Ready for Pesach? For Freedom?

What you can do in the days before being freed? Doing your best to deserve your freedom. From this point of view, cleaning means more than vacuuming and washing; it means as well reorganizing your priorities, thinking bolder to the future and finding time for thinking about the story of the Haggada - including the newest version, by JSFoer.

I found interesting this minhag of the Syrian Jews, according to this feature report:

Syrians — like Egyptians and other Jews who hail from Arab lands — will wrap the matzo in a cloth, sometimes resembling a knapsack. The Syrian tradition — at least in her family — is for each male, from oldest to youngest, to take the covered ceremonial matzo, hold it over his left shoulder and respond to three questions: What are you carrying? Matzo. Where are you coming from? Egypt. Where are you going? Israel.

At the practical level, I am trying to do my best for covering all those aspects. I am not always very successful, but at least I am learning more and more each day. Out of my working program, I put aside some time for reading about the traditions, cleaning some strange corners of the house and learning something insightful. Blogging is not necessarily part of the plan, but will try to update my online thinking diary as often as possible in the next days.