Goal: To experience, as a family, the Jewish Passover ritual of asking questions to gain a UU understanding of Easter.

Materials: “A Spring Haggadah,” by Joan Goodwin

Goal:
To develop awareness that there are things each of us can do to be peace makers in our world.

Materials:
Large poster board
Magazines for cutting out pictures
Blank paper and materials for drawing

Activity:
Make a Peace Poster

Procedures:
At the top of the poster write the words:
"Peace means taking care of ourselves, each other, and our earth”

Draw a circle in the middle of the poster board to represent the earth (color if you want). Then draw three lines out from the circle forming peace symbol on the poster board that divides it into thirds.

Write the words “OURSELVES,” “EACH OTHER,” and “OUR EARTH” around the edge of the circle in each of the three sections.

Using pictures (either photos or drawings) fill in each section with images of your family and friends, people taking care of each other, and people taking care of the earth.

Stress: Peacemaking begins with each individual—and that means you and me!

All the questions within the Adolescence category for Jewish & Christian Heritage.

Goal:
To introduce the idea that people find God in many different places.

Preparation: Read Background for “Hide and Seek with God”

Activities:
Introduce the story:
In our Unitarian Universalist church people have many different ideas about God. For some people God is what’s really real, for some God is what’s most important, and for some God is what’s most mysterious. But there are also some UUs who have ideas about what’s most real and most important and most mysterious but they don’t call those things God. They use other words, like Universe, Life, or Love. In our church we each decide for ourselves which words to use and what we believe.

The stories I’m going to read were written to help kids decide for themselves what they thing about God. Here’s the first one.

Read “Hide and Seek With God”

Discuss:
Would you want to play Hide and Seek with God? Would it be fun? Would it be scary?
If you were playing the game, where would you look? What do you think God might look like?
One girl found mysterious things but she wasn’t’ sure she wanted to call them God. Do you ever feel this way?
Draw a picture of what you think God looks like. Hide your pictures around the room and play “hot” and “cold” to find them – telling the finder they’re getting hotter if they’re getting closer to it and colder if they’re getting further away.

Children at this age have probably learned about slavery in the early days of the United States. Because of this they may associate the word slave with African Americans. This story provides an opportunity to broaden their understanding of oppression and slavery, to help them avoid stereotypical thinking. The motivating questions ask them to think about times when they felt oppressed. This may be difficult for them to do, but if you can relate a short personal story, you Il may elicit some personal stories from the children.

Beginning with the definition of slavery as "the total subjection of one person to another" (Mays, Harper’s Bible Commentary, p. 959), children can see that slavery is not necessarily related to color, race, gender, or religion, although all of those categories have been used to define classes of slaves. The Hebrews held different religious beliefs from the Egyptians. They were easy to identify by their patterns of worship, their dress, their daily life–and they had become numerous enough to threaten the ruling class. Thus, though they had been welcomed as settlers by earlier generations of Egyptians, by Moses’ time they had become an oppressed class of people, subject to the cruel taskmasters of the Pharaoh.

The Hebrews worked on the tombs, temples, and obelisks designed by Egyptian architects. (The famed pyramids had been built approximately a thousand years earlier.) Because they were called lazy workers–a charge commonly leveled against oppressed classes–the Hebrews were forced to make their bricks without straw. Strawless bricks do not hold together well, yet the Hebrews were required to make their usual quota. It was either no straw, or take extra time to glean the stubble from the fields. Either way, the task was nearly hopeless, and the punishment was a beating. For Moses, the lack of straw was the "last straw. " It was time to try the magic that YHWH had shown him. Popularly known as the ten plagues, the calamities inflicted on Egypt were familiar threats to the well-being of the nation. The power of the Exodus story is that they occur one right after the other. Written down many centuries after it occurred, and drawn from three traditions J, E, and P), the story as recorded in Exodus is full of repetition and confusion. The plagues were natural occurrences in an unnatural time frame–folk history in its most dramatic form.

The story of the plagues and the crossing of the Reed Sea is the basis tbr the Jewish celebration of Passover. At the Passover meal the story of the Exodus is recounted through words, symbols, and songs. One seder ritual has to do with the plagues. Before drinking the first cup of wine, one removes a drop for each plague visited upon the Egyptians, diminishing one’s own pleasure because of the suffering of the oppressor. The theme of the Passover seder is that our joy in freedom is possible only if we remember our own suffering and the suffering of others.

In the telling of this story, we have referred to the Reed Sea. There is on modern maps a sea called the Red Sea, but the Hebrew term used in Exodus is yam suph or Sea of Reeds. Great confusion exists among biblical scholars about the route of the Exodus–in fact, three routes have been suggested, each with respected literary and geographical credentials. The source of confusion seems to be the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures, the Septuagint, dating back perhaps to the third century B.C.E. Reed was translated Red, and on the basis of that error it was long assumed that the Red Sea was the site of the crossing.