This year we tried something a little different at our Seder. We were so pleased with the result that I wanted to share it here – an idea to store away for next year. It won’t work for everyone – certainly not for Jews who do not use additional power or technology on the festivals – but that still leaves a lot of Jews who might want to try something new.
We began our Seder fairly conventionally, following our Haggadah through the festival candle-lighting, first cup of wine, and so on, through to Yachatz – the breaking of the matzah. But when we arrived at the heart of the haggadah (and the longest section) – Maggid – telling the story, we put down the haggadah. First, we performed what has become a family ritual over the years – the Passover story in rap, with costumes and movement. That story in its entirety, from Moses’ birth to the crossing of the Sea, is rather difficult to find in a traditional haggadah, but we like to cover the basics.
What we do find in the haggadah is a confusing mix of conversations from generations ago – Rabbis talking all through the night, fantasies about multiplications of plagues, four questions (some of which are never answered in the text of the haggadah), four children who respond to the whole Seder experience in different ways, and so on. Its a rather strange hodge-podge if you think about it. I’ve always regarded it as something of a ‘teacher’s manual’ – it gives you ideas of how to engage in the storytelling, but it doesn’t work so well as the storytelling itself.
If it is the case that, ‘in every generation’ we must have an experience that gets us back in touch with what it means to experience slavery and what it means to seek and gain freedom, then how might we tell that story today? This year, we used visuals and video to help us access that story in ways that deeply tapped into our own experiences and understanding, challenging us, moving us, and inspiring us.
We began with a video of a new song out of Israel, entitled ‘Out of Egypt’, by Alma Zohar.
She reminds us:
Chorus:
Don’t you know that each day and in every age,
one and all must see himself as though having escaped Egypt
So he won’t forget how he fled, how he was beaten, bled, left dead
How he called out to the heavens
The song concludes:
There’s always war in Africa
What luck that it’s so far away
We don’t have to see or hear the screams
Since 2003, an estimated 10,000 immigrants from various African countries have crossed into Israel.
Some 600 refugees from the Darfur region of Sudan have been granted temporary resident status to be renewed every year, though not official refugee status. Another 2000 refugees from the conflict between Eritrea and Ethiopia have been granted temporary resident status on humanitarian grounds.
In 2007, Israel deported 48 refugees back to Egypt after they succeeded in crossing the border, of which twenty were deported back to Sudan by Egyptian authorities.
In truth, time did not allow us to discuss each section equally fully – we could easily have been like the Rabbis of old, up all night, to really do justice to this much material. But we certainly had one of the more meaningful experiences of engaging with the Passover story that I can remember.
But even a ‘low-tech’ version of this mode – photocopies or photos of images passed around a table – would achieve a similar result; like the chalk pictures on the pavement in the movie ‘Mary Poppins’, they provide a portal and, when we jump right in, these images offer a different way of accessing the journey from slavery to freedom.
Rabbi Rachel Gurevitz
