Passover in the Time of Covid-19

There doesn't appear to be a thread for this, so I'm starting one.

Last night's seder was one of the most meaningful for our family ever. By family, I mean the extended mishpuchah. Zoom allowed more family members, in more far-flung locations, to be together than has ever been the case before. And because connection is more important now than ever, it meant more.

We used a fairly simple Haggadah mostly in English. I pre-assigned parts by marking up a pdf, then scanning that marked-up version, and sending it out a week ahead. This reduced the chaos that might have happened if we'd had to go through "OK, so who wants to read the next part" in real-time. I considered in the hours before we began that I might have to mute-all except the family member who was reading at a given time, because I know the cacophony that twenty or more unmuted Zoom participants can create, but that was not necessary. Chaos was at a minimum, and we all figured out the best way to Zoom together as we went along with whatever improvisation was required. As you might expect, the section about the plagues was particularly meaningful, including the injunction that has become customary in recent decades to have compassion for the innocent Egyptian victims of the plagues, who didn't ask for misery to be visited upon them by their leader's intransigence.

We did our baseball themed Seder via Zoom last night.



We included friends from Canada, California, and New York in addition to local friends and family. It was nice to include folks that we would normally not see at our table. We all agreed that it was great that we had easy access to technology to enable us to meet as a group rather than individuals.

To put a positive spin on the chaos in the world.....less dishes to wash!