Every Pesach shiur I hear begins the same way: Don’t be afraid. Don’t overdue it. Just enjoy your Pesach preparations. Give your kids a positive experience. There is nothing to be scared of.
I am waiting for one shiur to just validate the feelings of those of us who are afraid. For many thousands of women, simply hearing the words “Pesach is coming” sends chills down our spines We feel our palms start to sweat and begin breathing rapidly. We are clearly scared.
But when Paul Revere warned the colonists, in his famous midnight ride, that “the Redcoats are coming,” they weren’t paralyzed in fear. On the contrary, they used the opportunity to show the world what they were made of. So...what are we made of? What are we missing that those determined colonists had? Or, to cut right through the grease, what are we really so afraid of?
I am certain that our collective national feeling of dread at the sound of the word “Pesach” is nothing more than our deep hatred for cleaning in general. You see, we actually love Pesach. We just loathe cleaning. We can genuinely enjoy Yom Tov – even a three-day Yom Tov – it’s just the cleaning that rattles us. And this fear of cleaning is deeply rooted in our fear of the unknown.
To explain: Often the hardest part of an ordeal is the “not-knowing” part. Since we don’t know what will happen in the future, we imagine the worst. This is the sole reason why many people (myself included) check the weather obsessively. We just want to know. We even check the long-range forecast, knowing it will be wrong, but we just want to know what it would have been before it was wrong! When it comes to cleaning, there are just so many unknowns that it sets our pulses racing.
When we begin to clean, we honestly don’t know what we are going to find. In an age when mankind strives to discover new worlds beneath the deepest oceans and into the vast expanses of our solar system, there are some corners of the universe that are best left unexplored: your nine-year-old’s backpack, for example. No one really wants to know what has been smashed and crushed and dripped into that bag for the past seven months. Between the granola bar crumbs, the Ziplock bag of cucumbers you gave him once in October, and the bags of chips that were half eaten and then saved for another time, there is definitely more chametz in that backpack than in my kitchen. There have even been years, I admit, when I have just thrown out the whole backpack and started over after Pesach. The only place that has more chametz than the backpacks is my car!
It is astounding to me how much chametz is in my car. I know it’s my own fault since I allow food in the car, however, I just can’t imagine how we would get to school on time in the morning without eating breakfast in the car. But the amount that seems to miss their mouths is incredible. As I vacuum between the seat cushions, I can’t help but feel a little guilty that maybe, after all these months, my kids have actually been going to school hungry after all, because their food is apparently all stuck to the floor of my car!
Every year, once my car is clean, I vow to never let anyone eat in my car ever again. And then, not even four days later, chips and lady fingers and something else made out of potatoes but called a “snack” once again litter the floor and the seats of the car – remnants of our Chol Hamoed trip – and my passionate desire for a more refined lifestyle is out the window.
Physically, when someone experiences fear, there is an internal release of adrenaline and the body automatically goes into fight-or-flight mode. Some people tackle Pesach cleaning with the fight response: cleaning with a vengeance. They are determined to rid their homes of all chametz and any dust that may have seen chametz in the past year. They move the fridge, they clean the chandelier, they remove the lint from around the dryer, they shake out every single book, even the Yom Kippur machzorim! And they enter Pesach a little weary, perhaps, but confident that they have thoroughly routed the enemy.
Other people go into the flight response. They remain in denial for as long as possible and avoid all conversations that start with, “So where are you holding?” like the plague. The truth is: Hashem didn’t have to hit Egypt with ten plagues. He could have just had Moshe threaten Pharoah that if he didn’t let the Jews go, the Mitzrim would have to clean their homes from top to bottom every year! That would have brought Egypt to its knees in no time. Paroah would have capitulated on the first day, moaning, “Not that! Anything but that!” Yet here we are, armed and ready to come to terms with the reality that if we had just cleaned a little more often during the rest of the year, we wouldn’t have so much to do now.
It’s hardly fair, though. As diligent as we may be, some messes seem to make themselves. For example: every year, when I remove the bottom vegetable drawer from my fridge, I find a large, sticky, light red stain that was hidden underneath. And I also know that it will have leaked from some unidentified source above in such a way that it will inevitably hit the tube that carries water to my water dispenser, which is coiled innocently in the back of the fridge, its length ostensibly serving no other purpose than to give me more to clean when the light-red sludge from Mars engulfs it. Even if I didn’t put anything red in my fridge for the whole year, I would bet my unbroken matzahs on the fact that the light-red alien sludge would be making itself at home on the coil of water piping in the back of my fridge. It’s one of those things that you can just count on, like the far-range weather report always being wrong (which just adds to the absurdity of checking it so often).
Another thing that we can count on is that, once Pesach starts, we are the queens of the day. Whatever thanks we get (or don’t get), we know that our families could not have made Pesach without us. We may be a little tired as the adrenaline starts to wear off, but we have stared fear in the face and walked away victorious.
It is okay to be afraid. The unknown is scary. But we do know that there are no bagels hanging from the chandelier and no slices of pizza in the heating vents. We know that we already bought new backpacks for the kids for after their Pesach break. We know that we can always just pay some teenager to clean our cars for us. And we know that, just as it was in the zechus of the nashim tzidkanios that we left Egypt in the first place, it is in our zechus that we celebrate it today.
Be proud of the work that you’re doing. Use your adrenaline to give your kids a positive experience. Enjoy your Pesach preparations. (Now I am the one giving the Pesach shiur!) There really is nothing to be afraid of. As Franklin Roosevelt said, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” He didn’t say anything about backpacks or the car or the fridge. Fear the fear. Not Pesach. Plunge right in with zrizus (zeal) and tackle the mountain before you. The view from the top is worth it. Remember, you are the queen of that mountain.
