The Chametz Warrior

“Can you go pick up the kasherin set from my mother?” my wife asks me.

“No way! I’m not kashering yet, it’s not Pesach yet,” I answer, starting our annual “erev Pesach” fight.

In my home growing up, erev Pesach lasted a whole month. My mother really knew how to fight chametz. The goyta was good to clean the house, but when it came to chametz, only my mother could do the cleaning. She knew all the places it hid and she knew which soap was needed to fight which particular chametz. She had special sharp tools that could remove chametz from anything. And even she, one of the best chametz experts around, even she was surprised every year, finding new places where the chametz was hiding.

When all the chametz was finally removed, my mother would tell the story about Leah the upstairs neighbor. That story was scary! One year, only three days before Pesach, Leah found a cookie in her master bedroom! In Leah’s home all the kids knew that the master bedroom was a no fly zone, no one ever entered that room. Leah was a tough lady – she looked scary and she had kind of a man’s voice too, so it was a mystery, how a chmetzdika cookie got there, a powerful example of how no one is safe from chametz, which can appear anywhere, anytime.

Later we learned that the cookie was a kosher-for -Passover macaroon. The baby had dropped it when Leah went to take something from her room holding him on her hip, but it was still a cautionary example to use when my mother spent hours cleaning the blinds, hunting for chametz.

My mother knew how to remove chametz, but my father, he knew how to insure that chametz never came back. My father understood the nature of chametz. He knew that it took only one tiny mistake to lose the war against it. He added new stricter rules each year to keep it at bay. Sometimes, he would change the rules in middle of Pesach, just to confuse the chametz. Sometimes he would change the rules because he overheard in bais medrish new, stricter guidelines that other people were accepting upon themselves. When a new rule forbade an ingredient in a recipe my mother just got from a friend, it was painful to watch, but in the end my mother always gave in, making the cake without that now forbidden ingredient.

“It has no taste!” we’d complain. “It’s a pesachdiga taste,” she’d tell us.

My father was a real chametz warrior.   He knew that even if you prevented chametz from getting into your house, it could create itself from regular household items. For example, the secret enemy ge’brox, which was a half-ready chametz that could sometimes wait for days, waiting, hidden in a matzah, till it spied a liquid. Then, it would jump out, into the liquid, and before you knew it there’d be a chametz sitting right in front of you! My father would monitor every single crumb of matzah to make sure it never got too close to any liquid.  He would follow my hand to my mouth with his eyes, making sure I ate the whole entire piece, warning me all along of any possible danger on the way. Sometimes, his cry of warning would come almost too late.

“The soup!” my father would scream. “The fish!” he would shriek. I’d freeze until he guided my hand along a safe path, depositing the matzah to my mouth.

That chametz was wily. It knew how to fight back. Sometimes, it would appear as a black spot in a big pot of soup. A black spot could be invisible chametz, so the entire pot of fresh soup had to be poured down the drain. If a spoon fell off the table, it had to be washed and then inspected by my father, before it could be used again.

A long time ago, Pesach may have been about a fight between the Egyptians and the Yidden, but for my whole life, it’s always been about a battle against chametz.

“You still have to make the seforim pesachdig!” my wife screams at me as I leave for maariv.  “There might be chametz in the pages!”

My wife thinks she’s good at getting rid of the chametz, but she’s nothing compared to my mother and father. But me, I have no interest in fighting that losing battle. If troops of Chasidim have fought every year, with every ounce of energy to ward of the chametz, and even they can barely maintain their ground, what hope do I have? I’m just a peaceful guy. I’m no chametz warrior.