Pesach 2025 – Are We Crazy?

I can’t think of a Biblical festival that is so popular and yet at the same time so obsessively neurotic and over the top as Pesach (AKA Passover).

For those of us who take it seriously, we have to remove any minute trace of Chametz (leavened grain) from our homes, our businesses and vehicles. Anything left over has to be thrown out, burnt, or given to a non-Jewish charity. Otherwise, we go through a convoluted contractual arrangement to sell it to a non-Jew who defaults on the deal as soon as Passover is over, and we get it back. Our other option is to spend a fortune going away on an outrageously expensive trip for eight days and simply turn our backs on the problem.

Perhaps this was a way of forcing us to spring clean (or autumn clean for the Southern Hemisphere). Given the Bible’s preoccupation with health and cleanliness being close to Godliness, it was not such a bad idea. However, it might not have been such an exhausting chore when we lived in tents and mud huts.

Those of us who stay at home, are penalized by excessive price gouging. Mixing water with wheat into round Shmura Matzas (the aristocratic and pious cousin of Manishevitz squares) watched over from grain to oven, raw material a few cents, can cost $50 for us plebs, but $100 if you want a Chassidic Rebbe’s blessing. All food, drink, water, aluminium, paper, detergent, tuna, nuts, coffee, tea and chocolate rocket in price because there’s a possibility of a minuscule speck of Chametz that finds itself in your plastic mineral water bottle. Which makes it so expensive for even the most basic of commodities, that for those on a limited budget it means going without. Not to mention having to buy a whole new set of cutlery, milk and meat, and cooking utensils for just eight days a year.  When if you really study the laws of kashrut, most of this is unnecessary and a luxury. Not a necessity. Most modern metal or glazed culinary utensils do not absorb food. And there is no reason to suspect that most housewives and husbands do not clean dishes, or tabletops, thoroughly. But where there is a vested interest, and jobs and money to be made, most people just capitulate.

Are there little human beings stationed at every food processing plant who all year-round spray Chametz or bring their sandwiches into the factory and we have to pay to keep them away on Pesach? Or do milkmaids sit on their stools with bread in their mouths as they milk their cows? The cost of Pesach has become so excessive that many families struggle to cope. Is this really what our religion requires of us?  If our enemies got to know about this, they would stop being antisemites because they would be convinced that we’ve gone mad and will self-destruct.

The case for the defence, of course, is that this shows how we take things seriously and exercise a degree of self-control and mindfulness, expanding our energy on religious ceremony rather than frivolous self-indulgent orgies of Western decadence and paganism. Like an ordinary Shabbat this creates another atmosphere to the one we are absorbed by throughout the week. Festivals occasionally go a step or two further in reminding us not only of our different values but of our different calendar, history and way of life. If you care about something, whether it is a person or religion, you go out of your way to do things with love, care and even excess. Besides, if you can afford it, why not? Better this than so many other things we waste vast sums of money on.

To be serious. Pesach is a festival of three different elements, history, theology, and practice. As for history, I think we are the only tradition that so glorifies its humble origins of slavery and oppression. It’s true that we also celebrate our victories. But no subject is repeated more often than coming out of Egypt as slaves and repeated every day three times. We stress our humble origins but also the triumph over adversity. And we don’t talk about freedom from slavery but rather going out of Egypt because you can escape from something. But then the question is how you will make good use of your freedom.

Since the destruction of the temple, prayer, family and study are the focal points of our tradition. The text of the Haggadah requires us to question and to challenge, from the youngest to the oldest, to argue and see there are different ways of interpreting and different ways of understanding and that ours is a dynamic religion which involves adults and children. It is what makes us a nation of priests rather than relying on someone else to do it for us.

Yet here, too, we often lose the plot. How often do you here people complain about all the stories, songs, preaching and teaching when all they want to do is to chat to family and friends and get on with the food and the drink? It’s fine for rabbis to stay up all night studying and arguing, but what about your average Joe (or Moishe)? Sitting in a crowded, noisy hotel dining room makes serious discussion and analysis impossible. So that reading the Haggadah often becomes a chore instead of an inspiration. Even the Talmud itself says it’s enough to say “God took us out from there.”

Yet all the fuss, the preparation and the effort can be so uplifting. Special precisely because it is different, and we put so much effort into it. All this might sound indulgent and excessive. Yet the Haggadah starts with the obligation to feed others, to be charitable and take care of the poor. It ends with a declaration of our national aspirations and homeland. When we wonder what is so special about Pesach and why we make such a fuss of it,  it is precisely the fact that it involves our relationship with spirit and body, the importance a family and the fate of our people through thick and thin, for better and for worse. And if sometimes we seem to be crazy and irrational, so be it. It certainly makes life much more interesting.

Rabbi Jeremy Rosen lives in New York. He was born in Manchester. His writings are concerned with religion, culture, history and current affairs – anything he finds interesting or relevant. They are designed to entertain and to stimulate. Disagreement is always welcome.