Passover

Passover: preparing your home

What chametz is, what genuinely has to go, how a kitchen gets turned over, and the search by candlelight the night before. In the order you should actually do it.

What you are actually doing

There are three separate obligations sitting underneath everything below, and keeping them apart makes the whole month calmer:

1. Do not eat chametz for the eight days.
2. Do not own chametz for the eight days. This is the one that generates the work. Chametz that stays in a Jew’s possession over Passover becomes permanently forbidden afterwards, which is why the sale exists.
3. Remove and nullify what chametz there is — by destroying it, by selling it, and by a verbal declaration that whatever you missed is as worthless to you as dust.

Notice what is not on that list: making the house clean. It is a perfectly good time to clean the house. But the mitzvah is about a specific substance, and a family that spends three weeks scrubbing skirting boards and arrives at the Seder too tired to enjoy it has misallocated the effort.

A sensible order of operations

Start after Purim. Thirty days is the traditional lead and it is about right.

• Four weeks out. Stop buying chametz you will not finish. Start eating down the pantry — this alone removes most of the work. Order shmurah matzah and, if you want one, a Seder plate.
• Three weeks out. Work room by room, not all at once. Bedrooms and offices need a check for stray food, not a deep clean. Pockets and school bags matter more than bookshelves. Cars are a real problem area and everybody forgets them.
• Two weeks out. The kitchen. This is the whole job; see below. Decide now what you will kasher and what you will put away, because the answer changes your shopping.
• One week out. Seal off the cupboard of sold chametz — tape it, or turn a lock. Authorise the sale. Do not leave this to the last morning.
• The night before erev Pesach. The search, by candlelight. See below.
• Erev Pesach morning. Finish eating chametz by the deadline; burn the rest by the later deadline; make the second declaration.

The kitchen

Kashering is the process of removing absorbed flavour from a surface. The governing principle is that a vessel releases what it absorbed the same way it took it in — so a pot used in boiling water is kashered with boiling water, and a spit used over fire needs fire.

Everything to be kashered must first be thoroughly clean and unused for twenty-four hours.

The three methods

• Libun — heat, applied until the metal glows or, in the lighter form, until it is too hot to touch. For grill grates, oven racks, spits.
• Hagalah — immersion in a pot of water at a rolling boil, then a cold rinse. For metal pots, cutlery, ladles, metal bowls.
• Irui — pouring boiling water directly over a surface. For some countertops and for a stainless steel sink.

Item by item, in general terms

• Ovens. Kashered by intense heat — a self-clean cycle where the oven has one, or a long run at maximum. The specifics depend on the oven, and the racks are handled separately. Ask.
• Stovetops. Grates and burners by libun; the surface around them cleaned and covered.
• Sinks. A stainless steel sink can be kashered by pouring boiling water over every surface. A porcelain, enamel or composite sink cannot be kashered — use a basin or insert, and do not put Pesach dishes down on the sink itself.
• Countertops. Stainless steel and some stone can be kashered. Laminate, wood, tile and composite are generally covered instead — heavy paper, foil, or fitted board.
• Microwaves and dishwashers. Both are genuinely complicated and the answers vary with the appliance. Ask rather than assume; a wrong assumption here is not obvious afterwards.
• Earthenware, china, porcelain, stoneware. Cannot be kashered by any method. Put away for the week.
• Glass. A genuine difference in custom: Sephardi practice generally treats glass as non-absorbent and permits it after a thorough wash; Ashkenazi practice, including Chabad, does not kasher glass for Passover. Follow your own community’s custom, and if you do not know which that is, ask.
• Small appliances — toasters, mixers, food processors with a chametz history. Most people put them away. Some can be handled with a new bowl and blade.

Refrigerators, freezers and pantries do not need kashering, just emptying and cleaning; cold does not transfer flavour.

Selling the chametz

You will not be able to eat or own the whisky, the pasta, the pet food with grain in it, or the sealed cereal boxes. Throwing them out is wasteful and unnecessary. Instead they are gathered into one cupboard or one corner, shut off, and legally sold — a real sale, with a real buyer, drafted so that it holds halachically — and bought back after the holiday.

The sale is made by appointing the Rabbi as your agent, and that appointment has to be done properly rather than by ticking a web form. We arrange it free of charge every year: how to authorise the sale. Include chametz utensils you are storing rather than kashering; they go into the sale too.

Get it in a few days early. The deadline is mid-morning on erev Pesach and nobody wants that rush.

The search, the night before

On the night of the fourteenth of Nisan, after nightfall, the house is searched for chametz. It is a small ceremony and one of the nicest things in the Jewish year.

1. Before it starts, someone hides ten small pieces of bread, each wrapped so it cannot crumb, in places you will remember. This is a custom, not a requirement — it exists so that a clean house does not produce a blessing over a search that finds nothing.
2. Turn off the lights. Take a single candle (a torch is used in practice for anywhere a flame is a hazard), a feather, and a wooden spoon or a paper bag.
3. Say the blessing — al biur chametz. From that moment until the search begins, do not talk about anything else.
4. Search the house room by room. Children do the finding; this is theirs.
5. Afterwards, say the first bittul: a short declaration in Aramaic that any chametz in your possession you did not find is nullified and is like the dust of the earth.

The next morning, the chametz that was found — and whatever is left from breakfast — is burned, by the deadline. Then the second bittul is said, in wider wording that covers chametz you knew about as well as chametz you did not. That second declaration is the one that matters most, and it must be said after the burning, not before.

Three things people find out too late

• Firstborn sons fast on erev Pesach — the Fast of the Firstborn. In practice it is almost universally discharged by attending a siyum, the completion of a tractate, and eating there. Ask when ours is.
• Kitniyot. Ashkenazi custom, Chabad included, does not eat rice, corn, beans, lentils or legumes on Passover. Sephardi communities do, and always have. Neither is an error, and a mixed household should get a clear answer rather than improvising.
• Chabad’s extra customs. Chabad practice avoids gebrokts — matzah that has come into contact with liquid — for the first seven days, eating it on the eighth. It also tends toward buying fewer processed products and peeling fruit. These are Chabad customs and not obligations on anyone else. Nobody here expects a guest to keep them, and nobody will think about it.

And then the good part

All of this is preparation for two evenings. When the kitchen is done, read the Seder, step by step — all fifteen stages, what each is for, and how to run one for people who have never sat at a Seder in their lives.

If you would rather not do any of this at your own table, our Seders are free and open to anyone: the community Seder. If you are hosting and have questions, or you are alone and would rather not be, say so.

Questions people ask

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