NJ Jewish News | Gosh, your car needs a wash!

New Jersey Jewish News
Passover Feature Story

Gosh, your car needs a wash!
Why not just kasher it for Pesach?

by Lisa Z. Segelman, a columnist for The Daily Record.

People love Passover. No King Ahashverosh from Purim to confuse with King Antiochus from Hanukka. No esoteric logic to follow. “We were slaves in Egypt and now we are free.” It’s that simple.

But I love Passover for another reason. It frees me and my descendants from the squalor-like existence we experience each day in our mini-van during the rest of the lunar year. That’s because I make my car kosher for Pesach.

Orthodox Jews have always done this, but I just recently added this practice to my list of observances. It forces me to do something that needs to be done anyway: fumigate a vehicle that’s truly a disgrace. My parents think I’m a real balabusta (Yiddish for praiseworthy housekeeper) because my house is clean. But that virtue does not extend onto the driveway and into my car. Sure, you can eat off the floor in our van, if you can find the floor under the CDs, stomped-on homework, cookie crumbs, and even clothing from the quick car changes kids make on the way to their next activity.

(Would you like to know the reason why the windows are dark on the back 2/3 of your mini van or SUV? It’s so the outside world can’t see the mess inside.)

Before I had kids, my jaw would drop when I opened the car door of a family van.

“How could they live like that…OK, drive like that?” Half-eaten sandwiches, pacifiers, toys, important papers from work — all strewn on the seats and floor.

But then I had kids of my own, when that first baby bottle spills, you realize that nothing smells worse than spilled milk. That’s the real reason people cry about it. Juice boxes are another enemy. They’re designed like square hypodermic needles, so no matter how carefully the straw is inserted into the box, the juice always spurts out.

And it’s no wonder grains have their own food group. Lift the car seat in my van, and you’ll find enough crumbs to make a meatloaf.

Then, of course, the day comes when, in the spirit of office camaraderie, you offer to drive a client to a meeting or your coworkers to a staff to lunch. “Let’s take my van,” you suggest. Oops. Before you know it, your colleague is pushing aside a stale glazed doughnut. “Oh…I have kids, too…,” someone invariably offers, but you still feel like a slob. How can you handle the XYZ account if you can’t take care of an old Starbucks cup and a pair of muddy soccer cleats?

Fastidious people may think, “Why do they have to wait for Passover to clean out their car?” The answer is that other seasons just don’t work. Summer’s got sand. The “no sandy feet in the car” rule lasts about as long as the “no eating in the car” rule. In fall you’ve got the leaves. (It’s never the supple crimson and gold ones that fall into your car, either. It’s always the old, crumbly brown ones.) In winter, it’s freezing, even in the garage. You wait for a warm day, but that day never comes. Plus, winter’s got slush and slush’s pal, the salt truck.

Even if the first breath of spring does come before Passover, it’s accompanied by the first footprint of mud from the softball field.

That makes Passover the perfect time to detail your car. I get out there like a Delta Airlines flight attendant and go through the aisles of my van ditching everything I see and loosening substances that rival Pharaoh’s heart for hardness.

The more observant you are, the more important it is to make every inch of the vehicle crumb-free. The Rabbi has you sign a special paper that essentially sells your hametz to a non-Jew for the week. That includes car hametz, if, for some reason, you intend to save that abandoned bagel. One year my niece and her husband just locked up the car and virtually deserted it for the entire week of Passover.

In Orthodox neighborhoods car washes can experience a surge in business that can cause considerable tension. Families with scores of kids come in for their “annual cleaning” and completely overwhelm carwash owners. One Baltimore proprietor added a $5 surcharge to the already steep $18 fee during the pre-Passover season. He came out of the office cursing “you people,” even though he was Jewish himself. I suppose it’s like the deal house cleaning services insist upon. If you sign up for cleaning once a month, it costs more than if you get it cleaned once a week. Dirt is cumulative, and people want to be compensated to plow through it.

Even after you think your car is crumb-free and you’ve added the hanging evergreen scented-tree from your mirror, beware.

Baltimore Rabbi Shimon Steinberg’s window broke during Pesach in his 12-passenger van. After the workmen removed the window to replace it, a whole intact Oreo also came out which they attributed to an assembly-line snack back at the factory. Meanwhile, Steinberg’s friend turned on the air conditioning on a warm day during hol hamo’ed (middle days) Pesach and out blew a pile of Cheerios. That led to a call to the Rabbi. What to do? Was the car now un-kosher for Pesach? Did the Cheerios need to be sold to a non-Jew?

Once your car is kosher l’Pesach this year, enjoy the freshness and cleanliness that’s so much a part of the holiday. Feel free to put white doilies in the cup-holders. Just don’t let the kids eat matzo in the car; cleaning up matzo mess makes cleaning up regular cookie crumbs look like a piece of cake.