Cleaning Out the Clutter in Our Souls

As Passover approaches many Jews go into spring-cleaning mode. Getting rid of chametz (food made from wheat and its crumbs) turns into actions such as changing over all of our everyday pots and dishes for special Passover ones, or making them kosher for Passover. Many of us also clean out the “gook” that accumulated in the bottom corners of our refrigerator, and conduct a detailed cleaning of the inside of our cars. For many of us we make the crazy part of cleaning our houses into our psychological cleansing before Passover so this brings up an important idea, does clearing out our clutter really clean our souls.
Often we put so much of our focus into the quality of the cleaning in order to not have chametz on Passover that we forget to think about the spiritual meaning of these cleaning actions. Similarly, when we eat matzah during the week of Passover our thoughts are often on digestion–or lack thereof–rather than on the spiritual meaning of matzah.
The spiritual meanings of chametz and matzah are actually the flip-sides of the very same Jewish mystical teaching. The characteristic of chametz is that it rises (think of dough rising into bread or cakes). According to the Kabbalah, rising symbolizes pride, while matzah, which is flat, symbolizes humility. Thus, the process of getting rid of our chametz is not just about getting rid of physical chametz. It is about ridding ourselves of our “spiritual chametz”–the negativity we build up in our lives that we need to find a way to let go of so we can embrace what is truly important.
When my family moved from our home in Wildwood, we had the tough task of deciding what to remove from our lives and what we needed to bring with us. We had spent seven years in Wildwood and had accumulated so many memories in each box of clutter before us.  Our oldest son Ari was born in New Jersey and in fact my wife was eight months pregnant with him as we made the cross country road trip from San Diego to Wildwood. We looked at the grabber she used to pick things up as bending over became more difficult.  Alex came three years later, our second miracle, with the help of science we were finally a family of four and I remember looking at this item as we were packing up the house and wondering what we could use it for in our new home and life in the Midwest as we moved to Iowa. We also looked at our baby clothes, some never worn by either child and our memories went back to our struggle to have children and the miracle that each child was for us and thus we decided to let go of that memory to embrace new memories of our growing boys without babies in the horizon as we faced the world before us in the Quad Cities.  We tried to let go of clutter but also embrace a new future.
Chametz is more than the yeast that leavens bread, it’s the clutter in our lives of both negativity and anger that can build in our souls and prevent us from gaining our true freedom before God.  We let go of our baby clothes and car seats and strollers and highchairs, knowing that letting go of them meant we had to make peace with a life with no more children and also forgive ourselves for needing help in conceiving children with the help of medical science.  We made peace with such an act and embraced the decrease of clutter in our lives and thanked God who gave us a new challenge to go into an uncertain future in a new land, just the four of us. Well, God gave us one more surprise before Passover.
Naomi and I are expecting our third child this October as a pleasant surprise to all of us, one we are very excited about. We let go of the clutter in our lives to move on and embrace a new world and now we are getting this great gift before us. A new life in our new home and a chance to add a new personality to our family.   
The Kabbalah teaches that the amount of potential spirituality and meaning in our lives is inversely proportional to the size of our ego that can grow or shrink depending on the clutter we let in our soul; and in order to help people overcome their ego, the Torah commands us to rid our domains of chametz both physical and spiritual every year before Passover. Therefore, instead of looking with disdain at the amount of time and effort it requires to rid my house and cars of chametz, I look at it as being spiritually therapeutic and taking time for embracing new things in our lives and give an ear to hearing new ideas and embracing new people in our lives. My new congregation has given me an opportunity to be their new Rabbi and have opened their hearts to me and I believe it’s this act of openness that has allowed spiritual space to open and allow God to bless us with this gift we have been given that will bless us in the New Year.  Take the time to embrace new things, see others for the potential they can give the world, and always offer your soul to offer words of forgiveness to someone who has wronged you. It’s time to let the clutter out of our soul just as we do in our house.
Rabbi Jeffrey Lipschultz is the former Rabbi in Cape May County and now serves in the Quad Cities, Ill. at the Tri City Jewish center. He can be reached at dvjewish@rof.net.