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Haggadah
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2020-04-08
Jewish Melbourne: The Plague Year Hypertext Haggadah
An interactive hypertext haggadah I wrote for my family’s Zoom seder in 2020. I used Twine, a popular open-source, interactive fiction tool, to write a choose-your-own-adventure haggadah. It was the first zoom-based seder I had ever attended, and I didn't know how long my family would tolerate technological difficulties and the often awkward, fragmented conversation that some Zoom conversations/events can descend into. (Let alone the near-impossibility of group singing via zoom). Apart from this, it’s fairly common in my family, as in many others, that parts of the seder are skipped over, or their inclusion is contested, and I thought that trying to conduct a seder via zoom would only make people more eager to get it over with and reach Shulchan Orech, i.e. the getting drunk/ shittalking part and then call it a night. Writing/Compiling a hypertext haggadah was my attempt to facilitate a more fluid seder, in which parts could easily be skipped over on the night, among other reasons. In practice in turned out to be a bit of a shemozzle, which is partly due to some technological illiteracy among the mishpachah, and also partly because my hypertext haggadah is a rabbit warren (over 5,000 words spread over over hundreds of individual pages joined by hyperlinks), and so moments of anarchy would often ensue when people strayed from the communal path (which I enjoyed tbh, but were clearly frustrating to my uncle, whose ideal seder is basically the Two-Minute Haggadah: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2013/03/the-two-minute-haggadah.html) -
2020-04-08
Cantor preparing for virtual Passover seder - Temple Emanuel, Dallas
Our congregation in Dallas, Temple Emanuel, put a huge amount of effort into creating a virtual seder. About 250 computers participated, probably about 500 people. Our clergy led, and congregants also participated by reading the Hagaddah. We don't have a collective congregational seder tradition, so this is an innovation for Covid-19. Our clergy, rabbis and cantors, put in a lot of effort organizing this. This picture is of one of our senior cantor. She has equipment at home now to lead virtual services, a reflection of the resources and effort it takes to keep a large congregation going through this time.