Today is Shabbat Ha-Gadol, the Great Sabbath. What made it so great? A number of theories are flying around, but it?s probably true that this Shabbat got its name from the people, who noticed that they got home from Shul especially late this Shabbat because of the length of the sermon. In the days when a sermon was given only twice a year, on the Shabbat before Yom Kippur and on the Sabbath before Pesach, this was the opportunity for the rabbi to preach at length about Pesach and all of its observances. And at times in our history this made this Shabbat especially appealing, as Rabbi Hugo Gryn of blessed memory writes:

The sermons themselves were two- or even three-hour long discourses delivered to packed congregations? everyone wanted to make sure of a good seat in the synagogue and there were always scores of people who had to stand crowded in the back of the synagogue and in the aisles . . .

Observing Pesach is likely to be a lot more of a mixed experience today. And I am sure that many of you would rather consult the internet than come specially to shul to find out about the Passover rules and traditions. And besides which, as the festival is starting tonight, this morning might be just a little bit too late. Our Liberal Jewish traditions are dismissive of ritual that becomes empty and meaningless, and disparaging of the urge to carry some thing out for the sake of tradition alone. We are taught that the emphasis needs to be on freedom, a bit of an irony to anyone what has spent the last few weeks chasing every bit of leaven from their home and their property.

But the trouble with this is that we cannot be sure of meaning unless we have experienced the tradition. Because meaning is sometimes, and perhaps even, largely, something we discover for ourselves. And meaning is not fixed in time, but rather, it is a set of stories that grow and multiply through experience. This year I was struck by the difference between preparing for Pesach and ordinary spring cleaning. Pesach, of course, falls in the spring, and the urge to clean fits perfectly well with the coming of the brighter weather. I often think that people who live in the sunniest countries have the cleanest homes, and that perhaps this is because of the brightness of the light, which shows up the dirt. So, cleaning in the spring falls into this time of brighter light and an almost natural urge to throw things away and start again. But cleaning for Pesach is something else. Cleaning for Pesach is an act of searching for leaven. For the fermented products of the five key grains: wheat, oats, spelt, barley and rye. Cleaning for Pesach is cleaning in pursuit, there is always a target. And for this brief time, this time of preparation, whether you make it for days, hours or weeks, leaven takes on a different set of meanings. After Pesach, leavened food will become just bread or pasta or cake, the most ordinary and basic of food stuffs, without any personality, neither positive or negative (unless you are following a special kind of diet which teaches you to view these carbohydrate foods with suspicion). They are ordinary and common, and attract the barest of thought. But for this brief time, these seven, or if you are Orthodox, these eight days of Pesach, they are eliminated from our lives. Leaven is chametz, the fermented food. The puffed up foods that were absent in our flight from Egypt. During our dramatic escape, we took no leaven with us. Leavened foods were absent from the time that became the birth of our people.

And then there is the spiritual leaven. The puffed up food that is the very opposite of the lechem oni, the poor bread or Matzah, the simple unrisen staple of this season. Here, leaven or chametz is a symbol of arrogance; it is the oral expression of our pride. Leavened foods acquire this ?personality,? not just for one person, but in our global outlook. We see this idea in this short mediation which can be recited on completing the ritual for disowning the chametz in our homes on the night before Pesach.

God, may it be your will, that just as we remove all the chametz from our house, and from all that we control, so may You help us to remove all the impure forces from the earth?May all negative forces disappear like smoke. Remove tyrannical governments from the world and all who cause anguish to the Divine Presence. Blow them away with a spirit of justice, just as You did to Egypt and their idols in those days long ago.

So here again are the two specifics of the removal of chametz, of foods containing leaven: that the cleaning for Pesach is cleaning with a goal, and the chametz itself is not merely pasta or bread or crumbs, but something that is transformed in its meaning, for these days of Pesach.

And the strangest thing is that after the festival the chametz, or leaven, returns once more to its pre-Pesach state. They are crumbs or bread or pasta once more. Ordinary foods we depend on. The transformation is not so much in them, but in our own individual and collective heads. This is very, very interesting. This power to transform, that lies at the heart of so much in Judaism. Like the transformation of the ordinary to the sacred, and back again, which we do every Shabbat. The transformation of ourselves, or at least the transformation that we strive for, at the other turning of the year, at Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. The transformation of time itself, where days of the month are not merely ordinary time, but time of our festivals, pinned as they are, on the phases of the moon.

Seen in this way, the seven days of Pesach are an entry into a year of the new. Our liberation from Egypt is marked with a break from the ordinary, where the most basic of our foods are out of bounds, and we think anew about our relationship to the creation. When we can no longer idly reach out and grab a sandwich from the supermarket shelf, this suspension in time can act as a reminder, that we may take nothing for granted. These seven days of Passover set us apart, from our ordinary lives, from the non-Jewish world, from simple daily habit. They are a constant reminder to think about freedom. To avoid the easy puffed-up leaven of our own personalities, and to hope for a time when the corrupting arrogance that destroys the potential for peace in the world may also be cast aside. As easily, or with as much real difficulty, as we cast aside the urge to grab an ordinary piece of bread.

It is in this spirit that I wish each of us the traditional Pesach greeting. Chag kasher v?sameach. A kosher and happy Passover.