Dear Friends:
A nasty cold set me back both in preparing my house for Pesach and for filing this year’s tax return. I try to get my taxes ready for my patient accountant no later than mid-March, but this year, circumstances took me to London in the middle of the month, which began the back-up with respect to the taxes. As for Pesach, I usually begin to ready the house for the festival’s cleaning on Purim, but that marker was missed since I was abroad for the celebration. I did masquerade as an American tourist in London on Purim day, although I spent most of my time disguising myself as a Canadian, uncertain as to how people would respond if they knew my true national identity.
The consequence of all this is that I am in the middle of two ‘cleaning-outs’ – one of the house and the other of the year’s economic activities. On the home front, I have already emptied the refrigerator of what was left behind to the point of being inedible, and I have purged the freezer of unused stock and of brisket leftovers that I can date to Rosh HaShana 5785 since I only ever make brisket for the New Year.
Relatively speaking, the sins of the uneaten is easy to dispense with. The sins of the literally misspent, however, are a bit more difficult to digest. But on the positive side, my annual financial review summons memories of dinner parties and Sunday brunches and of the people who filled the house. And I delight in books purchased and in having finally found the perfect tea infuser in a shop in the Berkshires for just ten dollars. Then I recall the weekend away with the family and the dinner for fifteen that was worth the cost just because we were all together around the same table for a couple of hours. And then there were the contributions that helped balance the world’s injustices and inequities and those that brought a measure of joy to those in need of fresh air and music and art.
Truth to tell, this emptying out of what the rabbis called hameytz is the easy part of my Pesach prep. I can empty a cabinet, scrub it down, and re-line it for the holiday and the year that follows in a reasonable time. And once I finish the organizing of receipts and the adding up of miles and tolls and the cost of professional supplies, my taxes are out of my hands and in the hands of my most capable accountant. The difficult search for haymetz is the leavening in my heart. Unfortunately, I know about cholesterol, the organic form of heart clog. The stent inserted five years ago is physical evidence of that. But what of the spiritual hamaetz – my stubbornness, my blindness, my lack of empathy – that prevent my heart from fully responding to life and the people in it. I can take feather and candle to search out the crumb-cluttered recesses of my kitchen, and I can hand over the tally of miles traveled for work to the accountant, but to search the heart and find what blocks it and then incinerate it, that’s a challenge that takes a different kind of effort may take a bit longer. That’s a deadline I always fail to meet, but then, expectedly so.
I find it instructive that our rabbis turned to a candle and feather for the final moments of the hameytz search. Even taking into consideration that those were the implements they had in hand before the miraculous invention of the Electrolux, were they the best implements for the task, I wonder? Couldn’t the rabbis have legislated a more muscular approach to the task? I think the rabbis intentionally turned to feather and candle to teach us that you can never really get every crumb, that there was a time to say ‘genug / good enough.’ No, they saw the mitsva not in making the heart or even the house perfect; for them, the mitsva is in the search.
I wish you a happy hunt for dust and crumbs and a liberating search of the heart.
With warmest regards,
Rabbi Lee Friedlander
