Before Passover begins walk through your living space. Open each cabinet in kitchen and bath. Lift the bed skirts, open the closet doors, reveal the refrigerator. Notice what is inside.
(Contemplate what you see. Is there hametz? Probably there’s the easy kind: A box of cereal, loaf of bread. This is also about the other hametz. Caffeine, chocolate, work, shopping, maybe bigger addictions. What did you find?)
Look deeply within,
Passover is a week long exodus from life-style patterns.
Can you empty the cabinets and reset the stage of your life?
You have a support group around the Passover table.
A week later, you restock the shelves of your life.
Every year Pesach brings a new start.
You are free to create a new inventory in the cabinets of your life,
to take stock and restock in the image you want to live into for yourself.
Who has time for all of this? It can be a sobering exercise to open up all cabinets and contemplate what’s within. What will be revealed? Truth to tell, some head for a kosher resort, or a cruise, and there are always paper plates. However, the drama is your life, and you are resetting the stage for transformation. More rigorous aspects of this practice include efforts such as changing over all of the dishes, pots and pans by putting out sets of these reserved for Passover only. Also, taping shut cabinets that hold the year-long sets of dishes, silverware, pots. What is really going on?
Since your home is a temple for your personal life, this Passover practice is a reminder to check that what you have on-site meets your criteria for sacred. Do this with friends, partners, children, help elders to prepare too. Closets in the children’s rooms can be memorable visits when done without punitive intent, just let their spirits and yours "see;" remember to include your study and the bathroom cabinets. A friend did this and what she saw through the mess in her daughter’s room was a troubled soul. She hadn’t really grasped just how badly this child was doing in life.
Cleaning is another kind of seder, way of creating "order." This ordering effect also takes hold when you restock and restack your cabinets after the holiday. Everything that is hametz goes out of the house. This means anything that could have been open to contact with leavened products. Some engage in a ritual of selling their hametz to, or having it held by, a non-Jewish person for a nominal sum.
Would that it could be as easy to release emotional hametz, like toxic memories lingering in objects better dispatched than retained. There is a paradox in the search for hametz. It is intended to commemorate the haste with which the Israelites leave Egypt; because of this the dough didn’t have time to rise and became flat bread, symbolized by matzah. Yet, it is the lack of haste and the increased attention to the detail of removing the hametz, that is the focus of the practice.