When my pareve pot became fleishig, I went through the five stages of grief

“IF you never had a refrigerator on your toe,” my sister wrote in her eighth-grade yearbook, “you cannot understand my happiness at having it removed.”

A couple of weeks ago, my big pareve pot encountered fleishigs. Or did it? In hindsight, it’s hard to know, because I did what every Jewish woman does when she sees her pareve utensils where they aren’t meant to be: Scream. And wash it quickly in cold water.

What’s relevant here is that my husband couldn’t be sure of the pot’s status. He suggested we reenact the crime in order to render a verdict — place the pot on the burner on top of the oven vent, to see if the steam that reaches from the oven broiler is yad soledes bo. My daughter, who’d wandered in after her father (what teenager doesn’t want to be privy to every mundane conversation her parents have in hopes they unthinkingly spill a state secret?) made her pronouncement: The pot was fine.

When I checked, I thought it was fine. But I have Mommy hands. When my husband put his hand over the burner, he jumped back. Under the circumstances, he thought it best to consider the pot fleishig.

I went through my own five stages of grief. Denial: It’s very hard to treif up a kitchen. This can’t be! Anger: Who was silly enough to put the pot somewhere it could be contaminated by meat?! (Me.) Bargaining: Okay, not so much. Would I really never yell at my kids for cutting half an onion with a milchig knife just because I had my pot drying on the vent-burner while meat was broiling underneath it? Of course not. Depression: This is a good pot! Almost 20 years old, purchased on a huge sale, and you know they don’t make things like they used to. It’ll probably cost $100 to replace this pot with something equivalent, and we’re not made of money. Acceptance: What’s $100 when it comes to a mitzvah? Take it! Take all my money. And break my oven — and my washing machine — at the same time! (True story.)

It was a process. I trudged through the next two weeks unmoored, doing things I never do. I made onion soup with butter and mushroom-barley soup with meat. On Friday, I went way out of my comfort zone and made popcorn in my is-this-fleishig pot, because, as my husband pointed out, we weren’t eating it with milk anyway. I washed the pot in the fleishig sink and threw the once-pareve-now-who-knows-what scrubber in the garbage.

Finally, I called the beis hora’ah. Turns out the rav on call knew exactly what was going on, had tried similar halachic experiments of his own, and gave me an eitzah for kashering.

It was like a weight lifted. I was giddy at the thought of resuming my life without worrying about researching recs and looking for bargains. Which is pathetic. All this to-do about a pot! Do you know that there are people out there with real problems?

It’s a pot. If it came to it, which it didn’t, thankfully, replacing it would have been $100. That’s money, don’t get me wrong, but it’s not a vast sum. It’s not an emergency. And yet I can’t shake the feeling of having escaped. I wasn’t ready to part with my pot, which I’d bought as a bright-eyed kallah. It had been $20, on sale at Macy’s.

I can make soup again! I can put the leftovers in the freezer to take them out at will. I can nosh on lokshen kugel and drink my coffee at the same time. I can sauté onions and leave them unlabeled in the fridge.

It’s okay, I don’t expect you to understand. After all, you never had the refrigerator on your toe.

(Originally featured in Family First, Issue 982)