Tour guide views Pesach at the Met

I have roamed the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Egyptian wing many times, marveling at sarcophagi, statues of Horus and Ra, and portraits of young men on ancient panels who gaze back at visitors, looking shockingly familiar and contemporary. But on a Sunday just before Passover, I viewed the artifacts as I’d never before seen them: through the lens of the Exodus story, which we retell each year in reading the Haggadah.

Nachliel Selavan, a Jewish educator and self-taught museum guide whose specialty is looking at Jewish texts and history through ancient artifacts, guided about 20 through the Egypt section, pausing at statues, carvings and the Book of the Dead scroll. Before setting off he distributed source sheets with canonical Jewish texts in Hebrew and English. For more than two hours Selavan connected items and ideas mentioned in the texts with the artifacts on view.

Selavan had us look at a passage from Deuteronomy in which Moses details what will befall the Israelites if they don’t live up to their end of the covenant. The Israelites are told they will be flattened by insufferable ailments and curses, and that the L-rd will “will bring you back in boats to Egypt.” Selavan pointed inside an ancient diorama to show what those boats would have looked like.

“The Jewish people and Tanach do not exist in a vacuum,” Selavan said after the tour. “Understanding the context for the text is key to our identity. Artifacts help us realize that ‘oh wow, these were real people’.”

“It was very interesting to see actual artifacts, representations of words we see in the Torah,” said Lori Leifer, 37, a Yiddish singer and computer database programmer who describes herself as Conservadox. Everyone else on the tour appeared to be Orthodox, including several haredim.

The Exodus tour is one of five Jewish tours Selavan offers at the Met through his company, Torah Intermedia. Another focuses on artifacts from the time of the Maccabee revolt and is oriented toward Chanukah. More Passover-themed tours are planned for chol ha’moed.

Selavan grew up the son of a rabbi/tour guide/archaeologist in the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City, and was educated at yeshivas. He discusses references from Mishna comfortably with a Satmar Hasid on his tour but dresses more like a Brooklyn hipster. Asked how he identifies religiously, Selavan replied, “I’m on the Orthodox spectrum but not sure where I fit.”

In his second year teaching Torah at Netivot Montessori Yeshiva in East Brunswick, he took fourth-graders to see the Met’s exhibit “From Assyria to Iberia.” Another visitor, overhearing him, asked if he read Aramaic and led him to the Tel Dan stele, a 2,800-year-old inscribed stone on loan from the Israel Museum. Reading what turned out to be paleo-Hebrew, Selavan was struck by the power of seeing the earliest known reference to “Beit David,” the seat of the Davidic dynasty, which is his hometown.

“Then people started asking me questions,” Selavan said.

At the start of the 2016–17 school year, he started networking with other Orthodox yeshivas to lead tours and quickly expanded into leading adults. Last summer he took about 20 groups through the Met, he said, and now leads synagogue and Hillel groups as well. He gave a Jewish tour of Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts to members of an Orthodox synagogue in suburban Newton, and is planning to do the same with area day school groups.

Selavan lives in Crown Heights and is finishing up a long-distance master’s degree program in Jewish education at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and enrolling in a Jewish history master’s program at Yeshiva University.

On the Passover tour, as the group approached the Temple of Dendur, the massive sandstone shrine set in a grand sunlit interior plaza, Selavan pointed out a replica crocodile in the surrounding moat. He noted that the Hebrew term “taneen,” found in Ezekiel and Exodus, is generally translated as “serpent,” but more likely meant crocodile, as they infested the Nile.

“My dream is to do things like this with museums around the world,” he later told JTA. “In Spain, London, France and so on. And to live in Jerusalem.”