Afikoman of the Mind: Finding New Hiding Places
Hello dear readers,
One of my husband’s favorite parts of the seder night is hiding the afikoman. It’s a job he takes quite seriously. When we’re invited out for a seder, he has been known to call up the hosts a day or two before the seder just to come over and scout out the location for potential hiding spots. When we’re away on vacation at a kosher Passover hotel, he has plotted with other families doing their seders, sometimes hiding our afikoman with theirs. Of course, my husband loves his home-court advantage, he’s always looking for a new place to hide a tiny flat piece of matza. (I was walking through the house and talking on the phone last night when I saw a new opportunity for an afikoman hiding place. I told my husband but I’m not telling anyone else!)
My husband loves hiding the afikoman, but no matter how hard he tries to find a new hiding place, he comes up against one immutable problem: our house isn’t getting any bigger, but our kids are. Both our kids and their cousins are too good at finding the afikoman. It used to be a real competition, a true battle of wits against a racing clock, a frantic search that was both physical and mental. Now it feels like it’s lost some of its luster.
However, dear readers, here’s an alternative that I heard about from my friend Sam, who lives in California: Instead of hiding the afikoman somewhere in space, he chooses to hide his afikoman somewhere in time.
How does this work? Well, he puts the afikoman right next to him, but then he says something like the following: The afikoman may be sitting on the table right here next to me but in fact … it is gone, to somewhere in history. Can you figure out where and when it is? Then everyone has to ask yes or no questions to figure out where the afikoman is hiding. Usually, he picks a famous era in Jewish history. For example, on the first seder night last year, he hid the afikoman in the turban of Maimonides, also known as the Rambam. On the second seder night, it was even harder to find: he hid the afikoman on the moon in Joseph’s dreams! Wow, imagine trying to guess that (and to guess it before midnight!).
If you want to try that, let me know where (and when) you picked, and also how many guesses it took for your family to get to the right answer!
More soon,
Ariella
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