.JPG)
I crank up our little gas oven to kasher it. I soak the knobs in soapy water, clean out the fridge and wash down the counters. Now ready for the final phase of kashering, I pour boiling water across all of the counters and tabletops. Carefully wiping up the steaming water with a clean towel, I feel as if I am washing away the old and ushering in a fresh new phase. It’s a great feeling.
During these pre-Pesach days, an infinitesimal percentage
of the planet’s population hunkers down to scrub and clean and cook.
If you
live outside of Israel, you may take it seriously, but the rest of your country
folk continue on with their regular lives.
spring cleaning, shopping, cooking and celebrating. All together.
religious or not. Everyone in the country cleans.
cleaned the buildings; they scrubbed the walls, the desks, emptied lockers and
swept halls.
My two kids in the army, together with their entire units, took
time off to clean their army bases; they scrubbed every surface on the base,
then waited nervously for the highers in command to inspect their important army
work.
.JPG) |
| Sign outside army base: No chametz until April 12 |
discounts at supermarkets like this:
ניקול להזכירך, לכבוד החג נשלח אליך בדואר שובר הנחה 20 ש”ח בקנייה מעל 250 ש”ח למימוש בסניפי שופרסל עד ה12.4.15. מימוש אישי חד פעמי פרטים בסניף. ניתן לממש גם באפליקציית שופרסל: לפרטים נוספים . חג שמח ממועדון
Billboards wish us all a chag
sameach as they announce the newest line of perfumes. This is standard holiday
marketing, the kind you would find in North America before Christmas.
twist. Here are some small observations as I did my errands yesterday.
always take them to the same supermarket and always see the same security guard
at the door. He looked in my bag.
“Bottles?” he asked. I felt as if I were
smuggling some dangerous weapon.
“Yes,” I relied, confused.
“No more bottles until after Pesach,” he said, waving his
metal detector in the air, as if this were one of the 10 commandments.
that’s bizarre,” I protested, wondering about the logic of grocery store refusing to take bottle
returns for a month just because of a Jewish holiday.
that Pesach was serious business in strange ways.
as if everyone in Ra’anana was at the car wash at this very moment. The line of cars
went right down the street. Why did I not think of doing this last week?
business. The car wash even had a sign outside announcing an extra special
Passover deep cleaning.
did not see the cashier, but I did see an unattended basket filled with car keys. As a
reticent, polite Canadian, I did not feel it was my place to sort through the
keys when no one was in the office, so I went out to look for her. A worker saw
me and thrust the basket in front of me.
not help myself to any car on the lot.
mine.
pick any car and drive it home.
trust. Where else on the planet would this happen?
vacuumed car, I saw a moving trucks sitting outside a few homes. Ah ha! The
best time ever to move into a newly built or renovated home is before Pesach.
The logic? When you have a brand new kitchen, there is no need to kasher it for
Pesach.
truck. It was weighed down with junk: metal bars, fence pieces, old appliances.
I even thought I spied a doghouse wedged in there.
wend its way up and down streets, a prerecorded message screaming out to people
to throw away their junk. Well, ’tis the season to get rid of stuff. This truck
is so piled high, looks like it won’t make it down the block.
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checked out, the cashier told me that my huge order made me eligible to buy a
box of organic matzah for only 9 ILS.
“Why not?” I replied, tossing yet another box of
organic whole wheat matzah into my shopping bag.
So Pesach is in the air: it’s at the car wash, on the billboards and out there in cyberspace. It’s in the matzah at the health food store.
As I wrote in my novel Let My RV Go:
All foods that have been leavened are puffed up, akin to our egos. We rid ourselves of selfishness and bad
drives, opening the way for a more direct spiritual connection. So when we
clean these leavened foods from our homes, we are, in essence, cleansing our
souls.
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Wishing you a chag kasher v’sameach and a real spiritual cleansing.
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