Here are a few Passover tricks sure to make the holiday more pleasurable:
• When nobody is looking, take a few sips from Elijah’s wine glass. Then, with abrupt intensity say, “Look! Look! Elijah has been drinking his wine!” It’s best to do this AFTER you’ve admitted the prophet into your home.
However, if you’ve had a few shots too many and you shout the news before you’ve let him in, just say, “Hey he’s here. You don’t think he needs me to open the door, do you?”
• I’ve taken a lot of unjust criticism on this one. When you hide the afikomen, put it back in the matzah box. They’ll never find it. If they’re wise to your stratagems and somehow find it, tell them they got the wrong matzah.
• Hire a street person or out-of-work actor — just make sure you’ve checked it out with the cops and national Sexual Offender Registry — to play the Elijah role. Some unemployed actors will do it free (it’s great practice).
Then you tell your son to go open the door for Elijah and, abracadabra! there he stands. Lucky for us, most actors look like Elijah anyhow, which is to say, bearded, in dirty robes and on the “fed-by-a-raven diet” (which is to say, scrawny). It’s a hat trick that ends up being a triple mitzvah because: You dramatize your seder; you fatten up a poor person with a free meal; you add a great gig to a future Tom Cruise’s resume.
(Just be sure to count the silver service you got from your bubbe before Elijah, his robes jingling like bells, leaves the house with a pocketful of bubbe’s spoons.)
Not enough tricks for you?
Then add a few “embellishments to the service,” as we call them.
• Like getting a parsnip and chopping it up like chunks of horseradish. Place them carefully on the seder plate so only you can tell them from the real thing. Then ostentatiously load up your matzah, all the while boasting of your asbestos mouth. Then wait for screams as they watch you munch this nuclear mouthful. Meanwhile, you swallow, smile and load up another.
• Don’t forget the old matzah ball-tennis ball swap. The downside: It only works with kids under 5, and the soup usually slops all over the table as the nipper tries to cut up his tennis ball.
But of all the dramatic devices — silly or serious — the best I’ve ever heard of was staged by my great-nephew Simmy (or Rab Simcha, as they call him). His mama, Lynnie Mirvis, is a famous Jewish storyteller in Memphis, and his dad is a well-known Jewish heart specialist there. Genetics being what it is, Simmy is a super rabbi in an Israeli moshav.
Lynnie tells me that at Simmy’s seder last year, suspended over the table, was a caged homing pigeon from a neighboring kibbutz. The bird’s heart, like the hearts of our wandering ancestors, yearns for home. We call it instinct, which is an unexplainable word for the poetry that our Creator and Deliverer put in his feathered and un-feathered creatures. At the proper moment in the service, the cage is opened and the bird flies home. Just like us. That’s hard to beat.
Ted Roberts is a humorist based in Huntsville, Ala.