By JOSEPH KELLARD
With so many congregants, it became a good-sized blaze. Luckily, Greenspan is a firefighter as well.
"Chametz is a symbol of all the bad qualities in people, like arrogance and greed," Greenspan said, standing in his Oceanside Fire Department suit, boots and helmet. "The idea is to search our souls and get rid of these bad qualities."
Chametz - which refers to any food that contains leavening agents, such as bread, crackers, cookies or cereals - is a ceremony in which believers toss these foods into fire as a form of repentance. On the night before the ceremonial burning, as believers prepare for Passover by koshering their homes, the last thing they do to complete the process is to leave aside a little bread or crackers around the house while other members of the family search for these.
"That way you search all the crevices and corners of the house," Greenspan said, "to make sure you've really removed any leaven products from your house altogether."
The following morning, family members burn these foods and make a declaration in which they say "that any chametz that is still in my possession is not longer mine, and if there's something I forgot, it becomes like the dust of the earth."
Last year, Greenspan got the idea that chametz is a ceremony his congregation could do to bring its members together. "I think when people come together things, become more meaningful," he said. "Usually, people do this at home. So it seemed appropriate to come together as a community and do this."
Mirroring the Rosh Hashanah ceremony of tossing bread crumbs into a body of water as a form of casting away one's sins, Greenspan this year wanted to add to the chametz ceremony the touch of having believers write their "attributes that they don't like about themselves" on a card and toss them into the fire, he said. The rabbi also wanted to make the ceremony communal, at OJC, because there's an element of danger in it. "People shouldn't be playing with fire," said Greenspan, who became a volunteer firefighter with the OFD after Sept. 11, 2001. Joining Greenspan as a precaution were several of his brother and sister firefighters on a Columbia Engine Company fire truck.
"It's part of the thousand-year-old Jewish tradition," said one congregant, Ida Haratz, who remembers her father performing chametz each year in their Williamsburg home when she was a girl. "Coming here today, it's a feeling of togetherness. Also, after remembering all these years, you did it with your family, it's a warm feeling, too."
Also on hand was Yitzhak Lefkovitz, cantor emeritus at OJC, who applauded Greenspan's public celebration of chametz. "It's an excellent and original ideas to do it this way rather than doing it at home," he said. "And it's done according to tradition."
