This time of year, many of us find ourselves engaging in some sort of heavy-duty spring cleaning. For instance, those of us who are preparing for the holiday of Pesach know that part of the process is cleansing our homes of even the smallest crumbs of chametz (bread and other leaven).
According to the kabbalists, Pesach is not a religious holiday. Rather, it is a spiritual window of opportunity to allow us to reach another spiritual level regardless of our faith or practice. Therefore, just as the energy of the astrological month affects all of us no matter what our personal birth sign, we all can expect to be affected by Pesach’s influence, whether we observe the holiday or not.
So what is this cleaning all about anyway?
The answer is that the cleaning we are talking about is not really external cleaning.
In our lives, many of us ask to gain freedom from challenges of all kinds: relationship difficulties, financial stress, worries about health. We also ask for the freedom to believe what we want to believe and to live how we want to live.
To find this freedom, we’ve got to look inside and find those places within ourselves that need to be cleansed—of ego, of anger, of sadness, of any negative emotion. That’s what the cleaning is really about. And we do the external work of cleaning our surroundings because the physical effort we make creates a vessel, or a place, for a blessing to reside.
Essentially, we are responsible for planting a seed through our spiritual effort that will allow the blessing to grow and for creating a clean place within where the Light can flourish. To make this happen, we have to eliminate the chametz from the past year and create a clean space inside of ourselves.
