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Role Playing and Bibliodrama

By Reuven Ben Dov

One would not expect the Shalom Hartman Institute to publish a standard Haggada based only on the traditional sources. So read on if you want to make your Seder dramatic, different, and challenging. Thanks to Noam Zion and David Dishon, it is going to be much easier to prepare my Seder this year, as they offer a wealth of stories, songs, ideas, and games.

Here are some examples from an "experimental" Haggada which is "designed to enable the contemporary Jew to lead an interactive and intellectually stimulating Seder."

The emphasis is on maximizing participation by family and guests. If you ask the person who cannot wait to eat to take an active role, he may forget that he is hungry. The dramatist among us should act out the Ten Plagues. Select someone with a good voice to lead the songs. Delegate responsibilities in advance. Invite guests to recall their own family stories of redemption from illness, danger or persecution.

The Four Questions remind us that we should be asking our own questions all evening. Isidor I. Rabi, Nobel laureate in physics, was not asked as a child growing up in Brooklyn, "Did you learn anything today?" His mother would ask, "Did you ask a good question today?" Pride of place is given to the Four Sons, or the Four Children, as it is translated. Eight beautiful color plates of different artists' interpretations are explained. (There are many color photographs and black and white illustrations scattered throughout the Haggada).

Many are the ways of understanding the Four Sons. Yaariv Ben Aharon, a kibbutz author, wants to show that all children have some characteristics of all the sons. The wise son may also be rebellious and inflict pain on his parents. "I do not view labels as static pigeon-holes," he says. "I believe in the power of the educational act to release locked up potential: For example, the one who does not know how to ask may be silenced by the rules of society. The silence may hide an exceptional, sensitive child whose questions are choked. A parent can 'open the child up,' remove the obstructions, enable personal growth and break stereotypes."

The authors suggest numerous topics for discussion. "In this age of liberation and democracy, of pluralistic tolerance for many different cultural expressions, should a person who expresses a sense of alienation from our Jewish heritage be condemned as 'wicked'?"

     

Role-play the child and his parents. Ask your children why they think the "silent" child asks no questions. How might he be coaxed into greater involvement? Compare and contrast the different pictures of the sons. Which portrayal is most surprising? Most disturbing? Most appropriate? What conceptions of Jewish values and society are implicit in the various depictions?

Many nuggets of information make the Seder more interesting. Did you know that in Tel Aviv the maternity hospital is located at the intersection of Shifra and Puah (the names of the Jewish midwives who outsmarted Pharaoh and saved the Hebrew infants from drowning)? Al Axelrod, Hillel rabbi at Brandeis University in the 1960's established the annual Shifra and Puah Award for nonviolent resistance to tyranny. Whom would you recommend this year? Pharaoh was fearful of the Jewish minority's power and size. In England, adults guessed that there were 250 million Jews in the world, instead of the actual figure of 13 million. High-school children thought that Israel was perhaps 10 times the size of England! During the American Civil War, Jewish Union soldiers could not make harosset, so they put a real brick in its place on the Seder tray. The concept of freedom is embellished with the African-American spiritual "Let My People Co," and such songs as "If I Had a Hammer."

Naturally, there are many references to the suffering of Holocaust victims and Russian refuseniks. A prayer said before eating bread in Bergen-Belsen is quoted. In a Soviet labor camp, the bitter herbs were represented by slices of onion, the zeroa (roasted bone symbolizing the Paschal sacrifice) was burnt soup cubes. For korech, the sandwich of matza and maror, there was nothing to put between the matzos. Yosef Mendelevich said, "We do not need a symbol of our suffering. We have real suffering and we shall put that between the matzot."

The word "sandwich" was invented by John Montague, the fourth Earl of Sandwich, who ordered his servant to bring him pieces of meat between slices of bread so that he could continue gambling without losing time: the first "fast food."

Linguists here wanted to call a sandwich a "hilleleet," after Hillel, who put bitter herbs and the Paschal lamb between matzos in Temple times. They then settled for "kareech" from the verb that describes the original sandwich — "korech" — but it did not catch on.

      

The Ten Plagues provide an opportunity for the children to play games. Act out a play so we can guess what the "yukkiest" plague is. The adults can also act. The Hassidic rebbe Naftali Zvi Horovitz used to invite all participants to pour from their personal cup into the Cup of Elijah. This symbolizes the need for everyone to make their own personal contribution to awaken the divine forces of redemption by beginning with human effort. At the same time we can make a wish for a better year.

Chad Gad-ya is the Jewish "Old MacDonald Had a Farm." So we can invite volunteers to make an appropriate sound or gesture for each subsequent aggressor . . . .

The authors offer us a bare bones basic Seder which though short still offers opportunities for a few enriching activities and readings. However, they point out that these minimal extracts do not correspond "precisely to formal halachic requirements." . . .

This is a mind-boggling haggadah which will make us look forward to resuming year after year to experience and understand the message of the Pessah story.

For more detailed information on how to lead a Seder, the Leader's Guide should be very useful; the ideas are more suited to the havura-Jewish Catalog scene than the Orthodox world.

True to the pluralistic and eclectic Hartman vision, an excellent list of the required halachic minimal text that must be read is given the approval of Rabbi Yaacov Warhaftig, director of the Ariel Institute, an Orthodox rabbinical seminary in Jerusalem. But in the same guide is an article by Rabbi David Golinkin, an associate professor of Halacha at the Seminary of Judaic Studies in Jerusalem of the Masorti movement, comparing Theodor Herzl with Moses. The book includes the Ma Nishtana in nine languages including Amharic, Dutch and Ladino, as well as many games and suggested activities for children of different ages. A number of essays are contributed by Rabbi David Hartman and others, which together with the teaching of roleplaying and bibliodrama offer a lot to think about.

We are advised which kind of guests to invite, to sleep in the afternoon before the Seder, to prepare small personal gifts for the guests, and to make the Seder "look like a jam session, not a pre-scripted concert." Above all, we must be creative, innovative, exciting, use gimmicks to arouse curiosity, and do new and different things every year. These two books could help us to achieve these aims in an enjoyable and painless way.