Mishpacha writers all have our “personal favorite” articles and one of the pieces I most enjoyed doing this year for Mishpacha was the article on hoarding.  The idea actually grew out of a conversation with my non-observant Partner in Torah who watches quite a bit of television and told me about popular reality shows in which crews come to forklift piles of junk out of hoarders’ homes.  Judging from the amount of response we got to the article (one reader even wrote a very charming poem!) I wasn’t the only one who found the subject of hoarding perversely fascinating.  Most of us aren’t pathological but we all struggle with trying to keep in control of the massive amounts of stuff that continually passes through our homes from groceries to kids’ school projects to junk mail to new socks.  Until recently people worried about not having enough but today we struggle with having too much—too much food too many consumer goods too much information too much choice—and find ourselves engaged in a constant battle to set limits on our consumption on every level.

            The ultimate cure for hoarding is of course—here we go again—the P Word!  How could anybody who keeps Pesach be a hoarder short of going away to a hotel or a relative’s place for yom tov?  There’s no way you can properly clean for Pesach without moving the stacks that line your goat trails through the house. 

            These weeks before Pesach are the weeks that force me to confront my own Inner Hoarder as I empty drawers and struggle with never-ending decision-making:  is this sweater too stained to hold onto?   Are we really going to use this pretty but totally impractical cake plate?  Do I store this almost-finished bottle of cumin or junk it?  My laziness about shlepping things to our designated chametz storage room battles with my more stingy (or more charitably “anti-bal-tashchis”) side.  

            But when the cleaning’s done we feel so wonderfully pared down like we just lost twenty pounds (halevi!).  We feel . . .light as a matzoh ball!  It’s a relief to literally sweep out the old and remain with only what’s essential and fresh to work in a pared-down kitchen with a limited supply of ingredients.  When Pesach finishes it’s with a certain regret that I shlep the cartons of non-Pesach goods back to the kitchen and watch the shelves again revert to their usual overpopulated status.

            There’s got to be a lesson here somewhere. The piece I’m working on currently is an interview with 88-year-old Mrs. Lola Lieber yet another of my amazing Boro Park Bubbies.  Lola just wrote a fascinating memoir of her Holocaust experiences and in one of the more unforgettable scenes the starving Lola is so desperate for food that she claws thick mold off a hunk of bread meant for chickens and devours the interior (and makes herself good and sick as a result).  When you read about people who lived through the war with nothing more than the clothes on their backs never knowing where the next meal was coming from you start to feel embarrassed about all the Purim nosh you’ve consigned to the garbage can and the closets so full of clothes we forget what we own. 

And that’s what hoarders have to teach us I guess: don’t take the privileges of ownership lightly don’t scorn Hashem’s gifts.  Hoarders feel in their bones that every item deserves respect for the materials and effort that went into producing it and that every item has potential value and use.  How relevant for times when the magic cornucopia has suddenly ceased flowing with endless riches.