Published on Tuesday, 06 December 2011 18:10 | Written by Vernon Gillispie | | | Hits: 7410
Bediket Hametz
"Clearing Out the Leaven"
This is one of the traditional ceremonies conducted in many Jewish homes prior to Passover and involves removing all hametz/chametz products, even the crumbs, from their homes.
Pantries, tables, counters, are meticulously cleaned, floors are swept and mopped, etc. Often as part of the ceremony children are encouraged to conduct a search and a small amount is deliberately left for them to find.
The following are a couple of the scriptures upon which these customs are based.
15 For seven days you are to eat bread made without yeast. On the first day remove the yeast from your houses, for whoever eats anything with yeast in it from the first day through the seventh must be cut off from Israel. Ex 12:15; NIV.
3 Then Moses said to the people, "Commemorate this day, the day you came out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery, because the LORD brought you out of it with a mighty hand. Eat nothing containing yeast. Ex 13:3; NIV.
Wikipedia has the following to say about hametz:
Chametz, also Chometz, Ḥametz and other spellings from Hebrew, are leavened foods that are forbidden on the Jewish holiday of Passover. According to Jewish law, Jews may not own, eat or benefit from chametz during Passover. This law appears several times in the Torah; the punishment for eating chametz on Passover is the divine punishment of kareth, one of the most severe levels of punishment in Judaism.
Chametz is a product that is both made from one of five types of grain, and has been combined with water and left to stand raw for longer than eighteen minutes.
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