No, OCD Isn’t Why Passover Is My Favorite Jewish Holiday
After my family’s first Seder - held in my parents’ home with my vaccinated grandma, just the four of us - I remembered seeing a funny Passover picture earlier that day. I took out my phone, Googled “Pesach funny,” and the first thing that popped up was a comic depicting an OCD support group where everyone was saying that Passover is their favorite holiday because it normalizes obsessive cleaning.
At first, I could only see red, especially when my mom and I were on Facebook later and saw similar “jokes” from extended family. It’s not that I am unused to insensitive jokes that make fun of OCD based on stereotypes, but every time I see them, it reminds me that we as a society have a long way to go in terms of understanding mental illness, which is a key step of destigmatization.
The people who share jokes like these only have a surface understanding of what it is actually like to live with OCD. Back when I was little and had compulsions about hand-washing, I used to wash my hands until they were red and raw because I was afraid there was even a single germ left there. That’s not something cutesy to put in a comic - it’s horrifying, and should not be the butt of a joke.
Literally only one thing in that comic made sense to me - the sense of community. Even though I know the comic wasn’t meant to empathize with this, I did connect in terms of feeling better when the “weird” things I do are normalized. It’s the main reason why I love fan conventions like DragonCon - I can show off every one of my positive obsessions to a degree I would never let myself normally and make friends instead of repelling people, because that’s the expected behavior in that space.
But Passover isn’t my favorite Jewish holiday because it normalizes cleaning or eating strangely or anything else that I or others with OCD do.
It’s my favorite because some of my earliest memories are showing up at Nana’s apartment early to cook for the Seder, practicing our songs together, chopping apples and nuts for the charoset (pre-allergy), and finding all of our favorite mistranslated text in our Maxwell House haggadahs from before I was born.
It’s my favorite because I love eating garlic Tam Tam crackers for 8 days straight, asking the Four Questions even though I’m in my late 20s, and setting time aside in a busy world to put away everything else and just focus on family.
It’s my favorite because it’s a holiday built around a story of redemption and survival, and whether we’re telling it from the Haggadah or watching “The Prince of Egypt” for the umpteenth time, it’s inspiring every year.
In addition to all of these wonderful moments, I also do some cleaning, either in my pantry or helping my parents with theirs. I make a game of finding the oldest expired thing from the back to make it more palatable as I am not exactly someone who enjoys cleaning.
I have OCD - 300.3 in the DSM, with basically every symptom in the book - and I’m not a cleaner. I pile my papers in a way that only makes sense to me and allow clutter to pile up on basically every flat surface I use frequently. I’m not dirty, but I’m also not going to have a perfectly neat and tidy apartment or work desk. My OCD never got in the way of keeping my home this way, and there are many other people who have similar experiences.
Even as someone with the disease, I didn’t realize there were so many different kinds of OCD until I started researching things after my junior year crisis. I learned that even though I knew what OCD meant for me, I had no idea what it meant for other people, and even sharing my story isn’t akin to sharing the story of all sufferers. Everyone’s obsessions and compulsions are a unique product of their environment, life experiences, and whatever the neurons in their brain are doing.
In other words, yes, I am a person with OCD whose favorite Jewish holiday is Passover. But I could take or leave the cleaning - for me, it’s all about family time, reenacting our favorite rituals while spending time together. As this year’s Passover wanes, I hope that next year, there will be even more awareness of mental health conditions and less offensive comics that reduce people to inaccurate stereotypes.
Ellie, a writer new to the Chicago area, was diagnosed with OCD at age 3. She hopes to educate others about her condition and end the stigma against mental illness.