My Year of Cleaning Quietly

Before October 7th I would listen to lots of Torah classes, at least one a day. Rabbi YY, Rabbanit Yemima, Shira Smiles, Rabbi Fischel Schachter. I would go about my day listening to classes, and it infused my daily life with a lot of deeper meaning. But since October 7th I just haven’t had the bandwidth to listen to long classes. I still listen to 5-minute inspirational stories. That kind of thing. But anything more than that, even long conversations, make my mind tired.

So this is the first time that my Passover prep hasn’t been accompanied by my rabbis and rebbetzins connecting me with the deeper meaning of what I’m doing and working towards.

Yesterday, in my therapeutic writing workshop with Yocheved Rottenberg, we wrote up a cluster of our feelings about Pesach.

I wrote about my class-less Pesach prep. How I’m concerned that I’m not really preparing for Pesach on a spiritual level.

And then I had a realization:

Pesach cleaning has 3 stages:

1) My home is more or less orderly

2) In my search for chametz I turn my house upside down .

3. By Pesach, my house is more or less orderly once more. But it’s a deeper, cleaner, purer order than it was before I started.

And last night I understood that this process, even without my beloved Torah classes, teaches me on a deep experiential level about Hashem and the meaning of Seder night.

Like my cleaning, in the world as well:

1. Things are more or less normal (i.e., pre October 7th)

2. And then the world gets turned upside down (i.e., post October 7th)

3. And then we see, as we did this Saturday night, that even if we don’t understand why the world has gotten turned so completely upside down, Hashem is running the show. Everything is actually b’seder, in order.

But not just any order. Hashem’s order. Not just any seder, THE Seder:)

Chag sameach!