Robot Seder

[ellenkushner]

This is surprisingly adorable.

That soundtrack, however, has got to go.  

Does anyone even know the Old Tune "Mah Nishtanah" anymore?

Comments

[rikibeth.livejournal.com]

"old tune?" That IS the tune I learned, just made oddly... bouncy. Younger nieces seem to have learned a different one. Perhaps it's a matter of denomination, not age? I know that even when I was at the age of going to other people's bar and bat mitzvahs, the Reform synagogues used tunes that sounded Wrong to my ears, which were accustomed to the melodies used by the Conservative temple my family belonged to.

[ellen-kushner.livejournal.com]

Well, when *I* was a child, the tune they're singing was called the *Israeli* tune. It was cooler and newer and bouncier and easier to learn/sing because of the repetition, and we learned it in Hebrew school. The old one, the one my mother taught me at home from her family, was more like cantillation. I think it was the primary Old Country Ashkenazik tune (or maybe I've just been assuming that all these years...).

[rikibeth.livejournal.com]

Oh, did your mother teach you the one that goes kind of MAAAAH nishtanahalailah haZEEEH, mikolhalaiLOOOT, that pattern, with no repetitions?

Every child in my family learned the "Israeli" tune, at Hebrew school, and we weren't offered any other options. The nieces were using the more formal-sounding one (and could not hold their pitch, either, oh the torment).

Then again, my family also had two forms of the Birkat Ha'Mazon -- a formal one that my grandfather led when all my cousins and I were quite small, and then, as my cousins got old enough to start attending the Jewish summer camps that my father and uncles had attended in THEIR day, the "summer camp Birkat" with its call-and-response came out of mothballs, and we never sang the Birkat in any other fashion again.

Me? I did not go to those summer camps. I went to a hippie, artsy summer camp run by Quakers. Once I aged out of the Four Questions, I was the one to read the Wicked Son.

[filkerdave.livejournal.com]

Oh, did your mother teach you the one that goes kind of MAAAAH nishtanahalailah haZEEEH, mikolhalaiLOOOT, that pattern, with no repetitions?

I think I was past my bar mitzvah before I heard any other tune.

[ellen-kushner.livejournal.com]

MAAAAH nishtanahalailah haZEE-EH, mikolhalaiLOO-OT

Yes! That's the puppy!

[akaspeedo.livejournal.com]

I do! The "old" tune was cantillation as far as I know, and we used it exclusively.

[jackdaniel.livejournal.com]

I learned the version with repetition as well. Probably because I went to an orthodox private school. The one here is similar but still sounds somewhat off. Probably because of the background music.

And I really only watched this video because you asked about the song. Though it was worth watching. Cute.

[tylik.livejournal.com]

That's not the tune I remember... but then my memories were formed not by family of blood but by growing up in Seattle's Jewish/Catholic/Queer neighborhood, and then a long term family alliance with the parents of my nerdsons. (We did Seder with them, they did Longest Night with us...)

[ellen-kushner.livejournal.com]

Urrrr..... if only there were a way to post or notate tunes here, so I could hear yours!!!

[movingfinger.livejournal.com]

YouTube?

[tylik.livejournal.com]

If only I weren't home sick (or rather, were home, but not sick), I could record it. So not singing right now, though...

(Trying to decide whether I dare to forward this to my conservative Jewish lab mates. I mean, the lab even does some robotics work... but having not grown up together, I'm a little more cautious with the sending out links from my goyish self. And I didn't get the impression the folks I sent the Facebook Haggadah to last year found it as hillarious as I did.)

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

Okay, I want to know where the Jewish/Catholic/Queer neighborhood is, because I grew up in the Catholic/Anarchist/Hippie/Queer neighborhood in Seattle, and I want to know if it's the same one :-)

[tylik.livejournal.com]

Cap Hill?

Hippie certainly is descriptive enough... though I feel like Fremont gets first dibs on Anarchist. (Well, okay, maybe on the west face of the hill. I grew up about half a block from the NE corner of Volunteer Park...)

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

The Seattle Anarchist Group used to be on 18th, I believe, so not that far from you. I grew up on the west side of Volunteer Park, in the house featured in Go to the Room of the Eyes (http://www.amazon.com/Go-Room-Eyes-Betty-Erwin/dp/0316249467/ -- though it doesn't look like the picture on the cover). But I knew so few Jews then that I was in high school, or maybe even college, before I found out that Shapiro was not a Japanese name.

[tylik.livejournal.com]

What time periods you talking about? (Though actually, now that I think about it, the anarchists on 18th are ringing a bell...)

I was born in the Group Health up on 15th in 1973, and lived on Cap Hill until the end of '88 and then for a few more years in the early nineties. (And have been staying near Broadway on my twice a year trips back to train, but it's another Hill now... though kind of an awesome one, if rather pricey. Some excellent hacking going on...) The Hebrew Academy was a couple of blocks east of our house - which might have been one of the reasons so many of our immediate neighbors were Jewish, and was certainly why every Wednesday most of my Jewish classmates rode home on my bus to attend Hebrew lessons. (I was terribly jealous, as they'd speak Hebrew the entire ride home, and I couldn't keep up.)

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

Ah, you're about ten years younger than I am, which is about what I figured. I'd forgotten about the Hebrew Academy, though one of my mother's friends taught there. We had dinner last night with a Jewish friend of mine who grew up on the east side (we heard about the Robot Seder from her, too, by the way), who said her family didn't sing "Mah Nishtanah" at all, they just recited it. She learned the Israeli tune when her kids first went to Hebrew school.

[chanaleh.livejournal.com]

Are you familiar with ShaBot 6000 (http://shabot6000.com/archive.php?id=1)? :-) (He blogged this today (http://blog.shabot6000.com/2010/03/other-jewish-robot-seder.html), too.)

[abominabledante.livejournal.com]

Woah. That's amazing. Imagine how much time it took to build and program all that.

[tpau]

huh that is the tune i always used/learned...

[lnbw.livejournal.com]

Do you have recommendations for where one might find (ideally free) good recordings of Passover songs? I'm trying to learn some for a friend's seder but all the recordings one friend found were, she said, too serious.

[dungeonwriter.livejournal.com]

Now if only the robot cleaned for Pesach.

[ellen-kushner.livejournal.com]

My first thought was that it was, in fact, going to be little robots (roombots?) sweeping up Chametz! Robot Seder much nicer.

[filkerdave.livejournal.com]

I know the old tune!

[elissaann.livejournal.com]

I know the Old Tune, and I still find this one grating, years after I heard it for the first time.

[swimtech.livejournal.com]

Sorry, to me, this is the ONLY Ma Nistanah tune. This is the one I learned at age 4, and this is the only one I want to hear at Passover. (But not with the tinny beat accompaniment.) This is kind of like the matzoh ball soup or charoset argument.

[rymenhild.livejournal.com]

Another datapoint: I'm a twenty-nine-year-old Conservative Jew from an Ashkenazi Conservative family, and that's the only Ma Nishtanah tune I know.

Also, I am delighted by the robot seder and wondering what robot Elijah would look like.

[skola.livejournal.com]

The song also skipped over a verse. At the end it went from "kulo maror" (referring to the bitter herbs of the third verse) to "kulanu mesubin" (referring to the leaning) and skipped the verse about double dipping entirely.

Also, why while the music was going on did it have the Haggadah open to the story of the four sons?

[papersky.livejournal.com]

I should offer them my "When we were robots in Egypt" poem as the soundtrack.

[ellen-kushner.livejournal.com]

Oh good heavens, yes! They look pretty easy to find - meanwhile, want to post it here?