Passover Ritual Is a Mystery to Many

“How are you going to explain this to people who have never seen it?” asked a bemused woman in the parking lot of Chabad-Lubavich of Greater Boynton.

She was standing upwind of a small bonfire, lit by Rabbi Sholom Ciment, surrounded by members of his congregation. A brisk wind whipped the flames.

It was noon, the scripturally appointed hour for the burning of chametz, any leavened food made of wheat, barley, oats, spelt or rye. Chametz must be removed from an observant Jewish household before Passover, which began Friday at sunset.

During the eight days of Passover, Jews eat only matzoh, an unleavened cracker that represents the unleavened bread they had to make on the run during the Exodus out of Egypt.

But it would not be right to waste all that chametz, so scripture tells Jews to sell it to non-Jews for a nominal price.

Still, even the best housekeeper might have missed a crust or a crumb, so families conduct a thorough search on the night before Passover, which this year was Thursday.

They threw onto the fire pita, bagels or bread left over from Friday’s breakfast, plus a few ceremonial crumbs brought just for the occasion.

One man, caught in the mini-gridlock in the parking lot, handed his chametz out the car window so as not to halt the flow of traffic.

Despite that very modern moment, Ciment told the children and grown-ups to focus on the seriousness of the ancient ritual.

“You’ve got to understand what you’re doing,” he told them. “If you don’t understand, it’s useless.”

He led them in a prayer: “All leaven or anything leavened which is in my possession, whether I have seen it or not, whether I have observed it or not, whether I have removed it or not, shall be considered naught and ownerless as the dust of the earth.”

In other words, nobody’s perfect, God. We did the best we could.

Members of Chabad, an Orthodox branch of Judaism, conduct these rituals, which would seem quaint or obscure to an outsider, as part of their responsibility to live according to the hundreds of Biblical rules that govern their daily lives.

But the ritual contains a spiritual dimension too.

“By doing this, we hope that (God) will burn away all evil forces which abound in our world today,” said Ciment.