Okay, now that I’ve stuffed myself with two pizza/pasta dinners in a row, I caught up with some Colbert Report Passover humor that I missed because it aired while us Jews WERE AT SEDER!
| The Colbert Report | Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| Passover Commercialism | ||||
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Watch it, cause it rips on 10-plague toys, which I hate. I have hated them since their inception nearly 15 years ago when I reported about them in their newness for the NJ Jewish News (this was back when only two of the office computers had internet, and there was no office email. Dark times, I know.)
The reason we take wine out of our cup for each plague is that we understand that the Egyptian people suffered because of their leader’s stiff neck (hey Current Middle East, sound familiar?) and we don’t want our cup to overflow on that, we don’t want to drink to that suffering. So why would we play with their suffering? Ew. It’s just ew.
5 Comments
Great clip!! We had a plagues bag, and even my vegetarian son got a kick out of pressing the button and making the cow fall over – dead. Does it belittle the suffering which occurred in Egypt? Yes, but I have no need to make my young-ish kids comprehend the extent of all that misery.
I LOVED this clip. I friggin’ laughed so hard! I do, however, love plague bags, (we dont have finger puppets) because they keep the little ones engaged! Point taken though. . . But we’ll keep our plague bags until our littlest one is all grown up.
I think they are cute. Not so into finger puppets, especially meaningless ones with the word blood written on them, but our seders (Orthodox) have featured various “props” in the past. Plastic frogs … lot’s of them! Plastic cows with magic-markered spots all over them. A fake pool of blood made out of red plastic. Bunches of plastic locusts (probably grasshoppers). Once my niece even got hold of a bunch of plastic skeletons for makkat bechorot! Rather unsettling she was that year
A friend on twitter even mentioned about her sons growing frogs from tadpoles and bringing them to seder. Now that’s a great idea!
Mark, I’ll take the real tadpoles over the toys. My sister the Conservative rabbi does have a penchant for frogs in general, and has gone all out some years finding every frog item she can (stuffed, plastic, big, tiny) to decorate the seder table. Last year she got frog kippot for my boys, they still love them.
I am so with you on the “ew”. We have always banned finger plague puppets at our seder — although we are all for making the seder more fun. This year we held a seder olympiad with teams representing Israel, Egypt and Midian. Not a plague puppet in sight though. Just can’t see making light of others suffering as part of a seder observance. To me, it seems contrary to the sprit of the holiday — and our tradition in general.