Cleansing Homes, Souls for Passover

Ritual Rids Lives of All That Enslaves

Several weeks before Passover, Ellen Epstein started to get ready. She scrubbed her Chevy Chase home from top to bottom, soaked her glassware in the bathtub for three days, vacuumed out drawers, poured boiling water over her countertops. And this was on top of having her cleaning lady make extra visits.

It is part of the Passover ritual of cleaning the home of leavened products, or chametz, which is prohibited during the holiday. "Talk to anyone who does this," Epstein said. "They're going crazy."

Chametz is the Hebrew word for foods made of grain -- usually wheat, barley, rye, oats and spelt -- that have been allowed to ferment and "rise." Grain-based bread, cereal, cake, cookies, pizza and pasta, as well as beer and bourbon, are examples of chametz.

Passover begins tonight and lasts for eight days for most Orthodox and Conservative Jews outside of Israel and seven days for Reform Jews and those living in Israel.

The holiday commemorates the liberation of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt more than 3,000 years ago. Throughout the holiday, observant Jews refrain from eating leavened products, recalling the unleavened bread eaten by the Israelites during their flight because they had no time to wait for the bread to rise.

During Passover, even a tiny particle of chametz is forbidden, and observant Jews do not keep it in their possession.

Among Ashkenazi Jews -- those with roots in central and Eastern Europe and Russia -- that prohibition extends to rice, corn, dried beans, peas and lentils because of their ability to ferment.

Ridding homes of such products can require heavy and elaborate cleaning. Pantries and cabinets must be cleaned out, clothes pockets checked, and kitchen equipment scoured and boiled.

In the midst of the physical and legal aspects of the cleansing, rabbis say, it is easy to forget that it is about more than a clean home.

"There is a very strong spiritual element to all this," said Rabbi Joel Tessler of Beth Sholom Congregation in Potomac. Chametz, he said, can be viewed as the ego, which -- like bread -- grows bigger and bigger the longer it is left to "ferment."

Rabbi Kerry Olitzky, executive director of the Jewish Outreach Institute and author of a book on the spiritual aspects of Passover, defines spiritual chametz as a "puffiness of soul."

"It's all of those things that we've accumulated over the past year in our relationships with people," he said, such as self-centeredness. "It's the kinds of things that have enslaved us, from which we wanted to be freed and liberated as part of the Passover experience."