Chag Pesach sameach! Happy Passover!
This week, we embarked on the adventure of Zoom Camp. Kiddos joined us on video chat from the comfiest spot in their house, some even still in their pajamas! In the morning, we did passover-themed art projects. We learned about Elijah’s cup, Miriam’s cup, The Four Children, and so much more!
After lunch and a read aloud, we explored bedikat chametz (searching for leavened foods) and biyur chametz (destroying leavened foods). We hunted in our houses on Monday for chametz and found:
- Challah
- Dried out pizza
- Animal cracker
- Two pieces of cereal
- Dried out piece of pasta
- Hamburger buns
- Pasta shaped like Jewish stars
On Tuesday, we brainstormed some ways we could destroy our chametz (safely). Our goal was to make it so that a person could no longer benefit from the chametz. Here are some of our ideas:
- Throw it in a river
- Burn it (with parental guidance)
- Turn it into an art project
- Send it out of the universe on a rocket
- Flush it
- Stomp on it
- Throw it to the wind in the form of little crumbs
We all grabbed our chametz and went off to destroy it. Each kiddo had the added challenge of thinking of a phrase or spell to put on it, so it would really be destroyed. This was inspired by the long phrase in Aramaic that we would traditionally say upon destroying our chametz. Some ways that we ended up destroying our chametz included:
- Flushing it down the toilet, while saying “I will never see you again! Bye-bye!”
- Throwing it outside and saying “And stay there!”
- Aiming the chametz at the sun and shooting it there in a rocket, while saying Adios! in every single language
We all came back together and decided whether or not our various methods had truly destroyed it. There was some confusion about the last one, because if the chametz didn’t end up on the sun, and instead ended up on another planet, it would still be chametz there. We also discussed the importance (or lack thereof) of our phrases or spells that we put on it.
Do our words help destroy our chametz, or do they not matter?
- Words don’t change the reality. It might make the person feel better to say the things.
- Having words to say makes the person doing biyur feel more actively involved.
- If someone says something mean to me, it changes how I feel about them because the words hurt me. But nothing happened physically. So words can change the reality between people, but chametz doesn’t have feelings so it’s different.
So this week, as we think about the story of Passover (and how much we all want a bagel), consider your words. They have the power to destroy, but they also have the power to make us all feel loved and safe. Have a happy and meaningful holiday!
