves in the wilderness of West Virginia. They had none of the ingredients for traditional haroset available, so they put a real brick in its place on the Seder plate! Families having remodeling work done on their houses might save a chunk of plaster or brick to place on the Seder table. What better way to highlight the difference between our freedom to choose to build and the oppression of living a life of forced labor.

Getting Stoned: Shemuel ben Hallal relates that his Moroccan uncle, who is a rabbi in Brooklyn, is accustomed to grating rocks into the haroset. Indeed, he adds so much rock that the haroset tastes terrible! While we do not suggest anyone adopt this custom, it is a creative attempt to illustrate the slavery of the Israelites in Egypt in a very “concrete” fashion!

Dressing in Drag 2: Back in the 1530’s, when participants opened the door for shefokh, (Elijah’s cup), someone in costume enters the room quickly, as if he is Elijah himself coming to announce the coming of the Messiah. R. Yosef Yuzpah Hahn (1570-1637) says “how good is the custom that they do something in memory of the Messiah.” How surprising that my family was not the first to think of this!

Communal Drinking: Rabbi Naftali of Ropshitz (1760-1827) initiated a beautiful custom. Following Birkat Ha’Mazon (the blessing after the meal), each participant poured some wine from their kiddush cup into Elijah’s Cup. In this way, he taught that each person has the responsibility to create conditions in the world that would encourage the messiah to come and finish the perfecting of the world. As you pour wine from your cup into Elijah’s, share with those at your Seder what you have decided to do this year to grow closer to God and to bring more justice into the world.

Buying Dessert: Others suggest that in ransoming or redeeming the afikoman, instead of just “paying off” the children, each participant at the Seder should also “purchase” his or her share to eat. Money seems inappropriate for such a purchase. So make a pledge of action, vowing to carry out ma’asim tovim (good deeds), as well as acts of tzedakah (charitable giving) and gemilut hesed (lovingkindness). For example, one might pledge to bring food to a homeless shelter or begin to visit the sick at a local hospital. Or, one might begin our search for the Messiah by engaging in Jewish learning or participating in personal and communal prayer. Think of what you will offer for the afikoman this year as it is passed around the table.

Pillow Talk: Noam Zion of Israel teaches that the idea of reclining on Pesach presupposes a social world in which, as in the Greco-Roman nobility, meals were often taken while the guests reclined on their left arms on couches, leaving their right hand free to dip and taste. At each couch was a small table with individual portions, like today’s Seder plate. However, since the European Middle Ages, it is no longer the way of nobility to recline. In fact, eating while reclining on pillows is the way of the sick. Still, Rabbi Y. M. Epstein teaches that everyone should be provided with a pillow precisely because it is an outmoded and outlandish custom. For the point of the Seder is to introduce changes into the meal, so the children will be roused to ask “Why is this night different from all other nights?” By the same token it would be ideal for everyone to have his or her own Seder plate.

Lesbians at the Seder Table: In the early 1980’s, Jewish scholar Susannah Heschel (daughter of the famous Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel who marched with Dr. Martin Luther King), was introduced to an early feminist Haggadah that suggested adding a crust of bread on the Seder plate, as a sign of solidarity with Jewish lesbians (which was intended to convey the idea that there is as much room for a lesbian in Judaism as there is for a crust of bread on the seder plate). Heschel felt that to put bread on the Seder plate would be to accept that Jewish lesbians and gay men violate Judaism like hametz [leavened food] violates Passover. So at her next Seder, she chose an orange as a symbol of inclusion of gays and lesbians and others who are marginalized within the Jewish community. She offered the orange as a symbol 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 many Jews. While lecturing, Heschel often mentioned her custom as one of many feminist rituals that have been developed in the last 20 years. She writes, “Somehow, though, the typical patriarchal maneuver occurred. My idea of an orange and my intention of affirming lesbians and gay men was transformed. Now the story circulates that thirty years ago a man said to me that a woman belongs on the bimah [podium of a synagogue] 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 erased. Isn’t that precisely what’s happened over the centuries to women’s ideas?” Today, let us place an orange on the Seder plate to reaffirm the openness of our Jewish community to lesbians and gay men and to others who have been marginalized.

Vegetarians Feel the Beat: Ever since the Talmudic scholar, Rabbi Huna, stated that “beets and rice” may be used for the two cooked foods on the Seder plate (Pesachim 114b), many vegetarians have substituted a red beet for the shankbone. In fact, while some wonder if Pesach and vegetarianism are compatible (after all, what is a Seder without gefilte fish, chicken soup, chopped liver, chicken and other meats) there is a common misconception that halacha (Jewish law) mandates that Jews eat meat to rejoice on Pesach and other Jewish festivals. According to the Talmud (Pesachim 109a), since the destruction of the Temple, Jews need not eat meat to celebrate festivals.

Surfing Seder: In the internet age, some families asked all the adults attending the Seder to search the web to bring with them one example of oppression, discrimination or social injustice in our world today. They also asked them to bring a few suggestions regarding how they can combat the problem they discussed. During the Seder, they intersperse presentations about modern day problems with the Haggadah’s story about the slavery of the Jews. Before the Seder ends, each person is asked to commit to some action to help alleviate one of these social problems.

Checking Out: Some families have a checkbook ready on the Seder table. Following the traditional recitation of the ten plagues, and a discussion of the modern plagues that are destroying our world, the children and adults choose one or two organizations which help alleviate these problems. They immediately write out a check before the urge to change the world diminishes. During the days that follow, they make plans to write letters to government officials to urge them to act to stop these injustices.

Dressing in Drag 3: The Jews of Morocco had the following custom: After reading the Haggadah, all of the adults put a stick with a bundle on their shoulders and they leave the house in haste, running and shouting: “In this way did our ancestors leave Egypt, with ‘their kneading bowls wrapped in their cloaks upon their shoulders’” (Exodus 12:34).

May these ancient customs and contemporary perspectives entice you to dig deeply into the Passover story to reclaim its essential purpose: to goad us all into action to rid the world of prejudice, oppression, and injustice.