It's a System: Spiritual Spring Cleaning for Passover and Beyond

It’s a new decade, y’all…which means its time to purge the unnecessary sh*t from your life, without guilt.

This obviously means different things to different people. But all in all, it’s about purging the items you no longer want, need, or find sentimental, with a solid argument to back it up.

Here we’re talking about the items you probably forgot about anyway. The items that are hiding out, taking up valuable real estate, and collecting dust. Living deep within the cabinets and drawers of your home, because you moved onto better things.

-The Home Edit

(Based on The Home Edit Workbook)

1) Pick a room

2) Pick a drawer. ONE DRAWER. (*The Home Edit suggests the junk drawer. We ALL have one)

THINGS YOU NEED TO GET RID OF:

1)

2)

3)

WAYS TO BEAUTIFY THIS SPACE:

1)

2)

3)

THINGS THIS SPACE COULD USE:

1)

2)

3)

Rabbi Kerry Olitzky

Hametz is also the baggage we carry from broken promises, failed relationships, and personal disappointments that weigh heavily on us. It is the refuse of daily living, the residual stuff that emerges from poor decisions, mistakes in judgment, and moral failure. What do we do with this kind of hametz? Can we hide or sell it? Can we clean or burn this type of “yeast”? Dr. Tamara Green helps us to frame the question when she asks, “Into what locked cabinet do I put all the pain and struggle that made the last previous year so difficult?”

Clearing out internal Hametz isn’t easy. Often we feel resistance: we don’t want to let go of an old story, or to forgive someone who’s hurt us, or to believe that we ourselves can be forgiven for our missed marks. It requires some scrubbing, metaphysically speaking. Our work is discerning which of our old stories still serve us, and which have become Hametz that we need to shed in order to move toward liberation.

-Rabbi Rachel Barenblatt

1) Pick a relationship--current or former, romantic, platonic, familial, what have you.

2) Write 3 words to describe the relationship as it is now

a)

b)

c)

3) Write 3 words to describe the relationship as you wish it could be

a)

b)

c)

4) Write 3 concrete things you think you could do/say to get from #2 closer to #3:

a)

b)

c)

Rabbi Kerry Olitzky

This leaven, this hametz, also symbolizes a puffiness of self, an inflated personality, an egocentricity that threatens to eclipse the essential personality of the individual. Ironically, it is what prevents the individual from rising spiritually and moving closer to holiness. Thus, what hametz effectively does in the material world is exactly what it precludes in the realm of the spirit. That’s why it has to be removed.

Rabbi Jill Hammer

In other words, our selfish impulses are kneaded all through us like yeast in dough, and it’s hard to separate them out. So Passover became a time to remove internal chametz as well as external chametz. The Chasidic thinker known as the Sefat Emet understands chametz as arrogance and matzah as humility, and points out that lechachmitz means to miss an opportunity. To remove the chametz, the arrogance, is to discover more opportunities to connect and grow.

Dr. Assael Romanelli

(https://open.spotify.com/show/2Z6xnOpBznX7Y9Tf5VMx2z)

What that means: I'm taking saying full responsibility of all my different self states; all the different parts of me and the shadow and behaviors that we usually deny or minimize. My aggression, my ridiculing, my belittling... When I owned them first on myself and then to my partner, that is ownership. And why do we need that? Because in the process of human change, there are three stages to change, to behavioral change. If you want to do that, the first stages of awareness being aware of that, the second is ownership or own your shit. In our case, not only saying yes, I have this annoying behavior that I belittle my partner. But it's saying full ownership. Why do I do that? And I do it and owning it and realizing with my secondary game from it and not blaming anybody else that saying that is mine and that leads us to the third stage. Just choice. But you cannot choose to change your behavior until you completely own it. What do you risk? Why don't people own their shit more? Because you're opening yourself up to risk, you're admitting, you're confessing you're sharing, you're exposing, different parts of yourself. Parts that are not benevolent, that are not holy, that are not tingly. That creates more ruptures, more conflict, more heat in your intimate and professional relationships. But what you gain, you gain freedom to express a different parts of yourself.

1) Write down the first 3 words that come to mind when asked to describe yourself. Don't overthink it!

a)

b)

c)

2) Write down the first 3 words that you think your best friend/partner/spouse would use to describe you.

a)

b)

c)

3) Write down 3 words that you want people to use to describe you in the next year:

a)

b)

c)

4) Write down 3 concrete actions you can take, corresponding to question #3:

a)

b)

c)