Pesach Cleaning

We've spent the last few days before Pesach (Passover) in fairly typical fashion, scrubbing away at pots and pans and floors and shelves and tables and pretty much anything else that we can get our hands on. We've left the house for occasional expeditions such as going to a matzah factory in Mea Shearim, where we purchased a stack of round hand-made "shmurah" (i.e., with grain carefully guarded from coming into contact with water from the time of harvesting) matzahs.



Another Pesach-preparation expedition was to go down the street to kasher some of our pots and pans by dunking them in a giant pot of boiling water.


Otherwise, our recent existence has mostly been about battling it out with the forces of dirt and grime. Katy is, not surprisingly, much more dedicated to this battle than I am. I tend to accept that spring cleaning is a good idea, but midway through the process of cleaning tend to cry out that we can cut a few corners with the cleaning as long as we fulfill our obligation to get rid of leavening (hametz).

Katy, of course, is right. As Moshe Benovitz, one of my teachers at Schechter this year, argues, part of the original idea of Pesach was that it was the holiday of "total and merciless" cleaning -- not just getting rid of waste, but going so far as to get rid of one's sourdough (starter), which most people in the ancient world would keep alive for years and years. In the course of the development of Jewish law, the focus shifted away from house-cleaning and towards focusing on matzah, such that

according to the letter of the law, the house need not even be cleaned thoroughly for Passover. It is enough to eliminate leavened foodstuffs from the house (or put them away, annul them, and sell them to a non-Jew); the house need not be cleaned of other organic or inorganic dirt. Some people chant the mantra "dirt is not hametz" during their Pesah cleaning, in order to excuse a less than thorough job.

But most Jews who clean for Passover don't take advantage of such halakhic loopholes. They intuitively understand the true reason for the prohibition against hametz, and take advantage of the elimination of hametz as an opportunity to clean the house thoroughly in every respect. We are asked to renew ourselves entirely each spring: to cleanse our houses of the past. Leaven is just a particularly stubborn form of dirt chaining us to the past, dirt that can only be cleansed by means of a seven-day matzah diet.

Happy Pesach, and happy spring cleaning!