Creating Lively Passover Seders

Many people want to create a more inspiring and lively Seder. But they don’t have time to sift through the scores of Haggadot and other sources for the engaging material necessary for a truly exciting Seder year after year. Creating Lively Passover Seders is an innovative guide that can help encourage fresh perspectives and lively dialogue.

This wide-ranging Haggadah companion offers thematic discussion topics, ideas for simple text studies, activities, and readings that come alive in the traditional group setting of the Passover Seder. Every activity and discussion idea aims to broaden your familiarity with the Haggadah itself, provides new opportunities for engaging the themes of Passover and deepens your understanding of the Exodus story. Each chapter revolves around a theme raised by a particular passage from the Haggadah and includes a mix of historical background, interpretation, readings, and activities for the Seder.

Rather than reading the entire book from beginning to end, readers are encouraged to focus on one or two chapters each year from which to select activities most suitable for their Seder participants.

Creating Lively Passover Seders includes scores of guided questions for discussion and activities for all ages. Here’s just a small sample of the activities you’ll find in this book:

• A script for telling the Exodus story in a whole new way.
• Suggestions for acting out an ancient Midrash, in which the Israelites must decide what to do when Egyptian mothers sought refuge for their children during the last plague.
• An activity based on two versions of the Great Seal of the US–the Israelites crossing the Red Sea as originally proposed by Jefferson, Adams, and Franklin versus the pyramid now found on the one-dollar bill.
• A short story to read aloud about the key role women played in the Exodus.
• A reading with questions for discussion about Elijah’s transformation from zealot to peacemaker and his role during the Seder.
• Short readings about the relationship between Passover, spring, and the environment with questions to structure a conversation.
• A guide for a conversation about the Haggadah’s curious omission of Israel from key passages and suggestions for adding a fifth cup of wine to the Seder to celebrate Israel’s birth.
• An easy-to-read story about the Haggadah’s development and the ancient rabbis who shaped it.
• A guided discussion of one of the toughest aspects of the Passover story–God’s repeated hardening of Pharaoh’s heart.
• Questions for a discussion about how we should relate to the “other” based on the Bible’s repeated exhortation to “know the heart of the stranger since you were strangers in the land of Egypt.”
• Using a simple “art Midrash” project to explore what the Haggadah might mean when it says that we have gone “from darkness to great light.”