Mock Zoom Seder!

We had a mock seder on zoom this evening with the extended family. It went beautifully. I had prepared an outline for the seder in and allocated parts in advance (for those who did not have preferences). We had at least a few representatives from Dan's four siblings, as well as his parents, and my brother and parents. Plus we had two of Dan's first cousins, Andrea and Amy, and their parents, Lawrence and Ruth. Those who attended spanned several cities, countries and continents: Montreal, Toronto, Ottawa, Los Angeles and even Australia.

The seder ran through all the "best of" or "Greatest Hits", rather than running through the whole haggada from cover to cover. As it was, the seder ran fora about 1.5 hours and I think that people enjoyed it and had fun.

Here was the introduction that I gave:

Welcome everyone! We're so excited to have you all here! Let's test this out by having each family give a shout out. Give a cheer when you hear your family! [l then listed each of the families.] 

I then offered this short reflection:

Pesach, as you know, is all about freedom, and a part of our history when we were slaves. This pesach, while many of us have certainly had experiences with having our freedom taken away, this is really the first time in our lives when we as a society, and globally as a planet, we've collectively had true constraints on our freedom. One important part of pesach is that are each supposed to feel like we ourselves personally experienced the exodus. Let's tap into these new feelings and experiences as we walk through the story of pesach. We can feel what it might of been like with our freedoms taken away, with our lives so confined, and how sweet that first taste of freedom must have been.

I then went through some logistics, and away we went! We had our seder plate on the table with the different items, real (like parsely) or improvised (like a sticker of a shank bone).

All in all it was a lovely mock seder and nice to have everyone together before the actual seders this Wednesday and Thursday. Due to covid-19 we are, of course, having the seder with just the six of us. But I hope that the mock seder that we had will make the real seders a bit less lonely, as we can draw from the sweet memories from this evening.