There is something different about Passover this year, besides its confluence with Birkat Hahammah, that exciting once-in-28-years celebration. That is the way of holidays, after all. While they stay the same year after year, we don’t. Therefore, we experience them differently each year. If we pay attention to how we see them, and feel about them, and react to them each year, we can learn a lot about ourselves, where we are in our evolution of values, choices and life.

So it is for me this Passover. These past three years of living deeply aware of the impression, the footprint, the impact my life leaves on our physical world has made me judge my lifestyle differently. This is not, and never has been, am “I’m okay, you’re okay” world. We each live in each other’s space whethere we like it and acknowledge it or not. My waste is your legacy.

Which has taught me two things:

1) I must have you in mind as I live my life. That is, I must live intentionally with the awareness of your presence and how what I do affects you.

2) To live so intentionally is to live more meaningfully, more fully, more profoundly.

In a way, I am never alone. The community, the purposeful intertwining of lives that we all crave, is consciously part of my everyday life.

As a committed Jew, this has always been that way for me: “All Jews are related and responsible one for the other,” we say and teach our children. So too, the mezuzah is to me like a dot in the connect-the-dots puzzles we did as kids. Each mezuzah is a stopping point along that invisible line that connects us all, so that all Jews can seek home and refuge in a strange place simply by looking for the place with the mezuzah.

But this new heightened awareness is an extension of that, a filling out of that to include all people, all nature, all creation. So when I get up and turn on the shower, or rip the plastic off my dry-cleaned dress or microwave my breakfast, all of this is laden with an awareness of the ethic I am living. Every act I take, every act we each take, leaves a trail, and therefore is a witness to our values and our care for each other.

In the beginning, as we move into this realm of greater self-in-place/self-and-other awareness, we feel a bit overwhelmed. On the one hand, we don’t want to be so self-conscious about our habits and our deeds. Or what they say or what they mean. We just want to do them.

On the other, we already construct our lives based on the audience and reception of the other. I do what I do in part, and make the choices I make in part, because I worry about what you will say and think about me. That awareness guides us in the clothes we buy, the coffee we drink, the cell phones we carry, the papers we read. What I think you will think of me by what I look like and what I consume affects so much of what I do, even in the privacy of my own home. Which is to say, we already live with the burden of the presence of the other in our lives. Why not just extend that awareness beyond what it does for me to what it also does for you?

Which brings me back to this Passover. Walking down the supermarket aisles, looking at the profusion of hametz look-alike products, seeing all the did-it-for-you prepared foods, never mind the extraordinary expense we are all burdened with in buying all that stuff, I cannot help but believe we have strayed from one of the premier lessons of Passover: simplicity. On Passover, hametz/leaven, is the symbol of too-muchness. It is the symbol of bloatedness, the things of our lives that are more than is necessary. It is a time when we are to simplify, take only what we need, only what we can carry.

On Passover, my kitchen reverts back to the essentials: fresh and frozen raw fruits and vegetables (I will be more aware this year about what is seasonal and what is not); eggs; oil; matzah meal; spices; cheese. I will do more cooking the week of this holiday than I do in over a month during the rest of the year. And despite the amount of eggs and oil I use, this week will probably produce some of the healthiest food to come out of my kitchen.

We make homemade almost everything – from soups to French fries to desserts. Our haggadot too are becoming more homespun. So too our matzah covers, seder pillows, games.  My buying appetite, never large, is getting smaller. Not just this week but throughout the year. I can hardly imagine something I need that I do not already have, in some form or fashion. That is where I am this year in life. It is this simple message of our return to Passover each year, that we learn more about what each of us truly needs, what is truly our hametz. Changing over our kitchens and doing more with less - or different things - than we have during the year opens our eyes to who we are and what we really need.

I am learning that for me, this year, I don’t need much. Rather, I cherish the homespun, the stuff that bears the earnest work of others, the stuff that leaves a smaller footprint, the stuff that conveys and inspires an interesting story, the stuff that brings people closer together, and the stuff that makes me worthier of sharing this world with my family, my community and you.