Getting ready for passing over
Tonight is the first night of Pesach. Oddly enough, this is the one Jewish holiday that everyone seems to prefer calling by its English name instead: Passover.
So, naturally, and in concert with all Jews everywhere, my thoughts were drawn this past weekend to that least charming of Jewish subjects: chametz. Or, more specifically, to the onerous task of removing every last speck of the stuff from my house and the similarly onerous chore of cleaning or (temporarily) replacing every chametz-contaminated food-related item we own.
I should take a step back for my non-Jewish readers. Chametz is Hebrew for "leavening" or "leavened food", and it is strictly prohibited for Jews to consume even a speck of chametz at any time during the eight days of the Passover festival. This is why we have a special food label that shows up this time of year: "Kosher for Passover."
The regular rules of kashrut are all about meat: only eat meat from certain animals, make sure they were humanely raised and humanely slaughtered, don't mix their meat with products of their milk. Those rules still apply, but kosher-for-Passover rules are all about grain products: specifically, about avoiding them. To be k-f-P, a food product must neither include nor ever have come in contact with (because molecules can jump from food to food, don't you know?) even a single grain of wheat, rye, spelt, barley, or oats that might possibly have been leavened or even allowed to ferment (self-leaven, as it were) for more than 18 minutes.
The funny thing is that even Jews who never keep kosher tend to follow the k-f-P rules. One of my earliest memories of Jewish culture is seeing college students I didn't even know were Jewish bringing boxes of matzah to the student-paper newsroom. They did this so that they would have something to nosh on, of course, but I suspect that it was also a form of conspicuous consumption: letting the world know through your food choices how proud you are, this week at least, to celebrate your Jewishness. I mean, hey, that's what I'm planning to do this week.
Why? Passover celebrates the epic tale of how God, through Moses and his brother Aaron, liberated the Hebrew people from slavery in Egypt. When Pharaoh finally gave the Jews permission to leave Egypt, the story goes, the Jews were in such a hurry to leave that they did not take time for their daily bread to rise. So, we are told, they baked their un-risen dough into the ultimate (hand-made, artisinal) flatbread: matzah.
And so one of the nicknames for Pesach -- Jewish holidays are famous for having multiple names, and Pesach is famous for having four of everything: four names, four cups of wine, even four sons (apparently, our family was destined to celebrate Passover) -- is Chag HaMatzot, the Festival of Unleavened Cardboard. I mean, Unleavened Bread.
In order to feel as though each one of us has personally just escaped from slavery in Egypt, we are commanded to eat matzah during the Passover seder *and* we are commanded to refrain from eating any leavened bread for the remainder of the holiday. Hence, the obsession with chametz and its avoidance.
You see, to the rabbinic mind (and all Jews are encouraged to adopt a rabbinic mindset to some extent) it is not enough to not eat, say, any bagels or rye toast for breakfast during Passover. What if, by eating a scrambled egg cooked in a kitchen containing bagels and rye bread we were to accidentally eat a crumb of the leavened stuff during Passover? The horror! Or, what if by cooking those scrambled eggs on a pan that had once been used to fry French toast our eggs accidentally absorbed a molecule of chametz. I know, I couldn't stand it either!
And so, the day before Pesach officially begins, we either throw away or sequester in some way all products containing chametz. The truly observant go so far as to contractually sell any nonperishable chametz to some cooperative gentile for the duration of Passover so as to be able to say that they don't even own a speck of chametz. We also either kasher (make ritually clean through vigorous scrubbing, boiling water, and ridiculous levels of heat) or store out of everyday reach any and all dishes, pots, pans, cookware, silverware, appliances and household installations (kitchen sink, I'm lookin' at you!) that might have come into contact with chametz since the last time we did this. Which, in my case, was in a previous life.
And so yesterday I applied scalding water to our oven, our kitchen sink, all the various bits and bobs of the stovetop, and our most commonly used pots and pans. It was even almost fun, in a sick sort of way. We alternated watching scenes from Dreamworks' excellent Prince of Egypt and spending time hunting for chametz or kashering the kitchen. Even my younger two boys pitched in to scrub and spray. It was the most enthusiasm for housekeeping I have seen since we told them they were not getting Chanukah presents if the living room didn't get cleaned. Will clean for religious occasions, apparently.
Things that were stored away are replaced with items that will get used for exactly a week and a day and then get packed away in the garage again for another year. I wonder if they will extend the one-year warranty for items that only get used a week each year...
So anyway, yesterday we also went on a little shopping trip. Okay, a moderately big shopping trip. The kids even decided on a color theme for our Passover collection: black or white or silver with red trim. Red, of course, to represent the blood of the Israelite children, the plague of blood, the blood of the firstborn, the blood of the lamb on the lentils and doorposts -- basically, what appeals to school-age boys is lots and lots of blood.
And finally, here we are, hours before our home seder begins (we will have another one tomorrow night at synagogue) with a kitchen that is about as kosher-for-Passover as it is gonna get and a pantry that looks decidedly empty. Time to figure out something chametz-free to cook for dinner, and breakfast tomorrow, and then lunch...and go hit the kosher aisle at our local grocery store. Where by "aisle" I mean "three-foot-wide section of shelf space".
I hope they still have a few boxes of matzah left...
So, naturally, and in concert with all Jews everywhere, my thoughts were drawn this past weekend to that least charming of Jewish subjects: chametz. Or, more specifically, to the onerous task of removing every last speck of the stuff from my house and the similarly onerous chore of cleaning or (temporarily) replacing every chametz-contaminated food-related item we own.
I should take a step back for my non-Jewish readers. Chametz is Hebrew for "leavening" or "leavened food", and it is strictly prohibited for Jews to consume even a speck of chametz at any time during the eight days of the Passover festival. This is why we have a special food label that shows up this time of year: "Kosher for Passover."
The regular rules of kashrut are all about meat: only eat meat from certain animals, make sure they were humanely raised and humanely slaughtered, don't mix their meat with products of their milk. Those rules still apply, but kosher-for-Passover rules are all about grain products: specifically, about avoiding them. To be k-f-P, a food product must neither include nor ever have come in contact with (because molecules can jump from food to food, don't you know?) even a single grain of wheat, rye, spelt, barley, or oats that might possibly have been leavened or even allowed to ferment (self-leaven, as it were) for more than 18 minutes.
The funny thing is that even Jews who never keep kosher tend to follow the k-f-P rules. One of my earliest memories of Jewish culture is seeing college students I didn't even know were Jewish bringing boxes of matzah to the student-paper newsroom. They did this so that they would have something to nosh on, of course, but I suspect that it was also a form of conspicuous consumption: letting the world know through your food choices how proud you are, this week at least, to celebrate your Jewishness. I mean, hey, that's what I'm planning to do this week.
Why? Passover celebrates the epic tale of how God, through Moses and his brother Aaron, liberated the Hebrew people from slavery in Egypt. When Pharaoh finally gave the Jews permission to leave Egypt, the story goes, the Jews were in such a hurry to leave that they did not take time for their daily bread to rise. So, we are told, they baked their un-risen dough into the ultimate (hand-made, artisinal) flatbread: matzah.
And so one of the nicknames for Pesach -- Jewish holidays are famous for having multiple names, and Pesach is famous for having four of everything: four names, four cups of wine, even four sons (apparently, our family was destined to celebrate Passover) -- is Chag HaMatzot, the Festival of Unleavened Cardboard. I mean, Unleavened Bread.
In order to feel as though each one of us has personally just escaped from slavery in Egypt, we are commanded to eat matzah during the Passover seder *and* we are commanded to refrain from eating any leavened bread for the remainder of the holiday. Hence, the obsession with chametz and its avoidance.
You see, to the rabbinic mind (and all Jews are encouraged to adopt a rabbinic mindset to some extent) it is not enough to not eat, say, any bagels or rye toast for breakfast during Passover. What if, by eating a scrambled egg cooked in a kitchen containing bagels and rye bread we were to accidentally eat a crumb of the leavened stuff during Passover? The horror! Or, what if by cooking those scrambled eggs on a pan that had once been used to fry French toast our eggs accidentally absorbed a molecule of chametz. I know, I couldn't stand it either!
And so, the day before Pesach officially begins, we either throw away or sequester in some way all products containing chametz. The truly observant go so far as to contractually sell any nonperishable chametz to some cooperative gentile for the duration of Passover so as to be able to say that they don't even own a speck of chametz. We also either kasher (make ritually clean through vigorous scrubbing, boiling water, and ridiculous levels of heat) or store out of everyday reach any and all dishes, pots, pans, cookware, silverware, appliances and household installations (kitchen sink, I'm lookin' at you!) that might have come into contact with chametz since the last time we did this. Which, in my case, was in a previous life.
And so yesterday I applied scalding water to our oven, our kitchen sink, all the various bits and bobs of the stovetop, and our most commonly used pots and pans. It was even almost fun, in a sick sort of way. We alternated watching scenes from Dreamworks' excellent Prince of Egypt and spending time hunting for chametz or kashering the kitchen. Even my younger two boys pitched in to scrub and spray. It was the most enthusiasm for housekeeping I have seen since we told them they were not getting Chanukah presents if the living room didn't get cleaned. Will clean for religious occasions, apparently.
Things that were stored away are replaced with items that will get used for exactly a week and a day and then get packed away in the garage again for another year. I wonder if they will extend the one-year warranty for items that only get used a week each year...
So anyway, yesterday we also went on a little shopping trip. Okay, a moderately big shopping trip. The kids even decided on a color theme for our Passover collection: black or white or silver with red trim. Red, of course, to represent the blood of the Israelite children, the plague of blood, the blood of the firstborn, the blood of the lamb on the lentils and doorposts -- basically, what appeals to school-age boys is lots and lots of blood.
And finally, here we are, hours before our home seder begins (we will have another one tomorrow night at synagogue) with a kitchen that is about as kosher-for-Passover as it is gonna get and a pantry that looks decidedly empty. Time to figure out something chametz-free to cook for dinner, and breakfast tomorrow, and then lunch...and go hit the kosher aisle at our local grocery store. Where by "aisle" I mean "three-foot-wide section of shelf space".
I hope they still have a few boxes of matzah left...
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