Cleaning out MY Crumbs- Not Yours
Passover Time!- Spring, Green, Freedom!
And how do I celebrate my freedom? Or better phrased- how does my freedom manifest itself?
I realize that it’s my job to search out the crumbs in my house, and not in yours.
(Passover preparations include making sure that there is no Hametz, leaven, in my possession. For traditional Jews like us, this means not only no bread, but no cookies or cakes with wheat flour, no pasta, almost no processed foods- not much of anything except for Matzah (Flat Cracker-Bread), nuts, potatoes and quinoa. And we spend days ahead (in some cases, weeks ahead), cleaning up and ridding our homes from even the smallest crumbs.)
It’s pretty wild, really. I might think, that as a free, powerful man I walk from house to house feeling smug enough to say “Well this guy’s really gotta clean up his crumbs,” or “This guy’s crumb-standards are definitely not up to par.” Or to tell my friends, “Well, we don’t talk with those people- they have crumbs.”
But on Passover, I am taught that free men look for the crumbs in their own homes. If I do spend my holiday on a “He’s got crumbs walk,” then I have obviously not left Egypt.
When I finish cleaning out my crumbs- and this is the deepest part- I burn my remaining crumbs and say a little prayer that nullifies them “As the dust of the earth.” I basically say, “I did my best. No more looking at crumbs- not even my own.” I enter the holiday redeemed even from judgments I have about myself.
When I was little I had a book called “Here Comes the Strikeout.” The book began, “In the spring the birds sing, the grass is green and boys run and play.”
And that’s spring. Wonderful it is, that we all come out to bloom- birds, people, flowers- when we finally realize that being free means working on our own crumbs, not judging anyone else for their crumbs, and knowing that at a certain point, it’s just time to stop talking about crumbs.
Happy Freedom!
What are your favorite Passover foods? I’m determined to fry my own Salt n’ Vinegar Potato Chips. I know that everyone has a plethora of Salt n’ Vinegar Potato Chip recipes, so please- feel free to share!
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April 22nd, 2008 at 4:06 am
Potato chips make huge crumbs!especially eating on a couch while watching hockey games! Boy do I miss the person who used to do that! Anyway, we miss the smell of your fabulous french fries that was the staple of your Pesach diet. When I bought a big jar of oil this year I realized there was very little use for it. So I ended up making a huge potato kugel. then realized I could have made potato latkes for Pesach. But that would be mixing up the holidays.
Potato chips with vinegar and salt sound great. Paul Newman, move over! Here comes the strikeout! With love, imma