A pitch clock for the Passover Seder is an idea whose time has come
If you're a baseball follower, you've most likely noticed a few new rule changes. The most prominent is the pitch clock.
With the bases empty, the pitcher has fifteen seconds to deliver the pitch to home plate. With runners on base, he gets an extra fifteen seconds.
The idea is to add more action to the game and make it move faster. It seems to be working. The games in the first week of the new season are considerably shorter.
I was curious if there was a way to incorporate this into real life. And then came to me last night. EUREKA! It was right in my face all along. How great would it be to have a pitch clock at a Passover Seder?
Let me give you a real life case study for this:
We go back three decades, when my daughters were two and three years old. We were living in Tustin, California. My mother was in Palm Desert, a little more than two hours away.
As Passover nears, she calls to let us know she's having a Seder at her home. Please come…and bring the girls. Yeah, yeah…it’s off to the desert for Passover, which only seems appropriate.
We get to her house and she introduces me to the man who is going to lead the evening. OMG! My mom has hired a Rabbi. Seriously, a real Rabbi.
Now, I had no idea who was going to be in charge, but I wasn't expecting this. I had a bad feeling we were going to be there for a while…a long, long while.
The Seder took four hours. I repeat FOUR F’ing HOURS!! Moses spent less time in his desert than four hours. All the plagues were completed in less than four hours.
Obviously we survived, but still…FOUR HOURS!
So last night, I'm at another Seder. It's at the temple where my now-adult children belong. We're two hours in and finally dining on soup, chicken and matzoh. I'm talking to the Rabbi, who I've known and liked for about twenty years. I tell him my Seder story and he's laughing. Finally, I said, “The reason I'm telling you this is we're heading in that direction.” He still laughed, but said no way…”There are plenty of little children here. They need to get to bed. We’ll be done by 8:15.”
We didn't quite get there. 8:30 was closing time. This Seder clocked in at just under three hours.
Now back to this pitch clock thing…where would it fit in? Hmmm.
How about we start with the Four Questions? Maybe we cut it down to two? Okay, if that doesn't work, give the child reading them a time limit to finish. I saw one minute! That'll knock off some time, right.
Next come those deadly plagues. Why don't we knock off a few of them? I'm leaning towards getting rid of killing that first-born children thing, mostly for personal reasons, but I can be convinced about some others. I'm fairly open-minded on this one.
I think by just doing these things, we can knock off about a half-hour. Two and a half hours sounds more than acceptable to me. We can work on that for next year…IN JERUSALEM!!