You! You there, the one who stumbled upon this blog and don’t know what a Pesach diary is because you are unfamiliar with the term Pesach. Will you stay long enough to reach the conclusion that Pesach is the same as Passover, the more commonly used secular name for the same holiday?
What exactly is the purpose of this holiday? Is it just another day celebrated with its given ethnic food, like associating turkey with Thanksgiving, in this case Pesach with matza?
Do you ever stop and wonder, why? Why do we do this? Why do we make ourselves crazy in the weeks and months leading up to our Pesach holiday, leaving nothing unturned in our mission to clear our home from any trace of chometz?
Do you even know what chometz means? Have you ever been to a seder?
Welcome to the wonderful world of orthodox religious Jews. We strive to maintain the same Pesach our ancestors celebrated when they were redeemed from slavery in Egypt. It’s not enough to say our fathers were slaves in Egypt, but WE were too. In the rush to get out of Egypt, the dough did not have time to rise and therefore turned into matza. We were commanded to remove all chometz from our households and refrain from eating it during the entire holiday of Pesach. No, that is not just for the seder, but rather for the entire eight-day-stretch that is the duration of Pesach.
Chabad.org defines Chometz as "leaven" -- any food that's made of grain and water that have been allowed to ferment and "rise." Bread, cereal, cake, cookies, pizza, pasta, and beer are blatant examples of chametz; but any food that contains grain or grain derivatives can be, and often is, chametz. Practically speaking, any processed food that is not certified "Kosher for Passover" may potentially include chametz ingredients.
AskMoses.com clarifies: Chametz is any product that contains wheat, barley, oats, spelt or rye that has leavened (risen). Our Rabbis have determined that flour from any of these five grains that comes in contact with water or moisture will leaven unless completely baked within eighteen minutes.
For the rest of you, who have been keeping Pesach forever, or at least for years and years, you know the deal. We turn over every room in our home in search of a wayward pretzel or cookie crumb. We find lost toys or earrings and feel so refreshed to actually have every single nook and cranny – even the ones we normally forget about – clean, for a change. (Yes, there are those women whose homes are always spotless; don’t worry, I’m referring to the rest of us.) Many people confuse Pesach cleaning with spring cleaning, but most of us just merge the two together. If we’re already cleaning for chometz, why not clean for dust as well? It’s the perfect excuse to stop procrastinating and finally clean out and organize all the closets that would have otherwise kept getting pushed off indefinitely.
The closer we get to the month when Pesach usually falls out, April, cleaning women become the most sought after. There have been cases of women sobbing uncontrollably because their cleaning help quit on them. Some desperate women offer to increase the pay of cleaning help if only they will work for her instead of their usual customers. Crazy, crazy, crazy.
Some of us move out of our homes and sell all the remaining chometz for the duration of the holiday so that we are no longer the owners when we are forbidden to be. Actually, it’s not just some of us, but we ALL sell the ‘chometz’, whether any remains or not, there are always the pots and pans and dinnerware we used for cooking and serving chometz during the year and that gets sold too. There might be remnants of chometz that we may have missed and we don’t want to take any chances about owning chometz on Pesach.
Yes, it’s quite complicated. I’m no expert, no rabbi’s wife, no Hebrew teacher – just an ordinary Jewish woman who grew up with this life so if you want to know more, Google it. The above-mentioned resources are good starting points.
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