Twitter Passover

Rabbi Oren Hayon feels the Passover story—a tale of enslaved Israelites, pestilence and plagues—needs perking up so he has recruited a band of Rabbis to act it out on Twitter. Hoping to make Passover more accessible to the Facebook generation Rabbi Hayon and his fellows will play out the story in 140-character Twitter messages, accessible at twitter.com/tweettheexodus. The tale began yesterday with @The_Israelites complaining: “We have much to fear from @PharaohofEgypt. He tires of us… ” Other characters include (somewhat predictably) @Godofisrael,Young_Miriam and DaughterOfLevi. In the last instalment the Twitter page read: “via @Young_Miriam: I can hardly believe he’s 3 months old! All that pushing and screaming seems like yesterday—or earlier today!” The idea is to give the age-old text a wider audience by immersing it in a modern forum. “Setting up a Twitter account for the God of Israel was the most irreverent thing I could think of,” Rabbi Phyllis Sommer of Glencoe, Ill., who will be playing the Divinity, told the Wall Street Journal. The improvised Twitter dialogue will continue for two weeks.