In one week it will be Passover, and, to be perfectly honest, I am uncertain what I am supposed to be "feeling" right now. All around me people are talking about cleaning and cooking, about not forgetting the meaning of the holiday amidst all that cleaning and cooking. As for me, well, let's just say that it's Friday afternoon and I am blogging. I don't clean or cook for the holiday. (A fact for which I am always grateful to my brother and sister-in-law, who have hosted the seder for over 15 years.)
The fact that I go to family for seder does not mean I have never cleaned or cooked for Pesach. Some years, in the past, I have had to be home for Chol Hamoed and the last days. However, this is the third year in a row that I have worked out a plan to be away.I can be perfectly honest and admit that visiting friends and relatives is my cover story. I don't like to clean, I never have and I never will. More than not liking to clean, I'm terrible at it. There's always something more interesting to distract me (like, say, writing this post).
Those of you making Pesach are reading this and rolling your eyes, perhaps even wondering if I am talking about cleaning just to join in the ranks of Jewish women everywhere...to be part of the holiday.
You may be right.
When people in my neighborhood ask me how my cleaning is going, I feel almost guilty mentioning that I am going away. I always quickly emphasize that we always go to my brother's and his family comes to us for Shavuot, and that it is an eight hour drive, and just how thoroughly thankful I am.
At the same time, a small part of me is regretful that I do not have that same Pesach cleaning furver going on. Every Jewish holiday has some sort of ritual that helps us to connect with the spiritual aspect of the holiday. Waving the lulav and estrog is a physical declaration of what is best express by our children as "Hashem is truly everywhere." The mitzvot of Purim remind us that it should not take the threat of annihilation to bring the Jewish people together. One might even say that the very lack of rituals of Shavuot is rife with meaning in that it helps us connect to the fact that the foundation of it all is the gift of Torah.
I'll still have pesach, matzah and maror, the core of the Pesach seder. I'll still feast on my unleavened bread the whole week through. But the preparations for this holiday do serve as a catalyst to understand servitude and freedom (a whole other topic, of course), and, at the same time, to prepare ourselves to experience the deeper meanings of the seder.
Of course, I could just "pretend" and clean the house anyway. (I am doing one or two rooms, but not the tough ones.) That, however, is like "pretending" chocolate isn't kosher. It doesn't really work, at least not for me.
Because of the way the holiday falls out this year, on Friday night, and the way that we travel, we might not even be able to do bedikatz chametz to its fullest extent. In fact, we might have to search the min-van as our bedikatz since we will already have sold the house and will be in hotel.
In a way, I feel awkward admitting that I feel stuck without the physical work. I shouldn't need a physical act to connect to the spiritual. But I do. That's part of who I am. It's part of why I have such challenges working out my spiritual "chametz" - my anger, my arrogance, my impatience, my need for acknowledgement (dont' forget to like this post).
For now, I can take a deep breath and tell myself, once again (so often again), that I will try harder. And I will, at least for an hour.
I love this.
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