Four years ago I stood at my stove for more than three hours and turned my kitchen into a Russian shvitz as I boiled every metal utensil, every pot, and every serving piece in both my milchig and fleishig sets. Explaining the ins and outs of Passover cleaning to friends and families who don’t keep kosher—and even understanding it myself—is an ongoing challenge. But this time around, I didn’t question the cleaning: I simply felt elated.

No doubt all that steam, the sweat pouring out of me, was cleansing. But beyond that. I was different. My dishes were still my dishes, a tad cleaner than usual, but I had changed. I’d been turned upside down, dunked head first, and what used to be on top and super-important was repositioned, minimized, shifted to the bottom of consciousness or dissolved altogether. I had a level of clarity and focus on the holiday that I often don’t. Usually I’m crazy about all the things I have to do before Pesach and end up not doing half of them. I come into the holiday frazzled.

Strangely, that year I did more, cleaned more, but I was not filled up with anxiety and to-do lists. I must have had those lists; why would that year have been different from all other years? But I wasn’t consumed by the process. I did the kashering, and everything else fell into place: the thousand details, the logistics of the switchover, chametzdik kitchen to pesachdik kitchen, the menu-making, the buying of Pesach food and selling of chametz, the emptying out of cupboards immediately followed by the loading up.

I spent more time kashering and less time worrying. I dipped silverware in boiling water, submerged small vessels into larger ones. My fingers got wrinkled inside my new dishgloves. My facial pores were pure and my hair was pure frizz. I breathed deeply.

I played my favorite CD—The Music of Pesach at BJ—to keep the energy and inspiration flowing, and one song in particular permeated the steamroom of my kitchen/mind: “Karev yom asher hu lo yom ve lo layla” (“draws near the day that is neither day nor night”). I’d always thought the song referred to the seder nights, those evenings of questioning and eating and singing—of supreme wakefulness—that last until the morning prayers, defying categories of day and night. But that year I realized the “yom asher hu lo yom ve lo layla” also refers to the day(s!) of preparation, the work that spans day and night. The time of packing up and then unpacking, the work that must be done until it is done, without regard to day or night, like our people preparing to leave Mitzrayim. There is no rest before such a journey.