Preparing for Passover: Symbolically and Literally
Pesah is almost upon us. My wife Caroline and I hunkered down in earnest today, seeking to do our best to rid our home of hametz—the leavening agent from which we free ourselves during the Passover holiday.
Freeing ourselves is, I suppose, a generous way to look at this: it elides the immense amount of work that goes into searching out every corner and crevice of our homes.
Complaining is a cathartic exercise for me; it comes very naturally, and so, in the midst of my efforts to clean our freezer, I exclaimed only partially-jokingly and most hyperbolically to Caroline, “I wouldn’t wish this process on my worst enemy!”
She rolled her eyes, and I clarified: I actually love this process. Sure, getting the last little reluctant crumbs out of a hard-to reach space can be frustrating, but the process as a whole holds immense symbolic and spiritual meaning for me.
The ancients thought of fermentation, a process related to leavening, as associated with decomposition and decay; leavening symbolized, in a sense, moral and spiritual corruption. Later authorities said that it represented the yetzer harah, the dishonorable, unseemly impulses within us. So for them, the process of cleansing their homes wasn’t just about following a law or remembering the Exodus (though it was certainly that, too). It was about having external actions facilitate and reinforce an internal process: searching ourselves, examining our souls as we sought to remove the cobwebs, the accumulation of spiritual gunk that had taken hold over the past year, extricating it to put ourselves in a position to do more good in the world.
If this sounds somewhat like the High Holidays, that’s perhaps no accident. My teacher, Rabbi Vivie Mayer, raises the idea that the days of Passover are in many ways the counterpoint to the Days of Awe, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Before the Days of Awe, we have Elul, the last month of the year, where we are supposed to engage in reflection, returning (teshuvah), and repentance. Before the days of Passover, we have the month of Adar, where the theme is generosity—mishloach manot: gift-giving on Purim, to our friends and to the needy; food donations so everyone whose tradition it is can celebrate Passover.
We approach one set of holidays—Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur with the intensity of self examination, and the other, Passover, with the tenderness of generosity. Thus when we engage in this internal and external spring cleaning, there should be a lightness to it, an expectancy that comes with spring: we’re about to have clean homes and a fresh start. We unburden ourselves from the mounds of hametz we’ve been carrying, enabling us to be in a better position to unburden the loads of those around us as well.
Traditionally, the night before Pesah, (this year, two nights before Pesah since Pesah begins on a Saturday night), we take a candle a feather and a spoon, and explore our homes, explore ourselves—we shine the candle on those spots that we ignore, we sweep them gently with the feather, cradle them carefully in our spoon, and, when we’re ready, we burn them up. We acknowledge the limited control we can have in any given situation and we offer these spiritual crumbs up as, to a degree, out of our hands. We watch the smoke billow up, conceivably taking the heaviness that has been weighing us down with it.
And we take a final step. If you’ll remember, the rabbis weren’t finished after burning the hametz. They acknowledged that the work of spring cleaning was hard, that they might not manage to investigate every last crevice. So they initiated a blessing that they referred to as a nullification, as a setting free. “Barukh Atah Adonai…” it begins. “Let all kinds of hametz in my possession whether or not I have seen it, whether or not I have removed it, be rendered null and void, like dust of the earth.”
We dig really hard, but sometimes we’re just not able to get the last of it. We can’t find the time, the means, the wherewithal to remove the stuff that’s really buried, really baked in. So we offer up a blessing: we let it go.May all our hametz, all our extra stuff, all the weight that we have been carrying, that we have not been able to unearth, that was just too hard, may we understand it as nullified, may it be released. May we be as unimpeded by it as we are by the dust of the earth.
