Episode 65 - Your Walls Don’t Eat Chometz, Relax

Feeling the Pesach countdown tightening your chest? We get it. Between Purim overdrive and Passover prep, it’s easy to drift from meaning into performance. We unpack why so many of us overclean, overspend, and overdeliver—and show a calmer, truer way that honours halacha, preserves energy, and keeps joy at the centre.

We start by separating spring cleaning from Passover cleaning. If food wasn’t stored or eaten there, you can tidy it for dignity, but don’t call it religious duty. That simple rule reframes the workload and protects the heart. Then we revisit Purim’s mishloach manot: two foods to two people, ideally with presence. The goal is reconnection, not 40 gift baskets and a mad dash. Quality over quantity becomes a guiding principle that travels from the kitchen to the calendar to the soul.

From there, we tackle a deeper idea: tribulations can be gifts that strip away arrogance. Not just the loud kind—also the quiet entitlement that says life owes me what I’m not getting. Every time we meet hardship with humility and trust, another brick drops from the wall between us and the Creator. The pain may remain, like ripping off a bandage, but purpose makes it bearable, even meaningful. We share practical ways to bring this lens into holiday prep and daily stress, so you arrive at the Seder awake, present, and ready to taste freedom.

If this conversation helped you breathe easier, save it, share it with someone who needs less panic and more purpose, and subscribe for more Torah-rooted, real-world guidance. Tell us your biggest Pesach stress and the one task you’re cutting this year to protect your joy.

Transcript

Pesach Panic Versus Purpose

Quality Over Quantity In Holiday Prep

Reframing Tribulations And Arrogance

Pain With Purpose And Closing Blessings

Calls To Share, Subscribe, And Connect

SPEAKER_00 0:11

Welcome to the Trust Factor Podcast, the only podcast that guarantees your success when you implement its divine age old teachings. Good morning, everybody. TGI F T G I S. It's Friday, it's Shabbat, and anytime there's a holiday that drops anywhere in the middle of the week, it makes Shabbat come that much faster, which is amazing because we had Puri. And so Puri made the week that much shorter. We're here. We've made it. Another week has passed, my friends. And something to look forward to is Pesach. It's coming up. Pesach is going to be here in less than a month, my friends. Now, a lot of people historically, when they hear those words, a shiver runs down their spine. And I get it, especially by the women in the household. Why? Because oftentimes they're charged with making sure that the house is prepared for the holiday, meaning it needs to be cleaned and ready to go. Everybody can chip in, and everybody should chip in, and everybody should help, and it should be a team effort. But I want to point out something very important. And like I said yesterday, I'm no rabbi, I'm no halachic authority, but I'm somebody who learns quite a bit. And here's what I have to say on the subject of cleaning for Passover. We have the same problem that affects us in all areas of our lives because humanity has developed into producers. That's what we've become since the Industrial Revolution. Human beings have been turned into producers. That's all we need to do is produce and acquire, produce and acquire. I can assure you that's not what we're brought here for, but that's not the conversation. The conversation is because we are now bent on just producing volume. The more, the better. Bigger is better. That's the motto that we run with. The same thing applies to our holidays. We've by default applied those approaches to life in our holidays, and it's not necessarily right. If you want to utilize the holiday cleaning as a spring cleaning effort, then have at it. But recognize that you're not cleaning for the holiday, you're spring cleaning. If you want to turn your house upside down and inside out and paint the walls and change the carpets and do all these things because that's what makes you feel good, great. Just don't make it seem to yourself and to other people like that is a necessary standard. It's not. There was a Facebook skit going around that come around every year around this time where you have old Moroccan women sitting around comparing just how crazy their cleaning schedule is before Pesach. And the one tries to outdo the other, you know, to the point where they remove the bristles from the toothbrush and they wash each bristle and they put it back in. Bottom line, what's the lesson? You're doing yourself a disservice. If just the thought of tearing your house apart for Pesach brings you down and makes you not look forward to the holiday, you've done the opposite of what you should be doing. Pesach cleaning requires you to clean deeply in the areas that there is a probability that there will be food. If food is embedded in your wall, you have a problem. Used to be in the old days they had holes in the walls and those were their shelves, so they would put food in the holes in the walls between rooms. That was normal. Today nobody has that. If you have shelves that you put food on, then you clean those shelves and you move on. The wall doesn't eat the food. You understand? But people have lost their collective minds in their desire to clean. And in my opinion, it's a lot to do with the fact that it's coming up on spring and they want to feel like they're doing a proper spring cleaning, or they got it from their parents and their parents' parents and they've done they've turned it into a chore. It's wrong. It's not right. It's just the same way by poor him. We just had poor him, and we had to do the mitzvah of mishlachmanot, which really means that you need to take two people and you need to give them two different types of foods, and then you have to deliver it. And the ideal way to do it is to sit with the individual, make a meeting, sit by their house, go for a coffee, give them the Mishlachmanot, and maybe even enjoy it with them. Have a conversation, reconnect. It should be somebody that you're not so close to so that you reconnect and reignite new relationships or old relationships. And what do we do today instead? We take about 40 or 45 Mishlachman each person. We spend a week preparing them, we enlist the help of everybody in the family, and then on that day we rush out and we spend an entire day delivering Mishlachman to who? To your best friends, to the people that you know, the members of your community, guys. That's not the way to do it. The right way that it was intended to do was with quality, not quantity. So be careful. The same thing applies with Pesach. When you're cleaning for Pesach, it's quality, not quantity. Don't turn over rooms that you've never been into. You got a room in your basement that nobody goes into, hasn't been in there for five years, and suddenly this year you decide I need to clean it for Passover. It doesn't make sense. Enjoy the holiday. If you come to the day of Passover and you're spent, you're wiped so much so that you can't keep your eyes open at the table because all you've been doing is cleaning and preparing, then you've missed the point. That's enough for that. Let's get back into what we were holding in the book. Tribulations, difficulties, challenges are designed for what? To break down a person's arrogance. You'll remember yesterday we said arrogance, and I added to that ignorance are the things that keep us away from our creator. That is the number one reason that people don't get back to having a relationship with their creator or never actually do establish one is because of arrogance and also the ignorance. And oftentimes those two are connected. Therefore, they're a gift. Now you have different eyes to see them. You can see them as a gift. Arrogance prevents a person from getting close to their creator. Therefore, that tribulation and breaking down arrogance also breaks down the barrier that separates between a person and their creator. Everybody has some form of barrier between themselves and their creator. That barrier is a wall. Some walls are thicker and taller and higher to get over or larger to get around and difficult to get under. The whole purpose of building our Amuna and our relationship with our creator is to be able to remove that wall, one brick at a time, to remove it. And every time you face with a tribulation and you overcome that tribulation by acknowledging that your creator is running the show and it's coming from a place of love, you've removed another brick. Eventually, that wall is no longer a wall. Eventually, that wall is something you can step right over as you would walk normally. Our ultimate task is to grow our amuna. Arrogance is the exact opposite of Amuna. And that's why Hashem leaves the arrogant person. He doesn't want to be around the arrogant person, because that person represents the exact opposite qualities as Hashem. We know Hashem's qualities. We know that he's slow to anger and that he's patient and that he's kind and that he's merciful. We have all of these attributes. They are exactly the opposite attributes of a person who is arrogant. There's no greater arrogance than sadness and depression. Why? You might think it's the opposite. How can somebody who is sad and depressed, lowly all the time, isn't that the opposite of arrogance? And the answer is no. Let's see how he explains it first. They are the result of a person's sense of entitlement. You hear this? As if he deserves something that is being withheld from him, or something that somebody else has, or something that they think they need. Therefore, a person who rids himself of arrogance can easily attain emuna and get closer to the Creator. He no longer needs the wake-up calls of tribulation. When you've removed the bricks from that wall and now you can walk over it easily, where it's not even there, or almost not even there, because again, we're not perfect, we're always going to have challenges, some we're going to fail. It's inevitable. But the more that we've worked on ourselves and we've removed that ego and that arrogance and we've dropped that wall, the fewer the tribulations are. Why? Because, like I've said a dozen times, it's water off a duck's back. I know I saw it coming and I know where it's coming from, and I know who's pulling the strings, and I know it's with love. So why would I be upset? Because it's uncomfortable? You know, it just popped into my head. This is how fickle people are. Donald Trump, love him or hate him, it's not the point of the conversation. What the point is, is before he got elected, he was talking a very big game. He was talking about doing a lot of things to turn the country around, to change the way that America operates. And what happened? He got elected. And then you know what happened? He did exactly what he said he was going to do. And you know what happened after that? A lot of the very same supporters, the people who sung his praises while he was running to be elected, dropped them like a bad habit. Why? Because it hurt. In theory, it was nice. They may have thought that it was going to affect other people, and therefore it's okay. But as soon as it started to impact their business, the economy, their customers slowed down, their ability to buy groceries, gas prices going up, all of a sudden it hit their pocket, it hit their bank account, it made their life difficult. At the drop of a hat, they abandon, they jump ship. It happened so many times after he got elected. I understand what he's doing. It may not be comfortable for me, but he's doing things that are necessary. And the longer these negative, detrimental policies have been in place, the harder they are to undo. But somebody has to do it. The bigger the band-aid on, the more it's going to hurt when you have to rip it off. But somebody's gonna have to rip it off, and that's what he's doing. It's the same idea. When you know it's coming from a place of love, it still hurts, yes. Nothing is gonna take away the pain of a large bandage being ripped off. But the pain is manageable, and it is even acceptable when you know that it is for your best. Let's leave it there, my friends. A little bit of a short one today. It's Shabbat. Let's take a little extra time in the merit of shortening the podcast by a couple of minutes today for Shabbat. Take a few extra minutes and prepare for Shabbat, my friends. Make it that much more meaningful. Have an amazing Shabbat and we'll speak again on Sunday. Thank you for spending time with us on the Trust Factor Podcast. If you've heard something today that moved you, save this episode and share it with someone who might need to hear it. Be sure to subscribe so you don't miss upcoming conversations that challenge, empower, and uplift. And if you're on social media, connect with us. Leave your thoughts, drop a quote that resonated with you. Hashtag the TrustFactor Podcast. Until next time, keep growing in your trust and keep living with purpose. I'm Jesse Revivo, and this has been the Trust Factor Podcast. Thanks for listening.