I am going back to sunny warm Austin for both seders, then back here for an institutional Shabbat dinner, then to another shul for Shabbat morning because they asked me to chant a chapter of Shir haShirim.
Tonight I am looking up Pesach songs so I can be ready to sing along no matter what my hosts throw at me. Seder customs can vary considerably.
Going to another family’s seder is a bit like going to Europe on an exchange program: The people are doing the same things but in unfamiliar ways. . . . Lately I’ve been asking friends and acquaintances about their Passover rituals, and almost all answered in the same tone: “Well of course the father hides the afikomen, silly. Then the children search for it and if they find it they get a prize. What else do you expect?”This grandfather must be related - by ethnic subculture if not by blood - to Forward columnist Marjorie Ingalls, who relates:
Except that in my family, it’s the children who hide the afikomen, and unless my father finds it, he has to negotiate with the children for its return. That is the way of things.
I thought there was only one way to sing the “Who knows One?” song until I heard of a family in which the grandfather “points at random table denizen” shouting out numbers in English, Hebrew and Yiddish, and the appointed family member sings the appropriate verse.
My parents have always had dueling Seders. My dad calls his "My Zeyde's Seder." It is a rapid-fire, singsong spew of Haggada delivered, in his words, "with the same intonations, incantations and misogynistic deprecations that have been handed down by rabbis to my grandfather thousands of years ago." In other words, he bangs on the table a lot and barks, "The women will be quiet!" This performance is only semi-intended as camp.When I said performance art, I wasn't kidding.
My mother's Seder, on the other hand, is all about cooperative learning and hands-on participation. As befitting a professor of education at the Jewish Theological Seminary, she finds neat-o lessons everywhere. In the past, we've compared and contrasted various kinds of Haggadot (feminist, archeological, Manischewitz, pacifist, Claymation). She's made game boards so we could play Jewpardy (with categories including Pharaoh Phacts and On the Seder Plate) and Jewish Family Feud. We've mimed the plagues, turned "The People's Court" into a one-act play in which Pharaoh was on trial (I was Rusty the Bailiff), and slapped each other with leeks (don't ask). She incorporates multicultural readings, finds amusing Passover songs on the Internet, invites questions and commentary from the group. My father assures readers of his Web site, "Believe me, God does not listen."
Last year Mom outdid herself. She had us tell the story of Passover through a combination of Haggada reading and Paper Bag Players-style improvisation. She divided us into teams, gave each team a bunch of random props (dental floss, a plastic lei, a tape dispenser, a vintage Dukakis/Mondale button) and assigned each team a section of the Haggada to act out.
Despite some kvetching, the family rose to the occasion. Some people went conceptual. My aunt Belleruth's team used Arafat as a stand-in for Pharaoh; my brother used the pimping of baby formula in Third World countries as a metaphor for the killing of the first-born. Some were more literal. My 90-year-old grandmother played the youngest child reciting the Four Questions, with shoelaces — one of her team's props — tied in her short steel-gray hair like bows. She read the questions in a piping babyish voice while my cousin Abie stuck his arms under her armpits and made amusing hand gestures. My father rolled his eyes and muttered things that sounded suspiciously like "hillul hashem" (an abomination unto God).
Mom's Seder can be scary. You will be in a skit, and you will solo on "Echad Mi Yodaya" even if you do not know Hebrew. My mother resolutely refuses to see that this is terrifying. She hands people a transliterated Haggada and sings encouragingly along with them. But hello! Still terrifying! Past guests have included Brown University students, who tend to look like deer in the headlights when the solos start, as well as my mom's friend Mary, a nun (whose Hebrew is better than mine, so she's not a very good example), and my dad's Franciscan co-worker from a group home for troubled boys, Brother John. Everybody steps up to the mike; everybody represents. Khad Gadya, yo!
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