Parshas Achrei Mot: Improving Every Day

 We are in the home stretch now of our Passover preparations.  The house is nearly ready and we are working on switching our kitchen over even as we write this.  If you need somewhere to go for a meal over Pesach, whether for a seder or for a daytime meal during the Yom Tov, please call the Shul office.

In this week’s parsha, we read about how the kohen gadol (high priest) has to immerse himself in a mikveh when he changes into his special white garments for Yom Kippur and again when he changes back into his regular priestly clothing.  But there is something unusual about this: We usually only immerse in the mikveh when we are ascending to a higher spiritual level.  It makes sense for the kohen gadol to immerse before putting on his special Yom Kippur clothes.  On the other hand, it seems odd for him to immerse in a mikvah when he is putting on his regular clothes.  It seems like he is going down a spiritual level, not going up!

From this we learn that we must always work to improve ourselves.  The reason the kohen gadol immerses before putting on his normal workaday clothing is that he will now be doing an even better job than he did before.  His priestly service on Yom Kippur raised him to such a high spiritual level that he is now going to be on an even higher spiritual plane even for his normal daily activities.

So, too, we learn that we can always grow and improve.  We must always be working to climb to a higher spiritual level, to keep a bit more of the Torah than we did in the past.

Pesach is the perfect time to implement this.  We can always keep it a little more strictly, a little bit better than we did last year.  If last year you did not eat bread during Pesach but you still had pasta or crackers, try this year to eat nothing leavened.  If last year you had nothing leavened on Pesach, try this year to eat all your foods certified kosher for Passover only.  If last year you attended or hosted one seder, this year attend two.  There is always some room for improvement.  One easy first step is to attend this week’s shiur on the Hagaddah!

We wish you all a Shabbat shalom and a happy and kosher Pesach!

Read more on Parshas Achrei Mot-Kedoshim & Yom Haatzmaut: Celebrating Israel

Parsha Metzora: Time to Clean Up!

To the tune of “Santa Claus is Coming to Town”:

I’m making my list, checking it twice
Wish I was Sephardi so I could have rice!
Pesach time is coming to town…

It haunts you when you’re sleeping
You clean while you’re awake.
Who knows if it’ll be bad or good
But it’ll be clean for goodness sake!

So you’d better not shout. You’d better not cry.
You’d better just clean, I’m telling you why:
Pesach time is coming to town!

Yes, that’s right, Passover (Pesach) is right around the corner.  With two babies under two, we’ve had to start our preparations extra early this year.  It really helps to have a good song or two to sing while you work, which is how Rachel came up with the one above.

But Pesach isn’t only about cleaning up your house.  All that cleaning to get rid of chometz in the physical sense leaves lots of time for reflection and it is an ideal time to focus on cleaning up our spiritual selves.  It is often said that chometz is a metaphor for the ego.  All the hot air that puffs up bread is like the ego that puffs up a person.  Pesach is the time to get rid of it, to empty oneself so one can be a more humble receptacle for G-d and His Torah.

But this week’s parsha reminds us that ego isn’t the only thing we have to clean out of our lives.  Miriam, Moshe’s sister, speaks lashon hara and develops tzaaras, a spiritual malady with a physical manifestation, often mistranslated as leprosy.   We don’t have a real translation for tzaaras because it doesn’t exist today.  Most people would, perhaps, see this as fortunate. Phew, I don’t have to have an ugly skin disease just because I spread some gossip about my neighbor!  But in reality, it is sad.  The fact is that gossip is so accepted and so rampant in our society that if tzaaras existed we would probably all be afflicted!  So G-d has removed the malady from us.

As we clean our homes for Pesach it is the perfect time to clean ourselves of old, bad habits.  As we brush aside our ego, one of the first things we should do is to brush aside our inclination to gossip.  We can choose not to speak it, choose not to read it, and choose not to listen to it.  We have the power to decide, and in that power comes freedom.  The freedom of Pesach.

Shabbat shalom!

Read more on Parshas Metzorah: Tsaraas: Sometimes a Bad Thing Can Be a Good Thing