As the saying goes, spring has sprung. And, for many folks, with spring comes spring cleaning. Of course, with spring also comes Pesach (Passover). To me, that’s no coincidence. There is nothing quite like having to clean the house for Passover. The process of kashering the home for the holiday is quite labor-intensive, especially if you don’t have separate dishware that is used only on Pesach.

Though not all Jews observe this tradition anymore, it can’t be denied that there is a real value in spring cleaning. In order to truly enjoy what we have, we must liberate ourselves from the dirt and grime. When cleaning is done properly, the pay-off is greater than the effort. But with all the effort one puts into it, the last logical thing we would do is purposely make our house messier than it has to be, thereby giving us more to clean. And yet, that’s exactly what we do in the lead-up to Passover. It’s called b’dikat chametz (the search for chametz, or leavened products.)

Every year, on the night before Passover, we go through the house to search for chametz one last time, traditionally with the aid of a feather, a candle, and a spoon. Though Passover hasn’t actually begun yet, it’s a very fun time for children, and for all of us who are children at heart. It’s fun to imagine the following exchange between a child and parent: “There’s no need for us to go look for crumbs. We’ve been cleaning the house all day, and it’s spotless! There’s nothing to find! Can’t we be done?” To which the parent would reply: “You’re right! You did such a good job cleaning, that there was nothing left to clean! That’s why I had to drop 10 extra pieces of bread in random locations throughout the house just to mess with you. Now go find them!”

Of course, with all the chametz most of us eat, setting a goal of removing every last crumb from the house just isn’t realistic. No matter how long we clean, we’re still bound to miss something. It’s always responsible to double-check. In the end though, we can double-check, triple-check, or check until the cows come home. We won’t get it all, and therefore, at some point, we need to cut ourselves some slack. It was Rabbi Tarfon who famously said:

לֹא עָלֶיךָ הַמְּלָאכָה לִגְמֹר, וְלֹא אַתָּה בֶן חוֹרִין לִבָּטֵל מִמֶּנָּה.

You are not obligated to finish the work, but neither are you free to neglect it.^[1]

Lo alecha hamlacha ligmor, v’lo atah ben chorin libatel mimenah.

 For those who know Hebrew/Aramaic, there’s an unintentional Pesach reference in Rabbi Tarfon’s statement: “אַתָּה בֶן חוֹרִין” (“You are a free person”). This is almost exactly the same wording as the Pesach song “Avadim Hayinu.” It goes: “עֲבָדִים הָיִינוּ, אַתָּה בְּנִי חוֹרִין” (“Avadim hayinu, atah v’nei chorin.”) “Once we were slaves, but now we are free persons.”

Some of us hate to clean. But there are certainly others who obsess over it. There’s definitely some overlap between those two categories. But sometimes we are so insistent on doing a perfect job that we become distraught when we achieve anything but the perfection we desired. What ought to happen instead, is that we should give ourselves a pat on the back for the considerable effort we put in.

To me, this is the true purpose of b’dikat chametz. If the point was to make the house cleaner, we wouldn’t be further contaminating it by dropping extra chametz. But the ritual ends with the following statement:

כָּל חֲמִרָא וַחֲמִיעָא דְּאִכָּא בִרְשׁוּתִי, דְּלָא חֲמִיתֵּה וּדְלָא בִעַרְתֵּה וּדְלָא יְדַעְנָא לֵּה,

לִבָּטֵל וְלֶהֱוֵי הֶפְקֶד כְּעַפְרָא דְאַרְעָא.

All chametz in my possession which I have not seen or removed, or of which I am unaware, is hereby nullified and made ownerless, as the dust of the earth.

To me, this liberating line is also somewhat sassy. “Chametz? What chametz? I don’t see any chametz? It’s not my problem anymore!” Burning the recovered chametz the following morning only adds fuel to the fire.

The lesson of b’dikat chametz echoes the statement of Rabbi Tarfon. There is a value in being ok with a task that goes uncompleted. We will never do a perfect job, nor will we ever accomplish all that we set out to do. This doesn’t give us an excuse to be lazy. In fact, we may even prefer to set impossibly high standards for ourselves in order to push ourselves to be the best that we can be. But when we inevitably fail to reach those angelic heights, there is a great freedom in saying, “I did my best, and that’ll have to be good enough.”

This Passover, may we all find such a freedom.

Maayan

^[1] Avot 2