It's Passover Again

Living in Israel, it's impossible to ignore the crescendo of passover mania as the holiday grows closer. Each year I am astonished anew at the hysteria over food and cleaning. Two weeks before the holiday I was dismayed to discover that my favorite brand of brown rice was nowhere to be found in the supermarket. "It's because of pessach," the Arab stock boy explained to me, eyeing me incredulously, as if to ask, "what planet do you live on?"
"I guess I missed the boat, huh?"
He shrugged his shoulders and I kicked myself - who knew that brown rice was hametz? I would have stocked up ages ago.
I can live without brown rice for a few weeks but the problem was much more acute in the days when we had a cat. The first year Mashie came to live with us we ran out of Friskies during passover. I was stunned to discover that in the supermarket the cat food was taped up behind cardboard in the untouchable aisle. Who knew that even the cats in Israel keep kosher for passover? In a moment of criminal insanity I stuck my hand behind the barrier and sneaked a box out when no one was looking. Luckily the checkout girl didn't say anything, but it took me years to cleanse the guilt from my soul. (In fact, this is the first time I've confessed in public. Forgive me?)
(P.S. When Mashie scratched my infant daughter right beneath her eye we decided she had to go. She was adopted by Haled, the Palestinian contractor who was doing work on our house at the time. She went to live with his family in Zaatra, near Bethlehem, and never had to worry about keeping kosher again.)
The cleaning madness is a slightly more honorable phenomenon, if you don't mind waiting hours on line at the car wash. Pre-passover cleaning is actually a great time to hunt for abandoned treasures because the garbage dumpsters are full of salvagable junk people have tossed out. A dear friend of ours who shall remain nameless cleans her house once a year on passover - and that's it. The rest of the year her place is a pig sty. As for me, I'm not about to go searching the house for crumbs with a candle, but passover is a great excuse to get my two teenaged daughters off the couch and out of their television stupor. At this very moment they are cleaning the kitchen and internalizing the importance of family cooperation.
Chores and inconveniences notwithstanding, I love the practical applications of the passover story - all the ways we have to make the liberation and redemption of the Jewish people 3200 years ago a first-hand experience for all of us. I love the gathering of the whole family around the seder table and the centrality of the children in the re-telling of the story. I love the way we reconfigure the daily necessity of food to make it part of the experience of remembering. I love the ten drops of wine on the plate during the recounting of the ten plagues that remind us always to be compassionate toward our enemies. And I love the search for new relevance and meaning in this ritual every year. Once we were slaves and now we are free people, so it is our obligation to ensure freedom for all.
In addition to those who live within our midst without freedom, three Israeli families remain imprisoned in fear and anxiety while their sons continue to be held captive by merciless enemies. Indeed, we cannot truly savor our freedom as long as Gilad Shalit, Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev have not returned home. Hopefully this spring they will be freed and that beautiful passage from the Song of Songs will ring true: "...the season of singing has come, the cooing of doves is heard in our land."