Wednesday, April 13, 2011

Passover's Coming: We Hope Your Seder Isn't Anything Like The Seder From Hell!


With only five days remaining until we sit down for the first (and in Israel, the only) seder, it's the right time to start picking and choosing which Haggadot to use at the table, assigning roles to all of the participants, deciding which parts of the Haggadah to skip or how many commentaries to add.

We can only hope that your seder isn't anything like the seder depicted in the video below.

It was produced by Ayeka, a Jewish spiritual educational organization that was founded in 2006 by Aryeh Ben David, who grew up in New York City, moved to Israel in 1978, received rabbinic ordination, and taught at the Pardes Institute.

After many years in the classroom, teaching subjects including Torah, Talmud, prayer, ethics, and interpersonal relationships, Aryeh sought a way to enable students to more deeply engage with Judaism and to explore their spiritual identities. He found it with the creation of Ayeka, which includes on its Advisory Board Dr. Erica Brown and Rabbis Yitz Greenberg and Avi Weiss.

Ayeka has developed some interesting new ideas for the seder, including guided conversations for adults and afikoman cards for kids 4-12.

One of the writers of the video is comedian Yisrael Campbell, whom we profiled in October 2009 when he started his Circumcise Me tour. And one of the actors is Benji Lovitt, whose Rosh Hashanah  street interviews in Tel Aviv we blogged about last September.

Enjoy!

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