Rabbi Mark Glickman: Purging our Inner Yeastliness – The Other Reason to Avoid Chametz on Pesach

By Rabbi Mark Glickman

(Calgary) – In preparation for our upcoming Passover celebration, Jews around the world will soon remove all leavened products from their homes. Bread, cereals, cookies, and other such high-carb goodies will all go out the door as we get ready to relive our ancestors’ exodus from slavery in Egypt.

The Hebrew word for this type of leavened food forbidden on Pesach is chametz, which is also refers to foods that are pickled, or fermented. For Pesach purposes, however, Jewish law considers food chametz if it contains one of five types of grain – whey, rye, barley, oats, or spelt – and it comes into contact with water and is allowed to sit for eighteen minutes or more before being baked.

Why aren’t Jews allowed to eat chametz on Pesach? The most common answer is one that we recount during our seders and teach our children from a very young age: When our ancestors fled Egypt toward the Promised Land, they did so in a hurry, and they didn’t have time to let their bread rise – they had to eat unleavened bread, matzah, as a result. We honour and relive that experience by eating matzah during Pesach just as the ancient Israelites in the wilderness.

That’s the most common explanation. However, our sages offer others, as well. One noteworthy explanation compares chametz – leavened food – to sin. Sin, in this understanding, is overpuffiness – getting too big for our own good or anyone else’s. And if you think about it, many of our wrongdoings are indeed a result of what happens when we puff ourselves up. The shoplifter steals because he thinks he deserves the candy bar without having to pay for it. The embezzler embezzles to make money that isn’t really hers. The gossiper shares nasty words about others to bring them down and cruelly inflate his own ego. Indeed, much of what we humans do when we fall short comes as a result of puffing ourselves up to something more than we should be.

Ridding our homes and our bodies of chametz during Pesach, therefore, is a way to symbolically rid ourselves of sin. In this sense, it’s like teshuvah, repentance. By purging ourselves of chametz we remind ourselves not to get too big.

This, too, is why we keep the chametz out of our homes for the full week (or, for many Jews, eight days) of the Passover holiday. It’s easy to rid ourselves of sin for a moment, of course, but what’s hard is to keep ourselves sin-free over the long haul. I’ve dieted between meals more times than I can count – what’s hard is to maintain my diet even when I might be tempted to eat. Even the worst gossips among us don’t gossip always – they take breaks for solo car rides and sleep. Their challenge is to stop gossiping and to continue to refrain from it even when they’re around other people. We keep the chametz out of our homes for the entire Pesach festival, then, as a reminder that instantaneous change is easy, but what’s hard is the kind of change that matters, and that’s the kind that you have to keep up.

The Talmud says this explicitly. “Rabbi Alexandri prayed,” it teaches. “He would say the following: Master of the Universe, it is revealed and known before You that our will is to perform Your will, and what prevents us? The yeast in the dough….” (Berachot, 17a)

It’s the yeast, the bigness, our own overblown perception of ourselves, our self-inflation, that prevents us from doing what it is that God wants us to do. And ridding ourselves of the chametz on Passover is an important reminder to keep ourselves in check.

So this Pesach, as we abstain from all chametz, may we remember that we are each but one small piece of a vast world. May we avoid all puffiness, and in so doing, bring ourselves closer to the wonderful promised land that lies ahead of us.

 Rabbi Mark Glickman is the Rabbi at Temple B’nai Tikvah in Calgary.