Home For Pesach (Passover)

Yes, we'll be home for Pesach, Baruch Hashem, Thank G-d! We're not joining the exodus from our homes. We don't pack up our belongings, like Bnai Yisrael. We don't spend the most family-oriented Holiday of the Jewish Calendar in a hotel.

Preparing for the Passover Holiday isn't always easy and pleasant, but it's a spiritual and kinesthetic process. The air swarms with dust, rather than the Biblical plague of locusts. And after breathing in too many cleaning chemicals, bleach and detergent, there's the delicious smell of food cooking. Every family has its traditional favorites, for which we eagerly await.

Going away to a hotel just doesn't compare.

Jewish and Israeli publications are full of ads from all sorts of hotels, all over the world, tempting families to pay for someone else to do the cooking and cleaning. Yes, even if the family home is cleaned and checked for chametz before leaving, it's not the same as cleaning to be there for the Holiday. Jewish organizations invite, for a price, its members to spend the Holiday together.

Some families have been doing it for so long that the parents have never prepared the food for a seder and don't know what to buy nor how to cook it.

I admit to never have enjoyed the required pre-Pesach cleaning, but it all becomes worth it when we sit together and eat our home-made food, all Kosher For Passover.