This Year's Thought on Pesach and decluttering

I've read a number of decluttering theories and I find that they don't work for me.

"Konmari" everything that doesn't "spark joy?" -- No. I use a lot of things that don't spark joy. In fact, I prefer to have some things that don't, if they are heavily used by the smaller, more reckless members of the family. It saves trouble not to love things.
"Toss everything you haven't used in a year?" -- No. I still give my students the best handouts my teachers gave us in middle school, and I am so glad I saved them.
"Moving is a great time to shed things" -- but only if getting rid of them is easier than putting them in boxes, which it usually isn't.
"Throw away 17 things?" -- This is a good one... but....

In general, the whole idea of minimalism intrigues me. I enjoy minimalist spaces but my favorite Victorians were terrific hoarders of curios.

What does the Torah say about it?

A -- "the more possessions, the more worry." That sounds like decluttering is a good idea.
B -- "Yaakov went back for the small vessels." He crossed the river in the middle of the night just to get the Tupperware. That makes it sound like you shouldn't declutter just to declutter.

So I rolled these ideas around in my mind for a while, and....

Cleaning for Pesach is an entirely different kind of decluttering. All we have to declutter is chametz. Pesach-cleaning, as everyone loves to remind each other, is not spring-cleaning. All you have to get rid of is chametz.
Why?
Because that's what G-d said to get rid of. Done.

Well! I can bring the same laser-like focus into decluttering in the rest of my life, too. It helps if you have more or less defined what your goal in life is.
Is this item helping me do what I'm here for, or not?
Not does it make me happy, not have I used it in a year, not is it number 16 and what will I toss next -- those are all peripherals. Does this thing help me be an eved Hashem, or not?

As an extreme example, if I used to love this thing but then my children ripped it and so the main emotion I experience when looking at it is not warm fuzzies for the person who gave it to me but bottomless irritation with my careless children, out! That thing is not helping me in my life.

How to Love Pesach

In the spirit of the Internet, here is my DIY guide to loving Pesach.

DIY LOVING PESACH IN FIVE EASY STEPS!!!

1. Identify the Quarry.

You can't love cleaning for chametz if you don't know what you're looking for. Call your friendly local halachic authority and find out what size and quality of chametz need to be out of your house by Pesach, rather than trying to “catch 'em all” when the pokemon in question are undefined. Know exactly what you're doing.

2. Put Your Ribbons in Glass Jars If It Makes You Happy.

Everyone says “Don't spring-clean!” and it's true that dirt is not chametz, Pesach-cleaning is not spring-cleaning, and the two should not be confused.

But Pesach-cleaning involves channeling the spring-cleaning instinct, not repressing it. So I say: start with spring-cleaning if that's what comes naturally. I started this year by rearranging ribbons on the sewing-shelf; we got to the kitchen cabinets eventually but every time I turned around I saw pretty ribbons in chromatic order and it felt... Pesachdik.

3. Appreciate that Love Is Born in Chaos.

Understand what the month of Adar is about.

Adar leads up to Nisan as Elul leads up to Tishrei. Pesach will not be all that it can be if you do not go through Adar first.

Adar is about chaos. Adar is about, I am so not in control of my life it's funny. Adar is about, Hashem is in control, not the king and not the vizier. Hashem.

Every Rosh Chodesh Adar something crazy pushes me into a corner so that I just have to throw my hands in the air and laugh. Will you will come into our school in ten minutes and extemporize teaching for four hours? The right answer is, No. But the righter answer is, Yes, and happy Adar to you, too.

Two weeks later, on Purim, we are so not on top of the situation that we can't even tell who people are by their clothes, and a good proportion of our social norms dissolve into one big happy day of giving food to everyone. If you try to maintain everyday order on Purim you'll short-circuit. It's a day when creation goes haywire.

Pesach flows naturally from Purim.

But suddenly people try to be in control again. Then they get frustrated and start wisecracking about how we give each other food for Purim just one month before all that food has to be cleaned out of every corner for Pesach.

What do you think, that G-d hates housekeeping? It's not an accident and it's not sabotage. While yes, you have to get all that chametz out, the very inefficiency of the arrangement pushes you to recognize that it's not about efficiency at all. It's not about having a clean house.

So, if not spring-cleaning, what is Pesach about?

It's about, Hashem came into Egypt suddenly to pull us out from nonexistence into existence and claim us as His own. The theme of the month is ahava, the love between G-d and the Jewish people. Pesach is the beginning of that relationship.

That relationship was formed in chaos. The feeling of not being ready is an essential part of Pesach. We threw the dough in the oven and ran.

No one said, “Wait a minute, G-d. This is too much chaos. I'd like to stay a slave in Egypt until my dough finishes rising.”

Lechtech acharai bamidbar be'eretz lo zarua, you followed me into the wilderness, into a place where the housekeeping was total chaos. Yeshuas Hashem k'heref ayin, it happened in the blink of an eye.

On Pesach we love G-d through chaos.

Just relax and enjoy it. You can get to places on Pesach that you can't get to the rest of the year. Make room for that.

4.  It's All about the Bottomless Supply of Chocolate.

A member of our community recently raised the question of how to explain the concept of chametz to her two-year-old.

My first thought was that before she switches her kitchen to Pesach mode, she could show the child how yeast produces bubbles (Loops like to cheer it on - “Eat, yeasties, eat!” - like Klara drilling Latin), and how those bubbles manifest in the finished loaf, but not in matzah.

But the truth is that when Loops was two, I didn't bother trying to explain chametz. It was all about look at these fancy pretty dishes with blooming irises on them, special for Pesach and here is your fancy new dress with pretty sparkly buttons, special for Pesach and here is matzah, special for Pesach. I hide all the things I want to buy her anyway in the closet for months and then give them to her special for Pesach.

Adults are big two-year-olds and the same principle applies.

In practice (says the halacha) this usually means that men buy meat and wine for themselves, dresses for their wives, and nuts and sweets for their children.

(My inner two-year-old also likes that the logo on the kosher-for-Passover seltzer bottles is the heroine from East o' the Sun and West o' the Moon, which is my favorite fairy tale because it reminds me of Jewish history: the wife wandering the world with a candle in her hand looking for her polar bear husband.)

Childish pleasures are a real part of loving Pesach (thus codified in halacha) and not to be sneezed at.

5. Get a Handle on the Haggada.

The haggada is totally incomprehensible until you put in effort to understand it but then it unrolls and it seems obvious that each paragraph couldn't have been anything else. Apportion some time before Pesach to learn where it takes us and how.

Here is Rav Leuchter's explanation. (truffles truffles truffles)

Apart from that, the four cups correspond to the four stages of the exodus:

1. And I will take you out

2. And I will save you

3. And I will redeem you

4. And I will take you to me to be a nation

This isn't a number game, it's the progression the seder follows. In the course of the evening we relive the experience, starting with being slaves in Egypt, and ending with Hallel for having come out and then Nirtzah. On top of that there is a custom to stay up and recite the Song of Songs.

At the beginning of the seder we put away half the bread for later, “just in case”. By the end of the night, there is no more concern about “just in case”. We take out our reserve and eat it, before G-d, as a korban.

The seder is not about “each person comes out of his own personal Egypt” and it isn't necessary to go down that route to make the seder meaningful. It is about a historical, national experience. You were there.

To review:

FIVE EASY DIY STEPS TO LOVING PESACH!!

1. Know exactly what you're cleaning for.

2. Start with spring-cleaning if that's what comes naturally...

3. ...BUT recognize that Pesach is about ahava, not spring-cleaning.

4. Please your inner two-year-old. This is halacha.

5. Get up an understanding of where the seder takes us and how.

Happy Pesaching!

Zrizus: Notes from a Matzah Bakery

The matzah bakery is an overwhelming experience. It is in an unimproved basement, rough as a factory can be, half-painted and in shambles. In this concrete labyrinth are chasidim in their shirtsleeves and aprons, and other visitors: little boys in long coats and long payes and those beautiful velvet caps whose name I always forget.

The kneading room: three gleaming silver kneading pins hinged to gleaming silver tables, operated by hydraulic pumps. The noise of the chasidim banging these down and the pumps slamming them back up is sufficiently loud that some of the workers in this room wear protective headphones. Others do not: their ears swim in the holy racket of matzah-making.

At a fourth gleaming silver table, one man rolls the dough out into logs, and a second slices it with a knife (curled at the top into a self-handle) into parcels, weighs them, and throws them deftly through the air into the next room.

In the next room, women stand at a long silver table covered in paper, rolling with wooden pins, those perfect parcels into perfect circles. The individuality of this process is striking. One elderly woman stands and rolls, firmly and simply, as if she has done nothing else since 1936; another has made almost a dance of it. There is an air of incongruity about the group – all of these women engaged in labor together; where are their families? --I ask my husband who these women are and he says the custom is to hire widows. Above the table, a rack of fresh rolling pins. At the end of the shift the women will send the current ones to be sanded. The rolling pins will narrow from sanding over the months of matzah-making.

A man comes round with a paper-wrapped pole; the women flip the matzos off their rolling pins onto it.

He swings the pole round to another table, where one man rolls a shining reddler (perforator) over the matzos, once and back again; zip-zip! the sound is like an electronic vibration. Across the table, his fellow hangs the matzos on a fresh paper-wrapped pole. There is much laughter surrounding this man as he brings in a fresh load of poles and pours them into the rack above his head.

A beckoning: we may step into the next room.

A chasid thrusts the matzah-laden pole through a small doorway into a large oven of white-glazed bricks and twirls the pole to lay the matzos on the oven floor. Beside them, the fire neither flickers nor licks at the piled logs but rolls up them in earnest. It is 1000-something degrees Fahrenheit, by the thermometer.

The chasid loading the oven thrusts each unloaded pole behind him expertly, not looking, and it sails into a narrow trough, its paper now smoking or, occasionally, afire. Glowing bits of paper fly into the air. If nothing else in this room is inflammable, still it seems as if those sparks would ignite the very clatter of the operation. A worker strips the paper from the pole into a bin and inserts the pole into a pole-twirling machine to wind on fresh paper. On the wall behind him, a machine-operated wheel endlessly unspools paper for this purpose.

The matzos are done – the chasid at the oven flips them, smoking, into a wagon. Another chasid wearing thick gloves arranges them in neat rows. When the wagon is full they will be boxed.

The shift ends – the chasid at the oven passes by and I see that he is wearing two sets of sleeves, one sooty, the other nearly black with his good work.

It could be 200 years ago, it could be a Kacyzne photograph; what happens in this room is not confined to time.

It is time for Mincha – my husband is swept into the crowd of men; the women remove their gloves and collect their rolling pins. The men are in the next room talking to G-d. The paper on the tables is changed. Then boom, boom, like the drums of Tolkien's Moria but o so much nobler, one by one the kneading pins start up again.

A contemporary description of the beis hamikdash flutters into my mind, like one of those glowing bits of paper: an image of the kohanim, or was it the leviim, passing from hand to hand a gold vessel, then a silver, then a gold, then a silver, a dazzling array in perfect synchronization. This matzah bakery is the closest thing to the beis hamikdash that I have ever witnessed.

(OK, the Jewish home is.)

No one rushes. Whistles blow, clocks display the time, the matzos have to be in and out of the oven within 18 minutes of the water hitting the flour – time is absolutely of the essence – but no one rushes. They do good work in good time, lshem matzos mitzvah, they smile, there is a little kibbitzing, anyone is welcome to walk through and watch. The people working are focused with all the powers of human focus. There is no haste.

The instinct to feel at home in this modest but great enterprise is overpowering. I told my husband I want to become hasidic and take up smoking. I don't; I have just fallen in love with a matzah factory. This is a thing exactly as it is meant to be. If you painted that factory, if you cleared the hall corners, if you did your very best to make the place look respectable, let alone beautiful – you could not make it any lovelier than it is already.

What Is a Gemach?

Did you ever, as a child, dig for buried treasure in the schoolyard?

And when your efforts were frustrated, did you remedy the situation by burying something for the next kid?

The Portland library has deep trenches running the length of the library tables; as teenagers my friend and I used to amuse ourselves dropping poetry in the trenches to be found by strangers.

Nowadays this sort of activity is called geo-caching.

I never went geo-caching, but I have opened an electrical-utilities box in a Jerusalem hallway to flick the fuse and found instead a library of English-language crafting books.

GeMaCh is an acronym for gemilas chasadim, an act of lovingkindness.

In modern parlance a gemach is an institution or person that you can call up or visit for a specific favor. Often but not always a gemach is a library or distribution point for a specific kind of thing.

Gemachs are an integral part of the Jewish community. Some are modest operations in someone's living room (or fuse box); walking into others is like walking into a retail shop.

Between the white pages and the yellow pages of any Jewish community phone book are the gemach pages.

Among them –

Gemachs for a single book. Someone reads a book and likes it so much that she decides it should be available to everyone in the neighborhood, so she purchases multiple copies to loan out.

The chickpea gemach. There's a custom to serve chickpeas on the Friday night following the birth of a son. If your family is busy, or if your son is born, say, Friday afternoon, the chickpea gemach sends round a bowl of chickpeas.

The carseat and crib gemach. You can leave a deposit and borrow everything for your new baby, or a crib for your guests, or a carseat for an outing.

The wedding-dress gemach. Women who have bought their own wedding dress (or mother-of-the-bride dress, or eight-sisters-of-the-bride matching dresses) and aren't using it anymore donate it to this gemach, which lends it out to other families, charging a small fee to cover mending, dry-cleaning, and rental of the space needed to store all those dresses.

There are also everyday clothing gemachs to sell secondhand clothes. (Stores with leftover merchandise send it to clothing gemachs at the end of the season.)

A housekeeping-for-newlyweds gemach: pots and pans and sheets and towels at cost price.

I always said I would never be the lady who has a cardboard box gemach, although I have benefited from box gemachs in the past, because cardboard is hard to store properly. But then we moved, and we had a huge pile of cardboard boxes, and it seemed a pity to throw them out when they are so useful to people who are moving (or sledding), so now I am the cardboard box lady after all.

The gemach gemach. If you want to start a gemach but need a filing system to keep track of information, and hangers or shelves, you can go to a gemach gemach and get them.

The “dial-a-diary” gemach. In large Jewish communities it can be tricky to schedule events; so you call the local “dial-a-diary” gemach before and after you set a date, to make sure your event will not conflict with anyone else's.

One of the kedoshim who was murdered just now in Har Nof had a freezer gemach. Har Nof is a steep hill; you get from one street to the next using stairs. I run out of energy walking up and down Har Nof carrying nothing, let alone a stroller; but he would load a whole freezer onto a handcart and bump-bump-bump it to whoever wanted to borrow a freezer.

(eulogy.)

I have a friend with the neighborhood printer gemach. If you want to print something small, like a government form, you call her instead of having to hike to the print shop. No charge.

And so on, and so on, and so on. Kerosene, hot plates, centerpieces, garlic and sugar; there is even a lady who has made her phone number a “gemach” for women who are having a bad day and want someone to encourage them. I always wish there were an airplane gemach (in effect, a nonprofit airline) to shuttle people to and from Israel.

I wrote this post because people who have not lived in a community with a thriving gemach culture tend to assume that gemachs are only for emergencies. I have had people jump on my offer of cardboard boxes until I called my stack of boxes my “box gemach” and then they recoiled, saying, “Oh, no, no thank you, I don't need to use a gemach, we can buy our own boxes.”

(No! Please! Come take my boxes!)

Gemachs are a convenience for everyone. Millionaires also run out of children's Tylenol in the middle of the night and visit the Tylenol gemach. There's no reason why people should need to buy new clothes unless they want to, when others in the neighborhood are looking for someone to adopt their like-new ones.

So, don't be shy about calling the gemach. Most are intended not as charity but as a public convenience.

On Being a Giving Person

My neighbor, Mrs. Monsoon:

"If someone tells me that her son is sick, and I don't say, 'Can I take the rest of your children? Can I cook you a meal?' that makes me a small-minded person, doesn't it?"

Food for thought.

On Not Moving House

The main reason that there have been so few posts lately is because the Chief Nudge of the blog has been moving house.

House?

The logistics of moving are such that we've been staying in our friends' basement while they are out of town, waiting for our belongings to arrive. Thoreau would have a field day with this, I am sure.

It is a very unsettling thing to cook in someone else's kitchen, serve on someone else's ceramic dishes, and work in someone else's living room, and I have repeated once too often that I rawther hope we can move soon.

And then we were told that the truck would arrive the next day -- joy! rapture! and then this thought:

I lived in a certain country until I had learnt to shed the hesitation of being an alien there; and then I moved to another another stage of life and another neighborhood and stayed until I had learnt to live responsibly there; so, based on precedent, it is pretty clear that the moving truck is not going to arrive until I have learnt to deal with living in someone else's house -- that is, to stop treating it as a temporary fix, mentally living out of a suitcase, putting off all important and complicated plans until I have a house to make them in... yes, it will be easier to take down notes when I have notebooks and a table not covered with someone else's papers to take them down on; and yes, it will be easier to feed my daughter pomegranates when I do not have to hover over her to keep the juice off someone else's white satin tablecloth; and so on; but to live in a perpetual state of "we shall do nothing of complexity until we have our own house to do it in" is illogical.

I have not yet learned to live properly in someone else's house -- thought I -- so it is quite impossible that the truck should come tomorrow, assurances of the moving company notwithstanding.

And then the moving company called. "Sorry, there's been a snag. The truck will not arrive until next week."

Back to the Wilderness!

We might be moving.
We don't know.
We might live in this apartment, where my daughter was born, for another year... or we might be overseas, with our books slowly following by ship like so many jolly right-to-left tars, by the end of the month.

I pick up the ironing pile and realize: it is futile to finish this. In another week it could all be balled up in a suitcase.
Or it might not.
I go to the grocery store and wonder: is it worth buying that much honey? We might not have time to use it.
Or we might.
I continue to recopy my address book, with all its little notes: S likes chocolate, Y likes popcorn, bring a story for the children, 11:00 is the middle of the evening, call us for anything, she won't bite your head off, and wonder: am I ever going to need these addresses, numbers, and notes again? Am I ever going to see any of these people again?
Should I be packing? Or not?

"How are you not short-circuiting?" my friend asked.
I think it's because we have no control over the situation. We don't have to make a decision. So there's really nothing I can do but daven and daydream about the possibilities.
"It's like a Choose Your Own Adventure book!" observed my neighbor.
"Right," I said, "but we don't get to choose!"

It's kind of exhilarating, actually.
It's Exile, but no one ever said we weren't still in Exile.

I am reminded of a dark joke I once heard from Rabbi B.
"You know why so many Jews are violinists, right?"
"No, why?"
"Because it's hard to run with a piano on your back."

We are running, but not from Russia to Poland.
We have it so easy.
I feel like... like we are going into Galus on the Atchison-Topeka & Santa Fe.

Shavuos Menu

I. Do. Not. Cook. Complicated.
Ever.
I make whatever can be thrown together in five minutes based on what is cheap, seasonal, and unprocessed. And once a week I bake challah.

But when Shavuos comes around, I get out the recipe books and have an annual cooking spree.
The custom is to serve dairy at least once on Shavuos; most people make blintzes and cheesecake.

I'm still not sure why it is considered normal to post one's menus online, but someone told me I should. I guess it gives other people ideas... so here you are.
Last year for Shavuos I made challah, garlic naan, lasagna, saag paneer (served with yogurt), spanakopita, build-your-own Israeli salad, seven-toed bear-claws, and carrot cake.

This year there is a spinach shortage, so besides serving yogurt, I made challah, plain naan, lasagna (with mushrooms instead of spinach), vegetarian shepherd's pie, rice-and-cheese balls, vegetarian bean sausages, malai kofta sauce, mushroom sauce, build-your-own Israeli salad, gefilte fish with fixings, and seven-toed bear-claws with chocolate sauce.
I'm not crazy -- we had guests, and now I get a week off from having to cook anything :) .

The custom in Frankfurt was to serve a dairy "moulish" in the shape of a seven-runged ladder. I've never been able to identify what a "moulish" is or how you keep a filled ladder-shape from falling apart in the oven... hence the bear-claws.

Sewing challenge no. 4: Tish Bekishe

A tish bekishe is like a long Victorian smoking jacket, worn to the Shabbat table by some Chasidic men. My husband (who does not identify as Chasidic) wanted one partly because a bekishe is machine-washable and a suit isn't: a bekishe is good if your toddler likes to pour soup in your lap.

As Rabbi Triebitz once said (in an entirely different context), there are no non-Chasidim in a foxhole.

Some bekishes are tailored; some aren't. I used a bathrobe pattern, Simplicity 5931, and relied on the fabric to make it look like something you could actually wear to dinner.

The pattern is good for beginners, but runs large. My husband's rav and our neighbor (thanks) graciously smuggled me their bekishes (this was a surprise) so I could study the construction.

There is some kabbalistic significance to not making such a garment all-black, but mostly I figured a man who wears a black suit and a black hat every day has enough black in his life already.
I wanted a fabric that would look black (like most other bekishes) until you turned your back on it and made it think you weren't looking. What I found in the right color is pretty stiff; next time I'll use something floppier. And a pattern that will allow for frogs (those Asian knot fastenings), because I. Love. Frogs.

I'm not sure why it looks ripply and uneven here. It looks ok in real life.

I put on a remnant of silvery leaf-like trim because every tish bekishe should look Elvish.

The Twilight Zone

I went to replace a light bulb.
"There are no light bulbs," said the clerk.
"Do you usually carry them?"
"Maybe you can find someone who still does. I doubt it. Everyone now uses these spirals instead."

I bought a spiral. I tried it. It's so efficiently small, it doesn't screw into our socket.

I feel like Rip Van Winkle. My light sockets and I went to sleep in a 60-watt age. We have awakened to find ourselves in a new and better age, an age of efficient, eco-friendly, 13-watt spirals.

How bizarre. How inspiring.

In Which I Cross Over to the Dark Side

This month, I became one of those parents.
Those square, unenlightened, irresponsible parents... the ones who outsource their children's education, even before the child is old enough to string together a complete sentence.

Horrors!

It happened like this:
My daughter woke up one day and I realized that she had just stopped being a baby, and turned into a proper Child.
She has always been incredibly independent but suddenly she wanted all my attention, all the time.
My neighbor, whose son was born the same day, reported the identical transformation in the same week.

This is adorable, and it would be swell except that I work from home and charge by the hour, and there is just no way to compile an honest time-sheet for work done with one hand while the other tries to prevent the Child from pouring from her sippy-cup into the keyboard dsothattyingtotyeedsultdsinthids.

I gave up. She now spends about 10 hours a week in my neighbor's living-room kindergarten.
This is a neighbor whose child-rearing I have long admired. For about seven years I have said that if I lived here and if I had a child and if I needed a kindergarten, I'd choose hers: she is warm and cheery and inspired and uplifting and nudges everything into place without ever raising her voice. And she loves my daughter. And my daughter is always excited to go, and not interested in coming home. And she gets to be with other kids.
Hrrumph, hrroomph. As I get older I keep turning into those people I said I would never be. I even have opinions on strollers.

I am still learning how to work in an empty house. But now, instead of spending the day in the house trying to get some work done, we can spend the whole afternoon in the yaarrrrrr! (the Hebrew word for the woods) without feeling guilty. Thank G-d.

I told this neighbor that she can tell my daughter "Don't whine" and be understood.
She laughed. "I'd forgotten that word," she said. "The other kinderlach all understand 'Don't kvetch.'"

Kenneth Grahame on Cleaning for Pesach

Every Spring when I face the prospect of cleaning this apartment for Passover, the opening of Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows comes to mind:

THE Mole had been working very hard all the morning, spring-cleaning his little home. First with brooms, then with dusters; then on ladders and steps and chairs, with a brush and a pail of whitewash; till he had dust in his throat and eyes, and splashes of whitewash all over his black fur, and an aching back and weary arms. Spring was moving in the air above and in the earth below and around him, penetrating even his dark and lowly little house with its spirit of divine discontent and longing. It was small wonder, then, that he suddenly flung down his brush on the floor, said, "Bother!" and "O blow!" and also "Hang spring-cleaning!" and bolted out of the house without even waiting to put on his coat. Something up above was calling him imperiously, and he made for the steep little tunnel which answered in his case to the gravelled carriage-drive owned by animals whose residences are nearer to the sun and air. So he scraped and scratched and scrabbled and scrooged, and then he scrooged again and scrabbled and scratched and scraped, working busily with his little paws and muttering to himself, "Up we go! Up we go!" till at last, pop! his snout came out into the sunlight and he found himself rolling in the warm grass of a great meadow.


"This is fine!" he said to himself. "This is better than whitewashing!" The sunshine struck hot on his fur, soft breezes caressed his heated brow, and after the seclusion of the cellarage he had lived in so long the carol of happy birds fell on his dulled hearing almost like a shout. Jumping off all his four legs at once, in the joy of living and the delight of spring without its cleaning, he pursued his way across the meadow....

...but once we crack out the pails of suds and set to work, I take exception to Mole.

The first step to Springtime liberation is to finish the whitewashing -- not only to begin, but also to finish, and then we can toss the buckets in the air, yell Hang Whitewashing! and run out of Egypt. I have been thinking this over, and I believe spring-cleaning is a universal instinct, not to hamper us from getting out into the Spring, but as an integral part of how we participate in it. Spring has got to reach into every corner of this house; it is not enough to fling the brush on the floor and leave it.

Rebbe Nachman miBreslov says to take the troubling feeling of not having quite finished preparing for Pesach and turn it into a yearning for the Divine -- that this, too, is an integral part of Pesach -- nun bau dein Tempel schiere!

So, no fair quitting in the middle of whitewashing.

Only in Israel

Only in Israel can bringing your daughter to the fruit store without a hat on a lukewarm day convince the greengrocer (erroneously) that you are too impoverished to buy her one...
so that he slips extra carrots into your bag...
which you make into a salad for the downstairs neighbor...
who gathers together a basket of foodstuffs for the upstairs neighbor...
who knocks at your door to give you the cottage cheese...
which you feed to the child whose bare head so alarmed the grocer.

Thoughts on Sponja

An American friend of mine who lives in a small town in Israel once observed that "when we want recreation, we hop in the car and go somewhere."
"What about the people who can't afford to travel?" I asked.
"They do a lot of sponja," she said.

There is something oddly holiday-like about pouring water all over the floor - especially in a country where water use is so carefully measured - and chasing it around.
Sponja is what Israelis do instead of mopping or vaccuuming. There are also miniature, handheld squeegees for countertops.

I heard from Rav Lorencz shlit"a (the younger) that when Ben-Gurion landed in Israel, he was directed to a family in Tel Aviv (then a hill of sand). His hostess, an imposing, strong woman, served him tea, in what may well have been the only teacup in the house. He dropped the teacup, and it fell to the sand floor, breaking. He was terrified.
"Bring the sponjadorlo!" cried his hostess. Ben-Gurion thought sponjadorlo might be a dog or a weapon -- something suitable for punishing those who broke teacups.
The hostess's daughter brought a a sponja stick and began cleaning up. The hostess endeavored to engage the trembling Ben-Gurion in conversation.
"First, the sponjadorlo," he pleaded, anxious to have his punishment over with.
She pointed to the sponja stick her daughter was wielding, indicating that this was a sponjadorlo.
...the moral of the story being not to fear unnecessarily.