Barbara Bensoussan – Mishpacha
Rosh Chodesh Adar is supposed to bring in armloads of simchah, right? So they tell me.
Well, I do love Purim despite all the effort involved: the surprise visits from friends, seeing the neighborhood kids in their costumes, hosting a large, rollicking seudah. (Our family name, in Hebrew, isn’t Ben-Shushan for nothing.) And yet I must admit, rather guiltily, that the advent of Adar always fills me with a certain sense of dismay, of fear and trembling. Because just as you’re reeling with exhaustion from all that Purim revelry, you wake up and realize the clock is somberly ticking towards … drum roll … the dreaded P word: Pesach!
The approach of Pesach forces me to throw a teary kiss goodbye to my normal routine, and switch into high gear both as balabusta and journalist. Every Jewish magazine wants to put out its most super-special, jam-packed edition for Pesach, so we writers are all busily pulling together more than our usual quota of articles in between frantically trying to scrub out our cabinets and move all the furniture. In recent years Erev Pesach has been, for me, as much about nerves over deadlines as it is about swollen varicose veins from cooking and cleaning. Baruch Hashem.
Yet I do recognize that my tendency to recoil from the P word is a reflex springing straight from the yetzer hara. As I mentioned in my first post, I have a nasty tendency to resist change (unlike those folks they call “early adopters” of new innovations). I get all comfy in my regular routine, and shudder at the thought of having to overcome my inertia and rouse myself to do something really intense and taxing.
People talk about renouncing bread on Pesach as symbolic of giving up our puffed-up sense of ourselves, but I like to think that bread — in all its pillowy soft, filling glory — represents the comfort of our usual well-entrenched habits and ways of being. When you’re sated with bread, you feel no need to stretch yourself beyond your normal limits — but of course, that’s precisely what Pesach does for us spiritually.
My inner grownup, of course, is well aware that we only grow through rising to our challenges. You grow as a journalist by learning to churn out articles under pressure, instead of lovingly obsessing over each word (although you grow from that too). You grow as a balabusta when the house molts its accumulated carapace of stained clothing and wall fingerprints and the curry powder you bought for a recipe and never used again, only to be reborn stripped and immaculate and pure (after which you vow you’re going to maintain this new level of cleanliness, simplicity and organization all year long, ha ha). You grow as a Jew when you invest yourself deeply, body and soul, to prepare yourself to shake off Mitzrayim and throw in your lot with Am Yisrael and Torah.
I love getting to the top of the mountain; I just get the jitters about making the climb. Nothing that a small added dose of courage and emunah couldn’t help, I suppose. Maybe I should reframe and tell myself the P word shall henceforth stand for Process, or Progress, instead of … Plotzing!
