Spiritual cleansing Pesach style
The Jewish festival of Passover (Pesach) is around the corner. It is a wonderful holiday, nostalgic and traditional for many. Alongside the hard work, cleaning and traditional foods, Pesach offers observers a deep and valuable opportunity for personal growth. This article, Cleaning Our Hearts for Passover by David Sacks explains it beautifully.
"Cleaning the house for Passover is an opportunity to do a tremendous soul cleansing as well.
On a spiritual level, bread products, or chametz, represents our negativity, those aspects of ourselves that we’d love to get rid of. Maybe on a deeper level that’s what’s so difficult about cleaning for Passover. Doing so requires us to come face to face with our chametz, our shortcomings. And really… who wants to do that?
Aspects of ourselves that we’ve grown comfortable with suddenly get exposed as the enemy. Muffins? Laziness. Cake? Lust. Cookies? Greed. Well, not exactly, but you get the idea. Cleaning for Passover has two parts. The first comes in the days or weeks leading up to the holiday. That’s the “normal” part of the cleaning process, and most likely takes place during the daylight hours.
But then things get, well… interesting. When the night before Passover arrives, we turn off the lights, light a candle, and finish off the process of getting rid of our chametz. This is when the “inside” cleaning begins.
The Talmud describes this process in the most interesting way. It says that we do the cleaning by “the light of the 14th of Nissan”. This is strange since it’s very clear that we do this cleaning at nighttime! Why then this language “by the light of the 14th” if it’s night?
Let me try to explain. When Moses walked toward the burning bush to investigate the wonder he was seeing, God said, “Take off your shoes because you are standing on holy ground.” The question is, why didn’t God tell Moses to take off his shoes before he stepped on the holy ground? Rabbi Mattisyahu Solomon said because the ground wasn’t holy yet. What made it holy was Moses wanting to investigate the phenomenon and learn more about God.
This then is the light of the night of the 14th. It’s more than a candle, the light of the candle is the light of the soul. According to Jewish law, we must use a candle. Why? Because if we see too much of our own imperfection we’ll freak out and get depressed. There’s too much to fix! When it comes to this inside cleaning, we take one step at a time. In fact, one of the most amazing customs is that when we do find chametz (remember that stands for the evil inclination) we sweep it away with a feather. A feather of all things!
Do you see the beauty of this? Our Sages are teaching us that when you go into those dark places within yourself, don’t forget to be gentle.
If all this seems like a big job, remember the words of one of our greatest teachers, Rabbi Israel Salanter. He said that the loudest sound in the world is the sound of a habit being broken. He also famously said that it’s easier to learn the entire Talmud than it is to eradicate one bad character trait. It’s hard. But so worth it. Because when we fix our hearts, we fix the entire world.
“Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught ”