Creating Lively Passover Seders (2nd Edition) - by David Arnow (Paperback)

About the Book

An innovative, interactive guide to help encourage fresh perspectives and lively dialogue at your Passover Seder. A complete resource for creating meaningful encounters with Jewish values, traditions and texts that lead well beyond the Seder itself.

Book Synopsis

A guide to help you invigorate your Seder, create lively discussions and make personal connections with the Exodus story today.

For many people, the act of simply reading the Haggadah no longer fulfills the Passover Seder's purpose: to help you feel as if you personally had gone out of Egypt. Too often, the ritual meal has become predictable, boring and uninspiring.

Creating Lively Passover Seders, Second Edition, is an innovative, interactive guide to help encourage fresh perspectives and lively dialogue. With three new chapters, this intriguing Haggadah companion has been revised, updated and expanded, and offers thematic discussion topics, text study ideas, activities and readings that come alive in the traditional group setting of the Passover Seder. Each activity and discussion idea aims to:

• Deepen your understanding of the Haggadah
• Provide new opportunities for engaging the themes of the Passover festival
• Develop familiarity with the Exodus story, as well as the life and times of the people who shaped the development of the Haggadah

Reliving the Exodus is not about remembering an event long ago, but about participating in a conversation that provides hope and strength for the struggle to make tomorrow a brighter day. With this complete resource, you can create more meaningful encounters with Jewish values, traditions and texts that lead well beyond the Seder itself.

Review Quotes

This book looks at the Seder from 25 different angles, drawing from the Haggadah, the Torah and the Mishnah. The author goes into great detail about the history of the Seder, detailing many of the changes that have taken place throughout history. Included are sections on the four questions, the four children, the sages, Pesach as a spring holiday, slavery, Pesach and Israel, the plagues, redemption, Elijah and the music of the Seder. There is a section from Mishnah Pesachim, a bibliography and an index. The preface notes that this new edition contains a new chapter on music, as well as chapters on the Seder plate and on Moses. The author has obviously studied Pesach in depth, but despite the title, this book is more of a study of the Seder as a historic tradition than an actual guide to conducting a Seder. There are suggestions for using the book that involve printing copies of readings, contacting guests ahead of time and organizing discussions in different rooms before the Seder even begins. This approach will probably be impractical for most readers. Most of the sections do provide questions that may trigger discussion among the right mix of guests. The book has an accompanying website, www.livelyseders.com, that offers more activities, articles about Pesach and a downloadable Haggadah text for users to cut and paste in the process of creating their own Haggadahs. This book is recommended for synagogue libraries, but a better choice for those that don't own it yet is The Family Participation Haggadah: A Different Night, by Noam Zion and David Dishon.

--Beth Dwoskin "Association of Jewish Libraries "