It is days before Passover, and I am spending most of my "spare time" scrubbing and washing and cleaning the house, ridding it of that one ubiquitous ingredient that is entirely unwelcome for one week of the year: leaven, hametz.
Hametz, and the bread, pretzel, cereal and crackers crumbs it creates, gets into everything. It lurks in sofas, car seats, pockets, rugs, carpets, keyboards, handbags, key drawers, offices. So we must go through them all to ferret out those outposts of snacks and crumbs that seek to lay claim to the netherfields of our homes.
In the midst of purging our homes of this scourge of hametz, we also go shopping for those foods we can consume on Passover. Fruits, nuts and vegetables (and eggs and cheeses and meats and fish and fowl for those not inclined to be vegetarian or vegan), spices, plus stripped down dough made quickly into matzah. One can eat heartily for a week with these. But more and more these days in the grand supermarkets of Jewish neighborhoods we find Kosher for Passover crackers, noodles, cereals, cakes, cookies. And it is beginning to bother me.
If we are to experience the power of Passover, I am thinking, we need to enter it full-heartedly, which means stripping our gustatorial lives of this one strutting, towering, pleasurable but non-essential thing called leaven. We are meant to re-orient our consumption, and thus our vision of what life is all about, for one week out of the year. We are asked to see where expansiveness, pomposity, puffing up, is in some sense a charade of more without the substance of more.
We are meant to strip away the trappings, the patina, of civilization that we have worked so very hard to construct but which can serve to conceal the essence and source and purpose of life. Without the annual correction of Passover, we end up thinking that what is the bedrock of our lives is actually just the poured concrete of human construction. (You get the idea.) Passover is meant to remind us of the true foundation that our lives should be built upon, the foundation that leaven can enhance but not replace.
So when we walk into grocery stores and see Passover "Cheerios," and Passover "Saltines", and all other assorted goodies that seek to serve as substitutes for the hametz we are to rid ourselves of, the question is why?
After all, we all know they taste terrible. If anything all they seem to teach me is that living a derivative life, that is, a life of substitutes and wannabees and copycats and false "essentials" is not very fulfilling. Even more, the mere fact of trying to imitate leaven reinforces the desirability of the very thing we are meant to avoid and contain, both physically and philosophically: the puffiness of life that builds false foundations and raises barriers between us and the ultimate.
Leaven - the alchemy of yielding more from a little - is a true gift of human ingenuity and a sign of the grandeur civilization. If it is used correctly. But unchecked, misapprehended, it will delude and consume us. So once a year we remind ourselves of what truly is ultimate and essential.
On Passover (in addition to the story of freedom we are to continually retell), we are to eat more simply, with family, broadly defined, in celebration of life's essentials: a life of purpose and meaningful pursuit, lived within the shelter of each other, and amid the mystery and majesty of the spiritual and natural sources that somehow allow us to be.
