The Art of Cleaning

Cleaning supplies

With respect to Passover, we remove all the chametz from our houses. Chametz is, technically, “any food product made from wheat, barley, rye, oats, or spelt that has come into contact with water and been allowed to ferment and ‘rise’ (1)”. That sounds simple, but it’s not so easy as dumping all the pasta, pizza, beer, and bread from the kitchen (or trying to eat it all in a week). There are the crumbs to consider. Where have I eaten bread in all the last 360 or so days of the last year? A baguette in my car, a cookie nibbled in bed? Usually at this time I focus on the macro, the big picture of Passover, of moving from slavery to freedom. But as I embark upon this year’s mad whirlwind of vacuuming, scrubbing, and the like, it’s the cleaning that is at the fore, and the micro – the crumbs – that has my attention.

The secret to cleaning for Passover is, of course, cleaning out our inner space. It’s really our inner-self – where we live within ourselves – that needs to be sorted. In a physical house, in order to truly clean we first have to take everything out – empty all the drawers, pull dishes out of the cabinets, sheets out of the armoires. Metaphors like “turning the house upside down” or “turning things inside out” come to mind. In this moment there is always a discovery – nestled alongside the fuzz is a coin lost between the cushions, fallen behind the towels is, somehow, that earring I thought I had lost. Turning things inside out, inspecting what’s been hidden in deep dark spaces, re-discovering things of value presumed to be lost, and discerning between the dirt and the treasure are keys underlying Passover – essential elements of both slavery and freedom, and choosing between the two.

The Jewish oral tradition tells us that as the tyrant Pharaoh became increasingly demanding in the daily quota of work that he expected of his slaves, the Jews, their babies got folded into the bricks, cemented into the walls (2). This is the same Pharaoh, who, as we are also told, neither ate nor excreted (3). Never eating nor excreting is neither taking in anything new, nor getting rid of anything already digested and no longer needed… In other words, remaining fixed, certain, unchanging. Like cement, and bricks.

We all have an internal taskmaster. The part of us that whips us into increasingly repetitive acts, making and laying brick after brick, in the unrelenting effort to make things solid in our lives. To ensure that things continue as they are, people don’t change or leave us, that we get a check every two weeks and a fat retirement package. And the parts that get lost, folded and cemented into the walls, are all our possibilities – the “babies” born of our internal passions, the parts of us that can regenerate and create new lives and new iterations of ourselves. Folded into bricks, those hard certainties that come in the form of “can’t” or “shouldn’t”, we layer them one after the other, slaves to our own building, desperate to keep these babies hidden.

Digging deep beyond what we see every day reveals things left unattended. In the every day we see only the hard exterior of the walls we’ve constructed over the years. Seeing only those unattended things that are the habits, patterns, and loose ends with others that need to be cleaned or dusted off and re-engaged with. Turning that inside out is to find the treasure that is hidden inside. The babies we tossed into the bricks. The forms of our desires to do something different, to engage with our hidden talents, to produce love again in our relationships with others. They are always there. Concealed at the core of our cemented beliefs lie the prospects of our passions, dormant until exhumed, bursting to life as surely as spring once released.

Chametz – things that ferment– are things we allow to sit too long, passing from ripe and ready to pick to rotting and eventually turning to bitter vinegar. It’s not for nothing that we must celebrate Passover every single year. Because every year there is something found, a recognition of “yeah, I really need to get on that this year, finally” … and then time slips by. Time slips by, things ferment, change their flavor, get once again lost in the face of the taskmaster demands for certainty and known-territory. So …

As you clean this Passover, or this spring, may you reach far within, turning things inside out, finding again the babies of your passions, freeing your hidden potentials, these so-many treasures. And may you do so with your shoes already on your feet, your bag already packed, so that you pluck them out and escape with them to freedom where they can breathe and become. In other words, “Don’t wait… just do it”.

Chag S’meach, Happy Easter, and Happy Spring!

Bonnie

1.Definition from the Chabad.org website: https://www.chabad.org/holidays/passover/pesach_cdo/aid/1742/jewish/What-Is-Chametz.htm
2. See, for example, the summary given in Deutsch, Yosef (1998) Let My People Go: The Story of the Exodus of the Jewish Nation from Egyptian Bondage; A Compilation of Talmudic and Midrashic sources. Feldheim Publishers, New York.
3. Cited in Zornberg, Avivah Gottlieb (2015). Bewilderments: Reflections on the Book of Numbers. Schocken Books, New York.