This Year's Thought on Pesach and decluttering

I've read a number of decluttering theories and I find that they don't work for me.

"Konmari" everything that doesn't "spark joy?" -- No. I use a lot of things that don't spark joy. In fact, I prefer to have some things that don't, if they are heavily used by the smaller, more reckless members of the family. It saves trouble not to love things.
"Toss everything you haven't used in a year?" -- No. I still give my students the best handouts my teachers gave us in middle school, and I am so glad I saved them.
"Moving is a great time to shed things" -- but only if getting rid of them is easier than putting them in boxes, which it usually isn't.
"Throw away 17 things?" -- This is a good one... but....

In general, the whole idea of minimalism intrigues me. I enjoy minimalist spaces but my favorite Victorians were terrific hoarders of curios.

What does the Torah say about it?

A -- "the more possessions, the more worry." That sounds like decluttering is a good idea.
B -- "Yaakov went back for the small vessels." He crossed the river in the middle of the night just to get the Tupperware. That makes it sound like you shouldn't declutter just to declutter.

So I rolled these ideas around in my mind for a while, and....

Cleaning for Pesach is an entirely different kind of decluttering. All we have to declutter is chametz. Pesach-cleaning, as everyone loves to remind each other, is not spring-cleaning. All you have to get rid of is chametz.
Why?
Because that's what G-d said to get rid of. Done.

Well! I can bring the same laser-like focus into decluttering in the rest of my life, too. It helps if you have more or less defined what your goal in life is.
Is this item helping me do what I'm here for, or not?
Not does it make me happy, not have I used it in a year, not is it number 16 and what will I toss next -- those are all peripherals. Does this thing help me be an eved Hashem, or not?

As an extreme example, if I used to love this thing but then my children ripped it and so the main emotion I experience when looking at it is not warm fuzzies for the person who gave it to me but bottomless irritation with my careless children, out! That thing is not helping me in my life.

Pharaoh in Pajamas

A perfect send-up of the silent film genre.

Happy Pesach!

Pharaoh in Pajamas, by the 5th-6th grade at Torah Academy

How to Love Pesach

In the spirit of the Internet, here is my DIY guide to loving Pesach.

DIY LOVING PESACH IN FIVE EASY STEPS!!!

1. Identify the Quarry.

You can't love cleaning for chametz if you don't know what you're looking for. Call your friendly local halachic authority and find out what size and quality of chametz need to be out of your house by Pesach, rather than trying to “catch 'em all” when the pokemon in question are undefined. Know exactly what you're doing.

2. Put Your Ribbons in Glass Jars If It Makes You Happy.

Everyone says “Don't spring-clean!” and it's true that dirt is not chametz, Pesach-cleaning is not spring-cleaning, and the two should not be confused.

But Pesach-cleaning involves channeling the spring-cleaning instinct, not repressing it. So I say: start with spring-cleaning if that's what comes naturally. I started this year by rearranging ribbons on the sewing-shelf; we got to the kitchen cabinets eventually but every time I turned around I saw pretty ribbons in chromatic order and it felt... Pesachdik.

3. Appreciate that Love Is Born in Chaos.

Understand what the month of Adar is about.

Adar leads up to Nisan as Elul leads up to Tishrei. Pesach will not be all that it can be if you do not go through Adar first.

Adar is about chaos. Adar is about, I am so not in control of my life it's funny. Adar is about, Hashem is in control, not the king and not the vizier. Hashem.

Every Rosh Chodesh Adar something crazy pushes me into a corner so that I just have to throw my hands in the air and laugh. Will you will come into our school in ten minutes and extemporize teaching for four hours? The right answer is, No. But the righter answer is, Yes, and happy Adar to you, too.

Two weeks later, on Purim, we are so not on top of the situation that we can't even tell who people are by their clothes, and a good proportion of our social norms dissolve into one big happy day of giving food to everyone. If you try to maintain everyday order on Purim you'll short-circuit. It's a day when creation goes haywire.

Pesach flows naturally from Purim.

But suddenly people try to be in control again. Then they get frustrated and start wisecracking about how we give each other food for Purim just one month before all that food has to be cleaned out of every corner for Pesach.

What do you think, that G-d hates housekeeping? It's not an accident and it's not sabotage. While yes, you have to get all that chametz out, the very inefficiency of the arrangement pushes you to recognize that it's not about efficiency at all. It's not about having a clean house.

So, if not spring-cleaning, what is Pesach about?

It's about, Hashem came into Egypt suddenly to pull us out from nonexistence into existence and claim us as His own. The theme of the month is ahava, the love between G-d and the Jewish people. Pesach is the beginning of that relationship.

That relationship was formed in chaos. The feeling of not being ready is an essential part of Pesach. We threw the dough in the oven and ran.

No one said, “Wait a minute, G-d. This is too much chaos. I'd like to stay a slave in Egypt until my dough finishes rising.”

Lechtech acharai bamidbar be'eretz lo zarua, you followed me into the wilderness, into a place where the housekeeping was total chaos. Yeshuas Hashem k'heref ayin, it happened in the blink of an eye.

On Pesach we love G-d through chaos.

Just relax and enjoy it. You can get to places on Pesach that you can't get to the rest of the year. Make room for that.

4.  It's All about the Bottomless Supply of Chocolate.

A member of our community recently raised the question of how to explain the concept of chametz to her two-year-old.

My first thought was that before she switches her kitchen to Pesach mode, she could show the child how yeast produces bubbles (Loops like to cheer it on - “Eat, yeasties, eat!” - like Klara drilling Latin), and how those bubbles manifest in the finished loaf, but not in matzah.

But the truth is that when Loops was two, I didn't bother trying to explain chametz. It was all about look at these fancy pretty dishes with blooming irises on them, special for Pesach and here is your fancy new dress with pretty sparkly buttons, special for Pesach and here is matzah, special for Pesach. I hide all the things I want to buy her anyway in the closet for months and then give them to her special for Pesach.

Adults are big two-year-olds and the same principle applies.

In practice (says the halacha) this usually means that men buy meat and wine for themselves, dresses for their wives, and nuts and sweets for their children.

(My inner two-year-old also likes that the logo on the kosher-for-Passover seltzer bottles is the heroine from East o' the Sun and West o' the Moon, which is my favorite fairy tale because it reminds me of Jewish history: the wife wandering the world with a candle in her hand looking for her polar bear husband.)

Childish pleasures are a real part of loving Pesach (thus codified in halacha) and not to be sneezed at.

5. Get a Handle on the Haggada.

The haggada is totally incomprehensible until you put in effort to understand it but then it unrolls and it seems obvious that each paragraph couldn't have been anything else. Apportion some time before Pesach to learn where it takes us and how.

Here is Rav Leuchter's explanation. (truffles truffles truffles)

Apart from that, the four cups correspond to the four stages of the exodus:

1. And I will take you out

2. And I will save you

3. And I will redeem you

4. And I will take you to me to be a nation

This isn't a number game, it's the progression the seder follows. In the course of the evening we relive the experience, starting with being slaves in Egypt, and ending with Hallel for having come out and then Nirtzah. On top of that there is a custom to stay up and recite the Song of Songs.

At the beginning of the seder we put away half the bread for later, “just in case”. By the end of the night, there is no more concern about “just in case”. We take out our reserve and eat it, before G-d, as a korban.

The seder is not about “each person comes out of his own personal Egypt” and it isn't necessary to go down that route to make the seder meaningful. It is about a historical, national experience. You were there.

To review:

FIVE EASY DIY STEPS TO LOVING PESACH!!

1. Know exactly what you're cleaning for.

2. Start with spring-cleaning if that's what comes naturally...

3. ...BUT recognize that Pesach is about ahava, not spring-cleaning.

4. Please your inner two-year-old. This is halacha.

5. Get up an understanding of where the seder takes us and how.

Happy Pesaching!

My Idea of Pesach's Freedom (2015)

[A guest post on Torah by Jonny Schneeweiss! He's better known to the Internet for his Schneeblog, an insightful treatment of writing technique, fantasy/sci-fi/otaku, and human nature. Check it out – some great stuff. --Ed.]

I've been noticing lately how there are cultural trends of values just like cultural trends of fashion and entertainment etc. People don't really think into these values, but they're just caught up in the current so to speak. It ends up being this dichotomy of either you agree with the culturally supported dogma or you disagree with it and there's no other option.  If you're too swayed by the questions of the opposing side, your only recourse is to either switch to the anti version of your idea or be stubborn and irrationally stick to your guns.

A big example was something I noticed looking into Korean culture. In American culture, what's important is being "successful", which is a) something we as a culture haven't really thought out, and b) no one really knows what it means. But we want to be successful. There are only two sides to this discussion: either you are ambitious and try to make money and achieve success, OR you naively follow your dreams and passions and are not as successful but you're following your dream, so screw success and screw the man!

In Korea, NO ONE talks about success. They DO NOT care about success at all. For them, the cultural dogma is all about hard work. Every instance when, in the West, you'd hear someone use the word "success", in Korea it's replaced with "hard work".  Women don't want to marry someone who is successful, they want to marry someone who works hard.  In school, you're not told to do your homework so you can get a good job and be successful, you're told to do your homework because you should be working hard.  Are you working hard or are you playing? Success? Who cares about that? Are you working your hardest? Even if you're not making any money or moving up in the world, are you working yourself to death? That's what matters.  What else COULD matter?

There must be hundreds of examples of this, where the thesis/antithesis phenomenon as it applies to cultural values is seen as the ONLY way of thinking, when in the country next door there's a completely different thesis/antithesis argument dominating the national discource.  This reality is a sign of a) how unthought out cultural values are and b) how inescapable they are when it's literally all you're surrounded by. People can't escape the binary yes/no morality they're raised in. They don't even know they're being confined. It's like Flatland.

The nation we belong to as Israelites was founded on an event where the most dominant cultural dogma of the time was completely and utterly shattered right before our eyes. Bnei Yisrael were raised in an Egypt where priests probably argued about which gods were supreme and politicians vied for pharaoh's favor. That way of viewing the world was inescapable. But then in the very forging of our nation we were shown through events that the entire foundation was wrong.

Throughout our history, we've stood as a broken nation on the edge of more powerful nations who refuse to accept us. We grow up exposed to the culture of whatever nation we've been exiled to while still knowing that we have our own system of values and our own ways of thought. Just knowing that--that there IS another way of looking at each facet of life we hear about--is the most powerful tool humans can have against being swept up in the cultural force of values and thought trends. Even if we don't understand the values of our own tradition, we know they exist, which means we never have to be confined to the thesis/antithesis cycle going on around us. We have the freedom to say "I know there MUST a different way of viewing ALL of this, there must be a third dimension in this 2-d world, so let me think some more and see if anything else makes sense." This is just an option many people don't have. They don't KNOW they can do that, because why would they? Whom have they ever seen or heard about who has done that? Our national identity IS "a stranger in a strange land." Breaking out of cultural dogmas is who we are, and even when we failed to build our own successful culture as a nation, we were exiled for the purpose of reforging that identity in the midst of countless other cultures that refuse to accept us.  That's the freedom I was thankful for this Pesach.

This Thought Has Been Brought to You by a Zucchini Peeler

Two thoughts fell into my mind just before Purim and then I saw a connection between them.

1. Hester panim is an illusion.

2. I was reading about the Norman oath of vassalage and wondered
whether there is any parallel in Judaism. We do not exactly place
our hands in G-d's and swear to be His from this day forward of life
and limb and unto Him to be true and faithful... do we?

The later thought that connected them is:

'Hester panim is an illusion': this is the message of Purim.

And our oath of vassalage is - Pesach.

Zrizus: Notes from a Matzah Bakery

The matzah bakery is an overwhelming experience. It is in an unimproved basement, rough as a factory can be, half-painted and in shambles. In this concrete labyrinth are chasidim in their shirtsleeves and aprons, and other visitors: little boys in long coats and long payes and those beautiful velvet caps whose name I always forget.

The kneading room: three gleaming silver kneading pins hinged to gleaming silver tables, operated by hydraulic pumps. The noise of the chasidim banging these down and the pumps slamming them back up is sufficiently loud that some of the workers in this room wear protective headphones. Others do not: their ears swim in the holy racket of matzah-making.

At a fourth gleaming silver table, one man rolls the dough out into logs, and a second slices it with a knife (curled at the top into a self-handle) into parcels, weighs them, and throws them deftly through the air into the next room.

In the next room, women stand at a long silver table covered in paper, rolling with wooden pins, those perfect parcels into perfect circles. The individuality of this process is striking. One elderly woman stands and rolls, firmly and simply, as if she has done nothing else since 1936; another has made almost a dance of it. There is an air of incongruity about the group – all of these women engaged in labor together; where are their families? --I ask my husband who these women are and he says the custom is to hire widows. Above the table, a rack of fresh rolling pins. At the end of the shift the women will send the current ones to be sanded. The rolling pins will narrow from sanding over the months of matzah-making.

A man comes round with a paper-wrapped pole; the women flip the matzos off their rolling pins onto it.

He swings the pole round to another table, where one man rolls a shining reddler (perforator) over the matzos, once and back again; zip-zip! the sound is like an electronic vibration. Across the table, his fellow hangs the matzos on a fresh paper-wrapped pole. There is much laughter surrounding this man as he brings in a fresh load of poles and pours them into the rack above his head.

A beckoning: we may step into the next room.

A chasid thrusts the matzah-laden pole through a small doorway into a large oven of white-glazed bricks and twirls the pole to lay the matzos on the oven floor. Beside them, the fire neither flickers nor licks at the piled logs but rolls up them in earnest. It is 1000-something degrees Fahrenheit, by the thermometer.

The chasid loading the oven thrusts each unloaded pole behind him expertly, not looking, and it sails into a narrow trough, its paper now smoking or, occasionally, afire. Glowing bits of paper fly into the air. If nothing else in this room is inflammable, still it seems as if those sparks would ignite the very clatter of the operation. A worker strips the paper from the pole into a bin and inserts the pole into a pole-twirling machine to wind on fresh paper. On the wall behind him, a machine-operated wheel endlessly unspools paper for this purpose.

The matzos are done – the chasid at the oven flips them, smoking, into a wagon. Another chasid wearing thick gloves arranges them in neat rows. When the wagon is full they will be boxed.

The shift ends – the chasid at the oven passes by and I see that he is wearing two sets of sleeves, one sooty, the other nearly black with his good work.

It could be 200 years ago, it could be a Kacyzne photograph; what happens in this room is not confined to time.

It is time for Mincha – my husband is swept into the crowd of men; the women remove their gloves and collect their rolling pins. The men are in the next room talking to G-d. The paper on the tables is changed. Then boom, boom, like the drums of Tolkien's Moria but o so much nobler, one by one the kneading pins start up again.

A contemporary description of the beis hamikdash flutters into my mind, like one of those glowing bits of paper: an image of the kohanim, or was it the leviim, passing from hand to hand a gold vessel, then a silver, then a gold, then a silver, a dazzling array in perfect synchronization. This matzah bakery is the closest thing to the beis hamikdash that I have ever witnessed.

(OK, the Jewish home is.)

No one rushes. Whistles blow, clocks display the time, the matzos have to be in and out of the oven within 18 minutes of the water hitting the flour – time is absolutely of the essence – but no one rushes. They do good work in good time, lshem matzos mitzvah, they smile, there is a little kibbitzing, anyone is welcome to walk through and watch. The people working are focused with all the powers of human focus. There is no haste.

The instinct to feel at home in this modest but great enterprise is overpowering. I told my husband I want to become hasidic and take up smoking. I don't; I have just fallen in love with a matzah factory. This is a thing exactly as it is meant to be. If you painted that factory, if you cleared the hall corners, if you did your very best to make the place look respectable, let alone beautiful – you could not make it any lovelier than it is already.

'To Spring' by William Blake

Just for fun.
Have a chag kasher v'sameach

O THOU with dewy locks, who lookest down
Through the clear windows of the morning, turn
Thine angel eyes upon our western isle,
Which in full choir hails thy approach, O Spring!
The hills tell one another, and the listening
Valleys hear; all our longing eyes are turn'd
Up to thy bright pavilions: issue forth
And let thy holy feet visit our clime!
Come o'er the eastern hills, and let our winds
Kiss thy perfumèd garments; let us taste
Thy morn and evening breath; scatter thy pearls
Upon our lovesick land that mourns for thee.
O deck her forth with thy fair fingers; pour
Thy soft kisses on her bosom; and put
Thy golden crown upon her languish'd head,
Whose modest tresses are bound up for thee.

In the Wee Hours of the Morning in a Kitchen Full of Spray Bottles This Seemed Extremely Funny

For the full effect, you have to stop singing abruptly the moment you run out of syllables.

On the evening before Pesach, my husband kashered for me
Five steel pots,
Four electric burners,
Three countertops,
Two kitchen sinks,
And a blech!

What We Wore in Egypt

This is not based on serious research, only the Internet; but from what I can make out, it seems that...

The Egyptians went round chiefly in white linen. The more wealthy you were, the finer your linen -- which is why garments in Egyptian art are sometimes depicted as transparent.

The Jews wore wool -- shelo shinu es malbusham, we did not switch over to traditional Egyptian dress. And, at least when we had time, we dyed it. Woolen garments, like shepherding, were anathema to the sheep-worshipping Egyptians.

Wool in summer is not as crazy as it sounds -- a light wool is more comfortable than, say, a light cotton.
But I did find this amusing, because even today certain Jews are the ones wearing black wool suits in the summer...

Ruskin on the Civil War

OK. I found the letter cited above. I am not a scholar of the Civil War, to agree or disagree - I don't have a good enough handle on popular thought in the 1800s - but Ruskin's critique is interesting.

John Ruskin was a 19th century English scholar of art and natural science, of whom I know very little.
Charles Norton writes that in person, Ruskin was a generous soul; but in his letters Ruskin is by turns melancholy and cutting. The best insult in his correspondence is reserved for certain political economists:
...the miserable wretches haven't brains enough to be prologue to an egg and butter.


This is Part II of the post on machlokes. Ruskin saw the same kind of self-deception in the Civil War:

Mornex, 10th February, 1863.
My Dear Norton---
. . . . It is no use talking about your war. . . . The miserablest idiocy of the whole has been your mixing up a fight for dominion. . . with a soi disant fight for liberty. If you want the slaves to go free, let their masters go free first, in God's name. If they don't like to be governed by you, let them govern themselves. Then, treating them as a stranger state, if you like to say, "You shall let that black fellow go, or" ---etc., as a brave boy would fight for another fag at Eton --- do so; but you know perfectly well no fight could be got up on those terms; and that this fight is partly for money, partly for vanity, partly. . . .for wild anarchy and the Devil's cause and crown, everywhere.

I should mention -- since one never knows how literate one's online audience is -- that certain words still in use meant something quite different in Victorian English.

__

It occurred to me when I posted about Chehalis that there is a curious contrast between Civil War reenactments, in which people assume the identities of historical figures to reenact historical events by way of recreation, and Tisha b'Av, which was yesterday, on which people sit down on the floor and weep over the disasters (which are still with us) of some 2000 years ago. Civil War reenactments are fairly impersonal, a day off from one's life as oneself. Jewish holidays are not -- we feel that we were there and still are, no reenactment necessary -- at least, not to the extent of Chehalis.

A True Story

Presented by Rabbi Rafi Mollot, of the Manhattan Beach Kollel.

So THAT'S why you do that

ME and MITZVAH OF REMOVING CHAMETZ FROM ONE'S HOME [commandment to remove leavened goods from one’s home for Passover]  are sitting with our feet up, sipping lemonade, on the first day of Chol HaMoed, 2012.

Me: Well! Isn't this lovely!

Mitzvah of Removing Chametz from One's Home: Yes!

Me: You were easy to fulfill this year.

Mitzvah: What do you mean?

Me: There was the year I had one afternoon in which to clean and fulfill you in a three-story house.

Mitzvah: Oh, yeah...

Me: And the year when I had to dash across town at midnight to clean someone else's apartment from start to finish.

Mitzvah: Oh.

Me: But this year, you were easy to fulfill, and I had an especially nice time fulfilling you.

Mitzvah: Thanks.

Me: (sips lemonade companionably)

Mitzvah: (sips lemonade companionably)

Me: What's that sloshing sound?

Mitzvah: (innocently) It sounds like it's coming from the freezer.

Me: Yeah.

Mitzvah: It sounds like your freezer has broken and is flooding your refrigerator with breadcrumbs and clumps of dough from the inner part of the freezer that you were not obligated to clean because you never, ever, ever unbolt it.

Me: Mitzvah. You didn't.

Mitzvah: It sounds like it is pouring out of the refrigerator onto your kitchen floor and flooding the house, bringing bread and bread dough into every room of the apartment. See -- here it comes.
Enter CHAMETZ, stage left.

Me: Oh, Mitzvah! Why did you do this?

Mitzvah: Because I love you to pieces, and I want to spend as much time with you as possible!

Springtime for Cynics

When I was a terribly cynical middle-schooler, the choir director taught us a song in four-part harmony, which I could never sing like I meant it:
Now is the month of Maying, when merry lads are playing, fa la la la la la la la la - no, they're not, they're either in math class or doing its homework -
...a-dancing on the grass - what grass? we live in a city, where open spaces are rationed and landscaped,
fa la la la la la la la la. The Spring clad all in gladness/doth laugh at winter's sadness - Spring? Winter? I haven't noticed a change in seasons. I think I need to get out more,
and to the bagpipe's sound/ the nymphs tread out the ground - What era was this composed in, that people had time to frolic in unspoilt meadows, and the peace of mind to do so wholeheartedly?
fa la la la la, fa la la la la la la, la la la la la. Where is that legendary Spring?


And every Pesach, I get my answer.


The air warms up, the earth bursts into bloom, and where are the Jewish people?
Indoors or in the courtyard, scrubbing all the winter's crumbs out of the house, until G-d drags us by the ear out of Egypt, and says, "This month is for you!"
This month is for you the origin of all the months: you are a Spring nation, a people repeatedly revived from the dead.
Go and tell everyone, go demonstrate to all the despairing middle-schoolers (of any age or stage in life), that just as the earth is led each year out of winter, just as the Jewish nation was led out of the slavery of its body, mind, heart and soul in Egypt, so too humanity as a whole, and every individual, are given the Spring.
This month is not the exclusive provenance of things that bloom, creep, or fly; no matter how oppressive your circumstances, this Spring is for you!


Those with better things to read than this blog will recognize that this post is not original material - thank you Rav Hirsch.
And Rabbi Estuary, we'll see if I ever forgive the rav for making me try to paraphrase that :P

Kenneth Grahame on Cleaning for Pesach

Every Spring when I face the prospect of cleaning this apartment for Passover, the opening of Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows comes to mind:

THE Mole had been working very hard all the morning, spring-cleaning his little home. First with brooms, then with dusters; then on ladders and steps and chairs, with a brush and a pail of whitewash; till he had dust in his throat and eyes, and splashes of whitewash all over his black fur, and an aching back and weary arms. Spring was moving in the air above and in the earth below and around him, penetrating even his dark and lowly little house with its spirit of divine discontent and longing. It was small wonder, then, that he suddenly flung down his brush on the floor, said, "Bother!" and "O blow!" and also "Hang spring-cleaning!" and bolted out of the house without even waiting to put on his coat. Something up above was calling him imperiously, and he made for the steep little tunnel which answered in his case to the gravelled carriage-drive owned by animals whose residences are nearer to the sun and air. So he scraped and scratched and scrabbled and scrooged, and then he scrooged again and scrabbled and scratched and scraped, working busily with his little paws and muttering to himself, "Up we go! Up we go!" till at last, pop! his snout came out into the sunlight and he found himself rolling in the warm grass of a great meadow.


"This is fine!" he said to himself. "This is better than whitewashing!" The sunshine struck hot on his fur, soft breezes caressed his heated brow, and after the seclusion of the cellarage he had lived in so long the carol of happy birds fell on his dulled hearing almost like a shout. Jumping off all his four legs at once, in the joy of living and the delight of spring without its cleaning, he pursued his way across the meadow....

...but once we crack out the pails of suds and set to work, I take exception to Mole.

The first step to Springtime liberation is to finish the whitewashing -- not only to begin, but also to finish, and then we can toss the buckets in the air, yell Hang Whitewashing! and run out of Egypt. I have been thinking this over, and I believe spring-cleaning is a universal instinct, not to hamper us from getting out into the Spring, but as an integral part of how we participate in it. Spring has got to reach into every corner of this house; it is not enough to fling the brush on the floor and leave it.

Rebbe Nachman miBreslov says to take the troubling feeling of not having quite finished preparing for Pesach and turn it into a yearning for the Divine -- that this, too, is an integral part of Pesach -- nun bau dein Tempel schiere!

So, no fair quitting in the middle of whitewashing.