Old/New World Discourse: Pessach Cleaning 5768

When we sort our closets into stacks to keep, stacks to clean, stacks to gift to friends and family, stacks to give to charities, and stacks to place into the garbage, we are asking ourselves about our values.

Pessach cleaning is not only an opportunity to tidy up one's home (yes, I am well aware that dust isn't chametz), but it is also an opportunity to tidy up (at least a bit) one's neshemah (soul). Triaging physical goods creates an opening for triaging our personal intentions.

A flashy outfit we once enjoyed wearing may no longer be appropriate for our perception of ourselves. An elaborate serving dish might be too fancy for our newfound humility. If we've been Blessed to have grown comfortable with the balance of successes allotted to us by Shemyim, it may be time, as well, for us to say "good-bye" to our unprocessed piles of literal and figurative rejection letters and to our additional kinds of unprocessed detritus. When we sort our closets into stacks to keep, stacks to clean, stacks to gift to friends and family, stacks to give to charities, and stacks to place into the garbage, we are asking ourselves about our values.

Sometimes, this process surprises us. Beyond the bottle cap located on top of the high bookcase, by the child, who, moments earlier, had protested that there was no need to clean such surfaces because chumetz can't fly, and beyond the customary assortment of "treasures," which tend to range from missing socks, and science-project worthy lunch leftovers (found in the recesses of school packs), to previously lost eyeglass screws, most years' efforts also yield literally wonderful things. This year, in our home, that sensation consisted of a few boxes of photos.

Even though my family has been Gifted, to date, with dwelling in the Promised Land for a few years, we still had a handful of boxes that had remained unpacked. Those cartons resided in the storage room off of our merpesset. Among the treasures we excavated from there, this year, were montages made of our children when those children were small.

More precisely, for each of Computer Cowboy and my offspring, we had created an assemblage of photos. We had one such object for each of the first five years of each of our little ones' lives. Three homes ago, those pictures decked the stairwell between the main floor of our home and the expansive room which, when the kids were very, very small, all of them shared. They grew up seeing their faces as art and knowing that they were very important people.

We never, unfortunately, got to unpack those montages in the home from which we made aliyah. Ditto our first home here, a rental. Finally, this week, we got to those boxes. Unfortunately, this last stop was not so good for those pictures.

Despite the fact that two different sets of movers, on different continents, had packed those prizes with care, a pipe in that storage space, in our present home had leaked and the resulting water spillage had damaged, permanently, those pictures to an extent that recovering them would be beyond human ken.

When I, at last, unpacked those boxes, I discovered that some of the pictures, some of their frames and some of their mats had taken on the range of florescent color which most of us think of as fungi. That transformation was a loss, in the least. Whereas some of the photos, having sat higher in their respective boxes, were untouched and whereas others the photos were salvageable given a bit of cropping and some new frames, many of them were lost to us forever.

It's funny to be sad about such casualties given that there are faces in some of those pictures that I no longer recognize. It's silly (polite word) to be sad about such casualties given that there are actual children, whom a month ago, were massacred.

Perspective is everything.

So, I try to appreciate what exists. Looking at the remaining visual evidence of a decade or more ago, I see that our lives, relative to our present, incorporated a different, a more simple type of ease.

In contrast, my family, today, enjoys the array of emotions that teenagers and the parents of teenagers evoke. What was soft then is taking on form now.

Boy-Getting-Taller, upon espying his once peach fuzz head, exclaimed that he was the cutest baby that had ever existed. Missy Oldest nodded in her enigmatic teenage way, looked directly at me and declared that she had been cute as a toddler. Missy Youngest ohhed and ahhed over just about every one of her images. As for Boy-Who-Needs-Books, he couldn't believe that the ones who lord over him had ever been that small. Plus, he asked me to do away with his naked baby picture.

Computer Cowboy smiled at his former hairline. I shook my head at my former waistline. Neither of us would, however, trade the present for the past.

Like the memories encapsulated in those photos, my husband and my grasp of life has amorphic edges as well as bits that have since been relegated to the dust bin; some facets of our former lives, though still familiar or still otherwise significant, are no longer functional. My husband and I have come to appreciate that it is not possible or even desirable to transport all of one’s life through the decades.

When our ancestors journeyed out of Egypt to this land of holiness, they brought with them what they could carry, both on their backs and in their hearts. Some things were left behind, out of physical necessity. More complexly, some things were left behind out of spiritual need.

Yet, even that process of self-selection didn't suffice to clean our ancestors of all of their undesirable effects. Hashem Helped. A few skirmishes and wars, forty years of hiking across a wasteland, and other tests enabled those earlier Jews to prepare themselves, first to receive the Torah, and later to bring it home.

This year, as I clean for Pesach, in general, and mourn the loss of certain pictures taken years ago, specifically, I think about the passages I've been Blessed to transverse and try to appreciate their goodness. Life is not at all what I expected it to be; The Boss, all along, had Planned something better.

Hag Kosher v'somayach! Have a kosher and happy Pessach!