Twitter, a New Passover Tradition?

(March 17) -- Why is this Passover different from all other Passovers? Because on this Passover, the story of the Exodus is being tweeted.

In a push to put some humor into the holiday, Rabbi Oren Hayon of Dallas has assembled a rabbinical team to re-tell the liberation saga on Twitter.

And, of course, there's a Facebook page promoting the project "one tweet at a time."

Despite the happy ending of liberation, Exodus is not particularly joyous. After 210 years of Israelite slavery in Egypt, the land of pharaoh is afflicted by 10 plagues. The last is the visit of the Angel of Death, who kills the Egyptians' first-born son because pharaoh won't let Moses' people go.

twitter.com/tweettheexodus

A Texas rabbi hopes that tweeting the story of the Exodus will make Passover more interesting than the "mundane and boring and horrendous" ones of his childhood.

Hayon hopes that TweetTheExodus can add a light-hearted touch.

"The worst thing we could do is say that a text is too important to be played with," Hayon told The Wall Street Journal. He remembers his childhood seder feasts as "mundane and boring and horrendous."

During the two-week drama that started Tuesday and ends March 29, Passover eve, each tweeting rabbi takes on a character from Passover to portray the story in 140-word bursts. Rabbi Phyllis Sommer is tweeting as God.

"Setting up a Twitter account for the God of Israel was the most irreverent thing I could think of," she told the Journal.

On Tuesday evening, the Israelites had a message for pharaoh: "We're working as hard as we can," they tweeted. "Making bricks takes time; forcing us to work faster isn't gonna speed things along." To emphasize their point, the Israelites later tweeted a link to Flickr, where a Brooklyn Museum slideshow featured images of people making mud bricks.

But the annoyed pharaoh issued his terrifying order: "You know what? I've had enough of their numbers and kvetching," he tweeted. "I hereby establish a new law: DEATH for all infant boys of the Israelites."

The project isn't the first to retell the story. Chabad.org, for example, has animated the 10 plagues to make them less menacing to children.

Hayon says the tweeting is really about keeping a tradition alive and relevant. He told the Journal he's planning to link to clips from an "American Idol" audition and the animated movie "The Prince of Egypt."

"We've even got some Bob Marley in there," he said. "I'm trying to make connections in ways that are relevant but not goofy."