One can easily learn very wrong lessons from deleavening. Naturally, since deleavening is such a heavily symbol-laden task, it is all too easy to jump to unreasonable conclusions projecting what one learns from the physical act of deleavening that one then unreasonably applies to the spiritual level. All of these various wrong lessons are lessons that I have seen or heard from people talking about their own musings on the subject, and it is not intended as a discussion of the question of what sort of task deleavening really involves (which is the subject of a great deal of dispute).

Let us first discuss, though, that it is a myth to say that one has deleavened one’s home at all. Even if we remove every bit of leavening (baking soda, baker’s yeast, baking powder, beer, naturally leavened products, and so on) out of one’s house, one still has leavening in one’s house, no matter what one does. After all, yeast is in the air. There is always leavening around, as it’s in the air around us and there’s not a lot we can do about it. Even if we could somehow have a 100% reliable air purifier that got rid of every particle of yeast in the air, every time we opened a door or window we would be letting new yeast enter the house through the air that would make our house have leavening again. That’s not even including the fact that the command is to have no leavened bread, not to completely eradicate leavening itself, which is an impossible task.

The fundamental importance of this remembering the limits of the task of deleavening is important when one considers the question of the lessons of the Passover and the Days of Unleavened Bread. One of the two symbols of the Passover itself is leavened itself, the wine. But we must remember that it is the Days of Unleavened Bread, and not the Days of the Eradication of Leavening. After all, when bread is leavened, there is some sort of spoiling that occurs. For that reason leavened bread was not allowed to be burned on the altar. Additionally, leavening in bread gives the bread an expiration date when it will go bad. Like sin, it places a “death penalty” on bread that is not the case for wine or unleavened bread products. As a result, leavened breads tend to have preservatives to attempt to stave off that expiration date (i.e. death penalty) as long as possible.

This is a significant lesson. After all, it is sin that places a death penalty on us. And the sin is not the fault of yeast itself, since the leavening process in wines makes the wines even better, and wines get more desirable the longer they have to ripen and age. On the other hand, leavened breads and sinning human beings do not get better with mere age, but face a certain endpoint at which point they will be rotten. The death that occurs to leavened bread is itself analogous to our own death as sinners, and it is for this reason that leavened bread is the symbol and not leavening or leavened products in general. The death is caused by the corruption of the body of the bread caused by the leavening, or the corruption that sin causes to our own lives. The symbolism in this case proves to be very meaningful, so long as we understand the precise symbol, recognizing of course that leavened bread is not itself sinful.

This gives us insight on another question, that of which foods are leavened. Having already dealt with this issue on a couple of occasions [1] [2], I will be brief here. By implication, since the symbolism of leavened bread is due to the spoiling of the product as a result of leavening, we may then infer that any leavened product contained of “bread” (or grains) that is leavened and that spoils is therefore included as a leavened bread product, since spoiling is the symbol of death connecting leavened bread to sin and its results for humanity. Incidentally enough, this leads to an actual good lesson that a friend of mine learned in that cleaning out leavened bread products he also got rid of a lot of other spoiled food products that were unleavened. That is the correct lesson.

There are implications of this lesson too, though. Some practices and ideas are good in their time, but that time is a temporary one and we must get rid of such matters when they are spoiled and are no longer serving their original purpose, even if they are not necessarily sinful. Again, such lessons force us to view life and behavior as more complicated than simply sin and righteousness. There is much behavior that is not strictly defined as sin that is not fitting and proper, and that may become a sin because it harms and spoils relationships as well as our lives, and that we must be careful to keep within proper times and places and proportions lest it lead to greater issues and problems.

There are many good and bad lessons that we can learn from the act of deleavening. If we limit ourselves to merely reading ingredients, we miss the pervasiveness of sin around us in the air. It is not by coincidence that in an age of exploding sin we also use leavening ubiquitously in our prepared foods and attempt to use preservatives to stave off the inevitable spoiling as long as possible, just as we do in our own lives with the inevitable effects of sin and corruption. Likewise, if we believe that our task is to rid our lives of all leavening at all, we deceive ourselves into thinking that to be a possible task, and also fail to understand what it is about leavened bread that makes it a fitting symbol for sin and death, these serious and weighty subjects that we ponder this time of year. As we approach the Passover then, let us purge ourselves of the old leavening, and become a new lump filled with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.

[1] http://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2012/03/10/something-in-the-air/

[2] http://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2011/04/03/on-the-three-types-of-leavening/