40Ways To Lead Your Seder
By Donna Gordon Blankinship
Driving home from a Passover workshop, I was reminded why I try to attend at least one such session each spring: new ideas keep my seder preparation a joy and not a chore.
One of the participants at a workshop I attended suggested it would be great if there was a way for the whole community to share its seder suggestions. Here is my own modest attempt at such an exchange. Friends, relatives, acquaintances, past workshop leaders, and friends of friends all contributed to this list.
I hope these ideas are as inspiring to you as they were to me, but before you pull out a pad and start jotting down the ideas you want to try this year, I offer a cautionary tale from the year I attempted to see how many new and exciting things I could do at one seder. My siblings complained vehemently about how all their “favorite parts” of the seder had been altered. The seder was a quite a lot longer than usual. And the few ideas that really worked were overshadowed by the complaints.
I’ve learned my lesson and only add one or two new things each year. The ones that work become family traditions and the others are remembered only as experiments or as humorous disasters, as the case may be.
1. Have a variety of Haggadot at the table and encourage your guests to bring their own favorite version so you can pull insight from many different sources. Include some children's haggadot or ones your kids made themselves.
2. Go around the table and name things that free us and enslave us. Or ask your guests when they have experienced freedom or slavery.
3. Show and tell: Have adults bring an object or a poem or drawing to your seder that represents their own struggle from slavery to freedom.
4. Assign each guest to bring a question with them to the seder.
5. Put something unexpected on the table to elicit questions. Examples would be something from your own family's history or something that would initiate a story about women's roles in the exodus from Egypt.
6. Invite someone who isn't Jewish or hasn't been to a seder for a while to add some fresh insight to your Passover gathering.
7. Serve potatoes along with parsley to help fill empty stomachs and stave off the question of "When do we eat?" If you're asked for an explanation of the potatoes explain that they were the vegetable often used at seders in countries like Russia when green vegetables were not available.
8. Have two afikomens. The grownups hide one for the children to look for and the kids hide the other for the grownups.
9. Come to the table dressed as a character from Jewish history and explain your appearance. Or you could ask your friends and family to all come dressed like historical figures and to bring along an explanation of that person's role in the Exodus from Egypt.
10. Replace the Maggid section of the Haggadah with a Passover story told in your own words, or with a play or puppet show. If you plan to involve your guests, assign parts and costumes ahead of time.
11. Spend some time with your children before Passover explaining what they can expect at your seder, watch a video about Passover, such as "Shalom Sesame," and give them an assignment to prepare for the seder.
12. If they are old enough and brave enough, let your kids lead the seder and tell the story in their own way. This is especially fun one year with teen-agers or pre-teens.
13. Turn popular music, such as songs from the Lion King, into Passover songs by changing the words and then making copies of the lyrics for your guests. Go online and search for new songs to share. There are so many at the Jewish web sites.
14. Assign each participant an animal noise to make during the singing of Chad Gadya. An alternative is to go around the table taking on one phrase of the song per person and then having the same people sing the same phrases every time.
15. Have a contest to see who can say the last verse of Echad Mi Yodei-a (Who Knows One) in one breath.
16. Start your seder in the living room or family room where your guests can relax on the couch or comfortable chairs. If you do this and light candles: learn from my family’s experience and make sure the candles do not drip on the carpet. The same goes for red wine.
17. Begin your seder under a tent in the family room. Dress your family in desert garb and invite your guests to take off their ties and get comfortable on pillows on the floor.
18. Ask one of your guests to prepare a list of 10 plagues for our day, such as homelessness and AIDS.
19. Create "plague bags" for the kids. Fill paper lunch bags with a little toy representing each plague in the Haggadah. Try Archie McPhee's for some of the hard-to-find plague toys. Some Jewish book stores also offer ready made plague bags, but making them is more fun.
20. Add some Sephardic flavor to your seder with a new recipe or tradition. Please note that Sephardic Passover food differs from Ashkenazic traditions.
21. Try a new recipe from one of the modern Jewish cookbooks and serve it at your seder.
22. Make a different kind of charoset this year, or make several different versions and invite your guests to sample them all. Hint: a Sephardic recipe calls for dates, walnuts, almonds, hazelnuts, raisins, apples, ginger and cinnamon.
23. Cook something from scratch that you usually buy in a box or bottle — such as dessert or gefilte fish.
24. Send the men to the kitchen to cook and clean up afterward and let the women lead the seder.
25. At the very beginning of the seder, give your guests an estimate of when dinner will be served. If your family traditionally spends more than hour conducting the first part of the seder, advise your guests to have a snack before they come over or provide snacks such as vegetable sticks at the table.
26. Put matzah in a bag or pillow case and pass it from person to person to "carry" for a while during the seder so everyone is reminded of the experience of carrying your belongings out of Egypt.
27. Do something just for fun. One family that has legendary seders is know for their egg cracking rituals where participants knock their hard-boiled eggs against their neighbors' eggs to see whose eggs will crack last.
28. If the weather is nice, move at least part of your seder outdoors. You can set up tables in the back yard or invite your guest to wander through the yard or neighborhood for part of the seder.
29. Invite your neighbors to drop by for dessert at about the time you expect to be opening the door for Elijah. Make sure you let them in on the gag beforehand.
30. Revive an old family tradition you haven't tried in a while.
31. If you have young children, experiment with a two-part seder: do a quick and child-centered version, put them to bed and stay up the rest of the night discussing the Exodus among the adults.
32. Search for a different midrash — one not highlighted in the Haggadah — to discuss during your seder. If you want to do the work, you will find an never-ending variety of interesting topics to discuss in the Talmud.
33. Have the participants decide what and how much to read and just keep reading around the table until the Haggadah is finished.
34. Learn something new this year about one aspect of the seder to share with your guests. Attend a Passover workshop to prepare yourself for the holiday or ask a friend to share his or her most creative seder idea.
35. Watch The Ten Commandments on TV the night before the first seder to get your family in the mood for Passover.
36. Ask your rabbi if he or she knows of anyone who doesn't have a place to go for Passover and then invite them to your seder. Or you could call Hillel and welcome a student into your home.
37. Invite a Russian family, buy some Haggadot with a Russian translation and ask them to recite a few passages in their native language. If you don't know a Russian family, call Jewish Family Service and ask them if they know of any families who would like a place to go for seder.
38. Clean your cupboards of chametz and donate the food to your local food bank. You should be able to find a collection bin at your synagogue, if you don’t ask your rabbi if you can set one up.
39. Go shopping for Passover and buy a few extra Passover items for the Passover food drive. If your community doesn’t have one, start it. Or donate the cost of one extra guest at your seder to MAZON: The Jewish Response to Hunger.
40. Plan an activity for the kids to do before the seder that gets them in the mood and also works off a little excess energy. One family I know starts by having the kids build card cities while their parents act as slave drivers urging them on. Then the kids are told to go to a neighbor’s house (if you have a big enough back yard, you can keep this activity at home) to each pick up a piece of matzah. They bring the matzah back to the house by way of a circuitous route (instruct one of the older children where to go or draw a map for them to use). When the matzah arrives at the table, the seder begins.