With a candle and a feather in hand, you are ready for the ritual of bedikat hametz, or hametz-hunting, where the home is searched for leavening the night before Passover. This custom, followed the next morning by the burning of the crumbs that have been gathered, provides an opportunity to ceremonially declare ourselves ready for the Festival of Freedom. Our home is officially Kosher for Passover.

Is this good enough? Several years ago, in anticipation of the pre-Passover cleaning frenzy, I found myself wondering about ways in which I could more directly focus my intention of increasing freedom in the world. Passover, after all, is our Festival of Freedom.What could I add to my Passover preparations that would do honor to the lessons that we were to learn from our enslavement?

I decided to search for hametz, or perhaps more correctly for Pharaoh himself, in my retirement fund.Was my retirement fund and my future financial well-being ethically Kosher for Passover?

I called the retirement fund coordinator and asked whether it was possible that I had any tobacco stock tucked away in my portfolio. Since this was my first attempt at learning about how to ethically "kasher" (make kosher) my finances, I decided to start with something that I consider glaringly evil and oppressive—tobacco companies.

To my dismay, I was told that the joint retirement fund of a major national Jewish organization had stocks in tobacco. I told the coordinator that I needed to have my funds transferred from any tobacco stock by 10:00 a.m. the morning of the first Seder–the time that I usually burn the hametz. I wanted my retirement fund at least minimally Kosher for Passover by the same time that I would

be performing the final ritual act of preparing the kashrut of my home.

Judaism requires so much more than simply being concerned about our personal spiritual purity.We must be engaged in tikkun olam—global improvement—and Passover provides a golden opportunity for utilizing the focus and meaning found in the festival toward this broader life purpose.

In these intervening years I have explored far more deeply the potentials of developing Ethical Kashrut.With the complex global economy, it is critical that we examine our personal relationship with a system that has in its hidden recesses unfathomable depths of human exploitation as well as disastrous environmental consequences. We can and must work toward establishing a global economy based on the principle of global justice.

As we sing Dayeinu ("It would have been enough") at our Seders, we should realize that there still many verses of Dayeinu yet to be written and sung before the journey to universal freedom is complete. May we have the wisdom of heart to dedicate the pain of our past to the great joy and fulfillment of the future.