There is a lot of wisdom in Jewish traditions even if you are not a believer. This is evident in this article about the cleaning done before Passover and what it symbolises to this Jewish woman. Sounded like good advice for those of us who have come out of our own bondage …..JanG

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Aish.com HOLIDAY SERIES

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HOT AIR

by Rebbetzin Tzipporah Heller

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Passover has a reputation.

For some it is a family gathering in which generations join together, and, using the glue of common spiritual and physical history, retell the Exodus story. For others, words are not what matters.

My recollections of the Seders of my childhood can never be erased. The Maxwell House Haggadah, the Manischewitz wine, and the passionate desire to pass on something of who we are without quite knowing who we are, characterized the holiday. We ate matzah and drank wine so thick that it probably could have stood vertically on its own sugar content. But a vital part was missing: we didn’t do bedikat chometz (checking the house to be sure that there were no leavened food or crumbs thereof).

Today I begin cleaning close to a month before the festival begins. I have always admired the law of gravity, and find it worth emulating. For this reason, the procedure starts with the higher realms of our closets from where I work down until, the day before the Seder, the floors are crumb- less and sparkling (well, relatively so).

The entire house gets a work over.

On the outside, it looks like I’m an under-medicated, obsessive-compulsive lunatic caught up in a spring-cleaning ritual designed by the Sorcerer’s Apprentice.

But on the inside, I feel a growing exhilaration, because my physical actions are nothing less than an attack on my ego and its barriers of choking limitation.

How can a vigorous pursuit of crumbs do this?

To answer that question, we need to take a look at what the Exodus means to us today, on a personal and spiritual level.

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THE MEANING OF EXILE AND LIBERATION

The enslavement and liberation of our ancestors is viewed by the sages as far more than history. It is the prototype of all future exiles and redemptions not only of the Jewish people collectively, but of each individual as well.

Daily, we are all engaged in battles of persecution and survival. We all have conflicts within us. We do battle with pettiness, desire, and selfishness that hold us back from becoming what we can be; this is our personal experience with the process of exile and redemption.

It is significant that the Hebrew word for the land of our first national experience with oppression is Mitzraim (Egypt). The root of this word is meitzar, which literally means “constraint.” The constraints that we suffered in Egypt were not only physical, but spiritual and emotional as well.

Today, when we ask ourselves why we are not liberated on the most basic and personal level, we often point to external constraints. We wish our parents loved us unconditionally, that our education provided us with the tools of facing real life with courage, grace and emotional know-how, that our employers, spouses, and friends opened gates rather than closed them.

However, when we look at our internal reality more honestly, the fact is that not one of these factors is the deal-breaker when we see our unrealized potential. We all know people who have expanded their inner worlds beyond anyone’s reasonable expectations against enormous odds. The most unyielding barrier of all is the wall of ego that chokes our potential for growth. This is what Passover cleaning is all about.

Here’s how the process works.

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WHAT IS CHAMETZ?

In order for bread to rise, the process that must take place involves leavening, which means that the flour “struggles” with the yeast. This causes oxidization to occur, and air pockets develop. Nothing is added to the dough, but it gets bigger and since it is full of hot air, it seems far larger as a loaf than it did when it was in the mixing bowl.

The forces of evil are compared to the yeast that is in the dough. Evil persuades us that things of little enduring value are hugely significant. Our inflated egos are sensitive to everything. Our insecurities feed the ego, and we become more and more sensitive.

I have seen this occur many times in my own life, but the most vivid and tragic example was one that I experienced vicariously. I was a junior counselor in a day camp. The head counselor was, at the time, the most worldly and sophisticated person I knew, who didn’t fall into the threatening and alien world of middle aged (30 or over) adults. She was cool, self- contained and astute, none of which would have described me at seventeen.

One day she got on the bus visibly traumatized. Her face was tear- streaked. Nothing remained of her cooler than cool fa?ade. I asked her what had happened. She told me that a child that she had taught during the school year had committed suicide.

My first response was to ask “Why”? The anguish in her eyes mocked my question when she answered, “No matter what it was, it wasn’t so big. It wasn’t worth it. He was eight.”

There is a reason that we are so easily and so gravely wounded. It is our unending search for feeling we are adequate. We don’t believe in our worth or our sense of eternity that stems from our spiritual essence. If we did, the vicissitudes of life would never impede on our inner lives.

We fill our empty spaces with air, and die millions of deaths as others deflate us. The problem is not that the rest of the world has the sensitivity of bulls in a china shop. The problem is that we are full of air. The flour and water, which symbolize the substance and spirit that make us human has been corrupted. We posture, exclude, and purchase to satisfy the hunger of our insatiable egos. The problem is that we enslave ourselves.

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PASSOVER CLEANING

The spirit of Passover is liberation. Now is the time that we can get rid of our chametz (leavened) self-definition. Rather than achieving this goal through introspection alone (which often makes us even more self- absorbed), we also attack the physical manifestations of chametz.

What we do physically often changes who we are spiritually. We move not only from the inside out (from the mind and heart to the body), but from the outside in, (from the body to the heart and mind) as well.

The scrubbing affects our inner space far more permanently than it does our outer space.

Passover can take us far beyond matzah, wine and family warmth. It can liberate us from our most dangerous enemy — our fragile egos.

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