Waste disposal and religion

[hudebnik]

I was walking the dogs yesterday morning and a garbage truck pulled up beside us. "Odd," I thought, "this isn't trash day." But it was the day before Pesach, and all the orthodox-Jewish houses in the neighborhood had a lot of stuff to get rid of before Saturday night. Perhaps to the relevant rabbinic authorities "in a trash barrel outdoors" doesn't count as "out of the house". Anyway, apparently the NYC Department of Sanitation is willing to do some extra pickups for this purpose.

Comments

[cellio]

Further, there is the concept that, while we do need to clean out all the leaven from the house, if there's some hidden stuff in hard-to-clean places but you've rendered it such that not even a dog would eat it, you're ok. (So, for example, you don't need to scrub out all the grout between all the kitchen floor tiles if you've poured bleach over the whole thing.)

Surely the concept could be applied to the bagged trash.

Further further, we nullify any unknown leaven -- declare it ownerless, even if it's hiding in the back of a closet we forgot to clean out or something.

So there are protections upon protections already. I don't understand why getting the bag of trash off of the property is essential.

[hudebnik]

I figured there was probably something like that first principle: if it's irrevocably in a state that nobody would eat it, it doesn't count.

But maybe they just use it as an excuse for spring cleaning. We used to use "friends coming over to play music" to force us to clean at least the guest-facing parts of the house. Back when friends came over to play music....

[siderea]

Rats.

I don't think this is about halacha. I think this is about avoiding inviting an 11th plague by serving the local vermin a mountain of tasty, tasty chametz.

[hudebnik]

That makes sense. I haven't seen rats in the neighborhood, but they're probably there; we definitely have a fair number of raccoons and lots of pigeons.