Celebrate the Feast of Unleavened Bread, because it was on this very day that I brought your divisions out of Egypt. Celebrate this day as a lasting ordinance for the generations to come. In the first month you are to eat bread made without yeast, from the evening of the fourteenth day until the evening of the twenty-first day. For seven days no yeast is to be found in your houses. And whoever eats anything with yeast in it must be cut off from the community of Israel, whether he is an alien or native-born. Eat nothing made with yeast. Wherever you live, you must eat unleavened bread.
– Exodus 12:17-20
Many committed Christians know that Passover marks the Jews’ deliverance from bondage in Egypt, and may even know that it’s celebrated with a seder, a family meal that includes the recitation of the Haggadah, the traditional Jewish text that teaches the story of the Jews’ redemption from slavery and formation into the nation of Israel. If you’ve ever been to one, you might have enjoyed the liturgy and discussion or tasted traditional dishes like matzo ball soup, brisket or tzimmes, a sweet carrot dish.
You may even know that observant Jews refrain from eating food that has any sort of yeast in it, known as chametz. (Ashkenazi Jews–those of European origin–also avoid kitniyot, a category of food that includes items that were frequently mixed with grains, such as corn and legumes.)
What you may not realize is that, in keeping with the biblical instruction that “no yeast is to be found in your house,” observant Jews spent the weeks before Passover ridding their homes of all leavened food — and that doesn’t just mean making sure you eat the rest of the pasta, but it also means cleaning underneath the sofas and bookshelves to find the errant Cheerios the 3-year-old dropped.
For the Orthodoxly observant, “Passover cleaning” includes switching kitchenware to special sets of pots and pants and dishes that are used only during Passover and stored safely away during the rest of the year. But, in Israel, even the non-observant get caught up in the fever.
Israeli writer Allison Kaplan Sommer, whose family is not Orthodoxly observant, observes wryly that:
Housecleaning is transformed from a private activity into something of a national competitive Israeli sport. In my corner of greater Tel Aviv suburbia, spring means the smell of ammonia, not roses, is in the air. Walk into the supermarket, and you have navigate past shelves full of cleaning supplies, before you make it to the milk and eggs. You can’t turn on the television without commercials for the latest gadget to make cleaning easier, faster and better; public service announcements sternly warn the population against the inhalation of too many toxic cleaning products.
Once we were slaves in Egypt, now we are slaves to the image of the idealized Passover home, with everything perfectly scrubbed and in order.
In fact, many major rabbis, including this revered ultra-Orthodox one, end up telling their congregants to stop the Passover madness and stop worrying so much about microscopic crumbs and enjoy the holiday more.
Meanwhile, in the political realm, Israeli politicians will lead up to the holiday by squabbling over the chametz law — a regulation that requires that leavened foods not be publicly displayed (in keeping with Jewish law). Last week, the Interior Ministry reminded municipal officials that they’re responsible for enforcing the law and asked that all municipalities submit a list with the names of inspectors responsible for enforcing the law.
In keeping with the other Israeli national sport–arguing–some will argue that the law represents religious coercion, while others will argue that it’s simply a publicly preserve national customs.
