“When [Aaron] has finished purging the Shrine, the Tent of Meeting, and the altar, the live goat shall be brought forward. Aaron shall lay both his hands upon the head of the live goat and confess over it all the iniquities and transgressions of the Israelites, whatever their sins, putting them on the head of the goat; and it shall be sent off to the wilderness […]. Thus the goat shall carry on it all their iniquities to an inaccessible region; and the goat shall be set free in the wilderness” (Leviticus 19:20-22).
All your mistakes, all your second guesses, all your imperfections, all your regrets—lifted from your shoulders in one ritualized moment, placed as a burden on a goat who will be sent so far away, to a land so desolate, it will never return. Your sins disappear into the harsh desert on the head of a goat condemned to heat and hunger, thirst and sun. You are left feeling cool and light, with a chance to start over.
Aharei Mot, our Torah portion this week, gives instructions for the rituals for atoning for sin. Some of these rituals we keep each Yom Kippur, but many of them have become obsolete. For example, we no longer sacrifice two goats: one on the altar to the Eternal, and one, the scapegoat, burdened with our sins and released into the wilderness.
It is highly unlikely that we will ever personally know the feeling of release in watching that goat trot away into the wilderness, our iniquities and transgressions with it. But we might begin to understand that release—that freedom—as we rid our homes of chameitz in preparation for Passover.
Our ancestors could not wait for the leaven to rise to bake their bread before fleeing Egypt and slavery for the wilderness and freedom. In memory of their haste, we eat matzah, lachma anya, bread of poverty and affliction. We are commanded not only to eat matzah, but to completely rid our homes of chameitz. The Torah commands: מצות יאכל את שבעת הימים ולא יראה לך חמץ, Matzot ye’acheil et shivat ha’yamim, v’lo yei’ra’eh l’cha chameitz—“Matzah shall be eaten for those seven days, and no leavened bread shall be found with you” (Exodus 13:7).
To paraphrase the Haggadah, מאי חמץ—What is chameitz?
The word “chameitz” appears relatively few times in the Hebrew Bible. In most instances, it indicates leavened bread or the leavening process. But, as anyone who’s ordered extra pickles on their falafel sandwich in Israel knows, chamutz, from the same linguistic root as chameitz, means “sour.” Chameitz, the material that makes our bread rise to fluffy perfection in baking, can spoil, embitter, and sour. This type of chameitz is like the process that turns sweet cucumbers to sour pickles that make us pucker our lips, piercing our tongues with a sharp sensation. In the Bible, the root ח-מ-ץ (chet-mem-tzadee)—chamatz—also means to sour or to embitter.
At our seder tables, we recall the bitterness of Egyptian bondage. This bitterness utterly altered the lives of the people Israel. We will recall as we read from the Haggadah, “[The Egyptians] made life bitter for them with harsh labor at mortar and bricks and with all sorts of tasks in the field” (Exodus 1:14). They embittered their lives, וימררו Vay’mar’ru. Recalling this bitter bondage, we will eat maror, bitter herbs, during our seders. If you crunch into fresh horseradish, you will feel that quick burn, and your eyes might even well up with tears that echo the salted water into which we dip our greens. These are the tears of a people enslaved, a people whose lives were embittered by cruel oppressors, a people called to love the stranger, for we were strangers in the land of Egypt.
But what if we are the enslaved and the taskmasters? What if the bitterness is not the bitterness of bondage but our own soured attitudes and habits? What if we sour our own experience by letting our pain fester into suffering?
Some people wake up each morning simply grateful to be alive to welcome another day. A pleasant smile never leaves their faces—even when someone cuts the long line at the grocery store or the pilot announces that it’s going to be another half hour waiting on the stuffy plane. They smile not only through these petty pains, but through their chemotherapy sessions.
But others of us are not so free from bitterness and doubt and worry and jealousy. Our minds spin out to so many “what ifs” that we cannot focus on the very moment we are living right now. We compare ourselves unfavorably to our peers, convinced we could never do as well—or, conversely, convinced we obviously could have done it better. We fight our negative emotions, trying to stuff them down and suppress them; we may not even realize how these negative emotions escape in other ways, hurting those around us. Pain can turn us chamutz; it can embitter and sour us.
Psychologist Marsha Linehan distinguishes between pain and suffering. Pain is inevitable; negative experiences are part of the human condition, and our negative emotional responses help us to understand and to cope with the full range of human experience. How we react to those experiences and emotions can sour and embitter us. When we sour ourselves in our pain—this is suffering. It is a place of chamutz, a sour stewing in all that makes our lives difficult and challenging.
Why do we sour our own lives? Is there a cure for this bitterness? Why do we rid ourselves of chameitz only once a year? Why not strive to rid ourselves of it permanently?
We do not make our lives sour on purpose. Linehan offers a way to integrate and accept all our emotions in our lives. On the contrary, she writes, “most people […] feel badly for good reasons” (Marsha M. Linehan, Skills Training Manual for Borderline Personality Disorder, The Guilford Press, 1993, p 85). Things turn sour when we forget how temporary and how inevitable painful emotions can be. Linehan reminds us, “Emotions come and go. They are like waves in the sea” (87). We can wait for God to part the waters miraculously. We can cling panicking to the shore, never crossing into freedom. Or we can begin to wade in, learning how to gauge the power of each swell and crest so that we stay afloat. Wading in requires courage and trust: we must be brave enough to cope with pain, trusting enough in our own resources, in our support communities, and in our faith to believe that we will not sink beneath the surface.
How can we escape the bitter bondage of emotional suffering? A cold, rational, logical approach might help us accomplish tasks, but all reasonableness drowns beneath the surface when we face pain (Linehan 65). A hot, emotional approach allows us to feel passion and connection, but when emotions take over completely, we can begin to slip beneath the surface ourselves, drowning in fear and worry, anxiety and depression. Where will we find the strength to wade into the waters? Linehan calls that place of strength “wise mind”—a balance between the logical and the emotional. Linehan writes, “You cannot overcome emotion mind with reasonable mind. Nor can you create emotions with reasonableness. You must go within and integrate the two” (Linehan 66).
Imagine yourself ridding your home of leaven, carefully searching the cabinets, separating the chameitz from everything Kosher for Passover. You are cleaning under all the cushions. You scrub out the refrigerator and the freezer. You pack away even the dishes and utensils that have touched chameitz in exchange for pristine Passover plates. You search for places you might otherwise ignore and dig out every last crumb. Just before the day of Passover arrives, you search again, in the dark, guided by a flickering candle, and sweep away any tiny piece of chameitz you might have overlooked. Finally, you recite an ancient vow nullifying whatever miniscule particles remain that we cannot hope to find, and we burn those pieces we recovered, watching the chameitz turn to smoke like the ancient sacrifices on the Temple altar.
Relief. And freedom.
We do not pack our chameitz onto the back of a scapegoat, sending it out into the wilderness. Instead, we make our best effort to gather the destructive chameitz and purge it from our lives for the days of Passover, turning over what we can to God, and making a vow to minimize the rest, like those miniscule particles of chameitz we can never sweep away.
Our chameitz cannot be destroyed completely like our sins on the scapegoat. At the end of the festival, we purposefully invite chameitz back into our lives.
Where does that leave us? The Torah itself links chameitz with something negative—the sour and the embittered. In the Psalms, to be chamatz is to be ruthless, unjust or evil (Psalm 71:4). In the book of Exodus, God twice warns Moses, “You shall not offer the blood of My sacrifice על חמץ, al chameitz—with anything leavened” (Exodus 23:18, see also 34:25). Indeed, the book of Leviticus repeatedly gives instructions for sacrifices, warning against mixing leaven into the meal offerings for the Temple (Leviticus 2:11, 6:10, 7:13).
Yet, when we bring our first fruits as an offering to God, the Torah tells us, “You shall bring from your settlements two loaves of bread as an elevation offering; […] תהינה חמץ תאפינה t’hiyehna chameitz tei’afehna—“baked after leavening” (Leviticus 23:17). When we bring to God the first fruits of our harvest, we bring also our chameitz.
At Passover, for seven days, rid your settlements of chameitz. And also, bring to God offerings of your first fruits, among them cakes baked with chameitz.
Chameitz is the tendency in us to spin from pain into suffering, from the maror of those events in our lives that embitter – to the chamutz of our own sour reactions. During Passover, we have an opportunity to examine our souls as carefully as we examine our cabinets for crumbs, separating out the chameitz and reflecting on how we will reincorporate it into our lives when Passover ends. We have an opportunity to practice being mindful not only of whether we ingest leaven, but of our own reliance on the emotional alone, or on the rational alone (See Linehan). We have an opportunity to learn where our personal place of “wise mind” rests.
This year, as we search our houses, let us also search our souls. We cannot sweep our embittered moods or tendencies or actions into a neat little pile and nullify them for all time with an ancient vow. But we can make Passover a time to rid ourselves of the chameitz that rises and rises in our hearts until it threatens to suffocate us. Like those miniscule particles over which we recite the vow, we may not be able to completely eradicate this spiritual chameitz, but we can search with our best efforts.
Baruch atah HaShem, Eloheinu melech ha’olam, asher kideshanu b’mitzvotav v’tzivanu al bi’ur chameitz. Blessed are you, Eternal our God, sovereign of the universe, who sanctifies us with your mitzvot and commands us concerning the removal of chameitz.
All my chameitz: all my jealousy. All my chameitz: all the times I snap at my spouse when I am having a bad day instead of voicing my frustration calmly. All my chameitz: All the “what-ifs” that prevent me from seeing the positive opportunities and good moments. All my chameitz: All the stress that overwhelms me despite how hard I work to find means of relief and distraction. All my chameitz: All the “could haves” and “should haves” that lead only to regret and despair. All my chameitz: All the social messages that convince me I must always please and serve others and never take the lead.
We take a moment now, in this sacred community, to be mindful of our own chameitz—the fears and worries that threaten to turn to chamutz, to sourness.
Let us recite a vow together, releasing ourselves of the bitterness of guilt and the sourness of worry this Passover.
All spiritual hameitz that I have not removed from my heart, my soul, and my mind, or of which I am unaware, is hereby nullified and ownerless as the dust of the earth.
May we sweep away all that sours and embitters us. And, when the festival is over, may the chameitz we re-invite into our lives be leavening that bubbles us into action, allowing the best in us to rise.
I thank the community at Beth Am, where I gave this as a sermon for Shabbat Aharei Mot.