Passover tips

[msmidge]

The rabbi sent out a Passover-prep guide that was prepared by the Conservative movement and I was all set to ignore it, but then I went ahead and looked. And I'm glad I did! It says you can use the dishwasher! All you have to do to "kasher" it is let it sit for 24 hours and then run a full cycle with detergent. In the past I have just assumed the dishwasher was unkasherable so I couldn't use it. And my kitchen was a horrid mess for the whole time.

I also have the opportunity to have the rabbi sell my chametz this year. Usually I just give whatever's left to our non-Jewish friends (whom I already gave a huge amount of wheat germ and wheat bran that I never used), but maybe it is easier to just send the rabbi an email authorizing him to sell it.

Unfortunately I haven't learned anything that gets me out of cleaning the house. Sigh.

Comments

[sanpaku.livejournal.com]

You know, you don't really need to clean the whole house for Pesach. I only learned this from Internetting a few years ago, but it's true. I mean, if you're like us, yes, you should probably vacuum up all the Cheerios that have fallen under the couch. But chametz is defined as a) something of a minimum size, I believe an olive's bulk, that b) a dog would eat. So dirty, old food, or food covered in cleanser, is not chametz. So you don't need to shake out your drawers, wash the floors, etc. You should take out your bread and whatnot, and clean areas where you store chametz, but most of what's on your floor to vacuum up is not actually chametz worth worrying about. Even the frummies are hip to this -- check out http://www.neveh.org/pesach/peshein.html.

Kashering and moving the food around are the biggies. Also, selling the pets is really a pain. But it's good to have a congregation and a rabbi who you can pepper with questions; you can find all kinds of things that are less stringent than one would think on the basis of what's written down.

[msmidge.livejournal.com]

That is a good point--it doesn't have to be so all-consuming. But I don't clean the house very often, especially not deep-clean, so it is unpleasantly useful to have the discipline.

But--selling the pets??

[sanpaku.livejournal.com]

You can't derive benefit from chometz, so you have to either give your pets pesadig food or you have to sell them. This is definitely one of those things that, when I found it out, I was like, "you can't be serious," but eventually I guess we figured it out. We used to get ahold of kosher lepesach food for Phoebe; it is actually not hard to get from a veterinarian (some Science Diet varieties are good). But we still have to sell the fish somehow, I think...

[msmidge.livejournal.com]

Oh, right. We just sell the pet food TO the pets. We make a deal and shake on it. :)