Sedra Scenes: Skits for Every Torah Portion

by Stan Beiner and Behrman House

These 54 lively and engaging plays (one for each weekly Torah portion) combine contemporary settings and vocabulary with stories that are faithful to the biblical text.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0867050772
• ISBN13: 9780867050776
• Release Date: June 2005
• Publisher: Behrman House Publishing
• Length: 1 Pages
• Weight: 0.72 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.4" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

Fun but faithful

This book contains one skit for each weekly Torah portion (he has a companion book with skits for Haftarahs). The skits are silly (at times brilliant, at times a little dumb, but there's no accounting for taste), and are clearly designed to be fun for youth groups to act out. The skits are quite faithful to the original text without being dull.In my familiy, we use the relevant passages play-reading style (no advance preparation, we just sit around the table and read the script) to retell the story of the Exodus at our Passover Seder (the traditional Hagaddah text does not actually tell the story well enough for people who are not already familiar with it, as many of our guests are not). Even those who know the story well enjoy making up silly voices and playacting around the table. There are enough parts that everyone old enough to read gets roped into playing at least one part. It's fun whether you match people to parts (a booming-voiced man with a great sarcastic streak playing Pharaoh) or you don't (a 7-year-old girl playing Moses).I'd also strongly recommend this book for any Jewish educator or family that wants to keep the kids apprised of the weekly portion without taking a long time or getting overly cerebral. The skits would work nicely around a Shabbat dinner table, as well as in a classroom.