Lee Diamond – Chametz and Freedom
The Bat Mitzvah girl and Rabbi Lee Diamond
One of the many cartoons for Pesach this year shows a robot vacuum cleaner doing its job with a candle mounted upon its helm –searching for the chametz.
One of the benefits of this robot is that it doesn’t need a feather to find and gather the crumbs of affliction. The robot is the new form for בדיקת חמץ or searching for the crumbs.
A friend asked me today what does freedom mean to me today on Pesach, 2016– some 3,200 years after the sea split before and for us.
You won’t believe it! I saw a robot with a candle before my very eyes. I saw me and my kids with feathers following the crumb sucking and revealing robot—-Getting the last morsels of Chametz from the most hidden corners of ………?
Wait A Minute ….
Who needs to be so compulsive about crumbs?
Feathers and candles and robots?
What does all this have to do with FREEDOM 2016 and ME.
And suddenly the word STAGNANT came into my mind as I started to a answer my friends
question.
Chametz is obviously kosher! But not Kosher for Pesach!
Because Chametz is stagnant. It’s been around for too long. It’s like water which lies in a pool and isn’t refreshed by new and flowing water. It’s like the Dead Sea which is dead because it doesn’t feed but only receives. And anything which receives but doesn’t give is stagnant.
Freedom, I suddenly thought, is removing the stagnant from our midst– searching for and discovering the spoiled, the usual, the habitual in our secret corners . Remaining in the Metzarim-the habitual the stagnant places in our life corners.
Just clearing out the cobwebs is so liberating
The cobwebs of stubborn ideas
The crumbs of anger and hurt
The slavery of positions that we have taken
The slavey of self definition and political stances.
The slavery of assimilation or the slavery of isolation
So that’s my definition of slavery and freedom, I told my friend.
Opening my mind, my heart and my soul to the fresh and vital and to a new beginning.
Here’s an idea for all of us to try
A Chametz cleaning tip
