A Spiritual Spring Cleaning

As Passover approaches our traditions calls on us to create a chametz-free environment. The process comes to its climax the night before Passover. Families gather with a candle, feather, wooden spoon and paper bag to search for and collect the last remaining chametz (leaven) in our home to destroy it. Given that many of us are stocking up on pasta, rice and bread during these strange times, you may not be as aggressive in your spring cleaning this Passover. But our tradition guides us on the "spiritual chametz" we should seek to eliminate - and no better time like the present!

Kad HaKemach, Passover 1:5 (By Rabbi Bachya, 1300's, Saragosa, Spain)

.... Just as the 'kabbalah' comes (instructing us) to eradicate chametz and (livdok) to check the house in nooks and in cracks, so too we are obligated to search and check the chambers of our inner being for bad (machshavas) intentions and bad (hirhurim) thoughts. Just as bedikat chametz (checking for chametz) is not valid by sunlight, nor by moonlight, nor by the light of a torch, but only by the light of a candle, so too the bedikah (checking) of the yetzer hara must be by the light of the neshama (soul) which is called 'ner' (candle), this is what is written (proverbs 20:27) "the candle of Hashem is the soul of man, which searches the chambers of one's inner being.

Mesillat Yesharim is an ethical (musar) text composed by the influential Rabbi Moshe Hayyim ‎Luzzatto (1707–1746) in Amsterdam (1738 CE).

Rabbi Dayna Ruttenberg (www.danyaruttenberg.net, March 15, 2013)

One of the mitzvot associated with Passover is that of removing chametz, leaven, from one’s domain. In contemporary practice, this involves not only getting rid of pasta and cookies from the cupboard, but also, for many, cleaning everything (most especially the kitchen) thoroughly, covering up countertops on which chametz has been prepared, taking out dishes on which chametz has never been eaten, and a lot of other things. It’s a rigorous, physically demanding process of cleaning, wiping, boiling, and sorting. But at the end of it, as Passover starts, there’s often a gorgeous feeling that one has purified, in a way, one’s physical surroundings.

These preparations for Passover can feel deeply spiritual in one way, but also invite us to ask whether we’re removing the spiritual chametz from our lives along with the physical stuff. A lot of traditional commentators describe chametz as fluffy, swollen (think of bread rising), and talk about spiritual chametz as the puffy, overextended parts of our ego; the way we try to posture and preen, to achieve renown rather than just existing as we are, being gentle and modest; a mere humble matzah, if you will.

It’s a lot harder to sweep out our illusions about ourselves, the ways in which we try to put ourselves first, the ways in which we hear others a little less well because we think of ourselves as more important, the ways in which we take shortcuts on our integrity and deepest values. There’s no cabinet in which we can lock away our pettienesses and our meannesses for a week.

Rather, we have to seek them out. Like the search for physical chametz that happens in the dark, with a candle, we need to be intentional in our attempts to collect all of the parts of who we’ve been that are not nourishing, that are dragging us down. We need to look for it, and we need to be willing to find it; to confront it, to face it, to name it, to take it from where it’s been hidden all this time. This work requires tremendous bravery.

And then, when we find it, we must burn it to give it up completely, to let it go, to transform ourselves by putting the worst of who we have been on the pyre.

We know, on some level, that like the cookie crumbs under the sofa, that some of it might come creeping back after Pesach is over. But it is the act of seeking it, naming it, and releasing it, to committing, year after year after year, to purifying the self and becoming the holiest version of who we are meant to be; it is the work of seeking out and releasing our internal leaven that is, in itself, an offering to God.