So where is Elijah now? Believe it or not, the job of tracking him has fallen to NORAD, the North American Aerospace Defense Command, headquartered at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado.

Similar to the Santa Tracker, the Elijah Tracker will follow Elijah’s travels throughout the Jewish world, particularly on the first, second and last nights of Passover. A private company that usually supplies visualization software for aerospace engineers — for the military, NASA, private companies that build planes or spacecraft, and so forth, will provide the software. If you’ve seen computer animation of a military mission, it may well have come from the same source.

If you go to the Elijah Tracker, you’ll see them taking an engineer’s literal approach to the Elijah story. He visits through the opened door during the seder, which means, if you look at the NORAD map, that you’ll see him moving across the world’s time zones from east to west, as the Passover holiday is observed in seders around the world.

This being the 21st century, there will be the inevitable links to Elijah’s Facebook and Twitter pages, and his location will be projected on a Google map. A typical tweet: “Elijah was just in Tel Aviv!”

But the Elijah story remains pretty much what it’s been since the time of the first Passover in the desert, and technology has not changed it much. It is perhaps just a coincidence that Jews have been inviting Eliyahu HaNavi into our homes for millennia, while the April 22 DVD release of Avatar (just 2 weeks after the end of Passover 2010/5770) will bring the rest of the Na’vi into our homes soon.

*April 1. Need we say more?