NJ Jewish News | A not-so-thorough cleaning

New Jersey Jewish News
Passover Feature Story

A not-so-thorough cleaning

by Frances Bucien,
who worked in a professional capacity with Jewish seniors; and is now a stay-at-home mom in Randolph.

My grandparents, Morris and Martha Rotter, brought home sugar cubes when telephone numbers still started with letters. The paper wrappers read Rothman’s Inn, Newman & Leventhal Caterers, Phil Gluckstern’s Famous Kosher Cuisine, and even the Cafe Tel-Aviv, from the Palestine Pavilion of a long-ago New York World’s Fair.

I found the cubes one April, while I was cleaning my grandparents’ shelves to get their apartment ready for Pesach. I took them for a friend, a Judaica collector, before our paths diverged. Now they are a reminder of the grandparents who held on to them for decades.

Passover is a cleaning holiday, I tell my non-Jewish friends. Cleaning first, then cooking — and more cleaning. It replaces the spiritual housekeeping of the High Holy Days with the literal kind. The stakes are high, with a feather and candle serving as the Judaic precursor of the white glove test.

My grandmother was a tidy woman who wore aprons and arranged each garment in her dresser. From a kitchen the size of a closet, my grandparents prepared elaborate seder meals. After we sang Had Gadya, each dish was washed, dried, and put away. Their one-bedroom apartment expanded to accommodate however many family members were there for the holiday, but always contracted to a neat and manageable size after we said our goodbyes.

In my own home, cleaning up and cleaning out are inextricably linked. Each afternoon, the kids come home and an avalanche of old assignments, school notices, forms, and projects spills from their backpacks. Birthday parties, camp crafts, and their penchant for collecting add to the disorder. Although I have a soft spot for their artwork, I know that maintaining a pathway through the living room depends on this stuff’s quick disposition.

In his discussion of Parshat Beshalah in NJ Jewish News on Feb. 9, Rabbi Lawrence Hoffman wrote about the Israelites leaving Egypt. He speculated about what they brought along, intentionally and otherwise. Moses brought Joseph’s bones to bury in the Promised Land. Despite time constraints in packing, the Israelites may have been “laden down” with other things as well. Food? Weapons? God’s presence? Their slave mentality? After 40 years of wandering, they lost some of their excess baggage, with God’s presence remaining to fill the void left by spent ammo, and a future to replace memory.

There is no time I feel quite so “laden down” as when I have to clean for Passover. It’s one thing to don an old sweatshirt and wipe grime from the oven, and quite another to confront all the items in my home that are tied to me by sentiment. The place is crowded with them, and they all collect dust.

The sugar cubes, for instance. I could give them to my children to feed to a nearby farm animal, but I won’t. Perhaps my grandparents’ organizational secret was to save small things. Ounce for ounce, those sugar cubes pack a lot of memory, and perhaps a big lesson, in a small package. At least for this year, I’ll keep them.