Culture, Global, Justice, Religion

Bring out your Bread!

Bring out your bread
Its 48 hours before Pesach, and having read  “The Year of Living Biblically”, I’m preparing a lamb to meet its end so that I can smear its blood on the lintel of my door… What’s that? I don’t have to do that? Okay, the neighbors will be so relieved…
I will still have to rid myself of my chametz, however, as I can not possess or own any during Pesach.  Before I engage in Bedikas Chametz, the search for chametz, I simply open my pantry- BAM! Bits of cereal at the bottom of the box. Legumes of all shapes and sizes, pasta and so on and so forth. On to the fridge. I half-eaten kugel from last week.  Some fruit salad. Cheese slices. Egg Beaters.
Anyone else find themselves snarfing down whatever odds and ends remain the week before Pesach?  Some people hate Passover cuisine.  After a week of leftover crumbs, I’m ready to tear into Matzah.   Whatever is sealed, I sell through a duly appointed process involving a Rabbi, pretzel logic and a certain number of he-goats and zuzim.
Those who do not avail themselves of the Rabbinic end-around of selling it on contract for a week with an option to an agreeable gentile have three options.  1. Keep your chametz and incur the wrath of the almighty and the sneers of neighbors.  2. BURN IT!
WOO HOO! Let’s burn everything in sight! It’s like Black Rock but with Bread! Its PAN-demonium!  After all, we wont have another huge bonfire for 40 days when its Lag B’omer so let’s have a Biscuit Inferno! Cue the Music!
But wait, isn’t burning things bad, like crossing streams in ghostbusters?  And can’t we do something with that stuff?  There may be some excellent items sitting around. A bag of flour. A whole cake. A loaf of bread. Peanut Butter. Perfectly good food.  Option 3: Donate.
In the Hagaddah we’re instructed Kol Difcheen- let all who are hungry come and eat. So how about it then? Donate your Chametz. You wont miss it.  Fine, keep that bottle of Blanton’s, but the rest?  Drop it at your local food pantry. Many congregations have a system set up for this.  And in Israel, Modi’in’s Biur Hametz Project is coordinating the distribution of hametz to needy African refugees and migrant workers.   That sounds so much more sensible.
It could be given to other as well.  In Morocco, it was apparently the custom to give Hametz to one’s Arab or Berber neighbors.  The Muslim neighbors would then repay the favor by supplying the pastries for the Mimouna festival at the end of Pesach.  Such a healthy symbiotic way to coexist. Maybe that’s fantasy and maybe there’s a broader lesson. But in the interim, donate your your Hametz. To paraphrase Monty Python, BRING OUT YOUR BREAD! (to which the matza replies, I’m not quite bread yet…)

2 thoughts on “Bring out your Bread!

  1. Just FYI, legumes and peanut butter are not chametz. I will however spare you my rant about why everyone should drop that particular minhag.

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