Some Reflections on My Passover Seder with my Autistic Son

I have an autistic son. His name is Moriel. Moriel is an 18 year old who is very lovable because he likes to play games. Once you understand that he is playing games you can connect to him by joining in his game. One game he loves is "Win the Championship High 5". Mori loves the sensation he receives from a vigorous high 5, the one you might get after winning the superbowl or the worldseries. Giving him a strong and enthusiastic high 5 always transforms his face into a broad smile. He will hold his hand out in the air and all you have to do is swing your own hand in an arc so that your palm lands squarely in his palm. Since Mori does not speak, this 'game of champions' is one of the way I know I can make him happy.

Mori has another game which I did not realize was a game until recently. The doctors think that Mori has Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Persons with OCD need to control their environments more than others. In Mori's case he likes to have people sitting near him to maintain a certain posture and keep their hands and arms in a specific places in relationship to him. So if I move my hand from my knee to place it on my hip, he will take my hand and put it back on my knee. It is very important at this moment that I keep my hand on my knee.

For years I would go along with this, but recently I have tried testing Mori by moving my hand off my knee repeatedly after he places it back on it. I noticed that he smiled broadly as I kept on removing my hand and he kept on putting it back. At that moment I realized that he was playing a game with me. I learned his rules and once I knew them I could play with him over and over. All games have rules and in Mori's case he makes them. I had to learn the rules of his games in order to play them.

This insight I bring to running a seder. Baruch Bokser, z'al, my teacher of Mishnah, wrote a marvelous book on the Origins of the Seder. He quotes an anthropologisst's observations about the nature of a Passover Seder. "Formal public ritual is like a game that everyone agrees to play. The participants consent to abide by the rules of the evening and to let the decisions concerning their own actions be taken out of their hands and placed in the Haggadah's program.

For the success of the game, they allow themselves to be freed fro the evening from the mentally divisive process of decision making, which focuses the mind on ideas in opposition, and also tacitly agree to ignore the personal matters and status considerations that separate individusl in nonritual time. In relaxing the barriers that divide people mentally and socially, the focus of the evening now may be socially shared ideological considerations and not private concerns." p. 81

The seder has its own rules, its own world. To make it come alive you have to allow yourself to enter its world. Of course every seder leader must interpret that world to the participants and that is precisely the art of running a seder. The great challenge of running a seder is to keep the private and physical concerns of those attending in the background so that everyone present can fully play the game. That is why I think a seder has to be highly interactive, improvisational (following Maimonides teaching on doing something different), and multi-sensory.

Everyone must be invited into the game which is meant to teach us once again something that unites those present at the seder. At second night seder I experienced the joy of my son, Moriel, attending most of the seder. He was surrounded by loving family and friends, and several others who had never been to a seder.

It was my opportunity to welcome them and him into a timeless game that the Passover seder presents to us. He did quite marvelously with the help of an aid and his brother who sat at his side. He played the role of the 'child who does not know how to ask' and he played it beautifully. His non-Jewish aid who had never been to a seder was greatly moved by the whole experience. Of course, the haggadah, anticipates a person like Mori at the seder and the rules of the seder game demand that you make the experience accessible to this person as well. So we sang, and we told stories, and we ate the symbolic foods in the most playful manner and so fulfilled our obligation to see ourselves as going out of Egypt.