Let cleaning be the worst of your problems - opinion

I always dreaded the coming of Purim when the children were small. So did The Wife.

But we dreaded it for different reasons.

The Wife dreaded it because she had to deal with all the kids’ costumes and figure out which day they were supposed to wear them to school. Costume day was never, of course, on Purim itself, which was a vacation day, often – somewhat inexplicably – a multi-day vacation from school.

But if Purim landed on Shabbat or Sunday, as happened this year, everything moved back and forth, and it was just impossible – as new immigrants – to keep track. We feared we’d send little Yankel to school as Mickey Mouse on the wrong day, holding him up to ridicule in front of his peers and scarring him for life.

The Wife also dreaded Purim because it meant having to prepare all the mishloah manot, which fell directly into her lap in our household’s division of Jewish holiday labor chores. That division went roughly like this: I set up the candles each night on Hanukkah, cleaned the hanukkiah at the end of the holiday, and put up the sukkah; she essentially did everything else.

Except for Passover cleaning. We shared Passover cleaning, which explains why I dreaded Purim. In our house, the day after Purim was the opening bell for Passover cleaning.

The arrival of Purim is a telltale sign that Passover is only 30 days away, which means you’d better get moving on cleaning the house. My father taught me that big chores are always more manageable when divided into small bites, and I internalized that life lesson. When Purim hits, we divide the housecleaning into 30 days – we call it 30 days of bleach and tension.

That was when the kids were younger, and we were less wise. Back then, we went crazy cleaning for Passover, not content just to scrub the oven, wash out the refrigerator, and clear all the cupboards of hametz.

Back then, we went around the house with a fine-tooth comb, closet by closet, drawer by drawer. The kids ate in every room in the apartment, so who knew where breadcrumbs could be scattered? We sought elusive crumbs among the toys and the kids’ books, in their sock drawers, and underneath their mattresses.

It was a tremendous job, and it began the day after Purim.

Time is the best teacher

WITH TIME, however, we’ve mellowed. One reason for this mellowness is simply that the kids have grown, moved out of the house, and stopped leaving cake crumbs in the clothes hamper.

Another reason, however, is that, with time, we have learned to differentiate between Passover and spring cleaning. Passover cleaning is meant to remove all the leavened products from the home and make the kitchen kosher for Passover; spring cleaning is to give the house a complete once-over.

The two are not the same. It took me more than three decades to realize that cleaning the tiles in the shower has nothing to do with the Exodus from Egypt, and going through the stationary drawer is not connected to removing leavened bread from one’s domain. In the past, both The Wife and I conflated the two, to our detriment. Now, we do so much less.

I can clean the windows after Passover – in any event, every year there is generally a sharav (chamsin) accompanied by a sandstorm right around the Seder, which pretty much nullifies any window-cleaning benefit. That sandstorm often nullifies something else we, and much of Israel, do right before Passover: clean the car.

The script is predictable: We procrastinate until the last week before Passover to get the car washed, forgetting that most of the rest of this country’s Jews are in the same situation. We then wait impatiently in a long line, overpay to have the car scrubbed inside and out, and then bring it home, only to have the sharav and sandstorm originating in Saudi Arabia render it all meaningless.

Except it isn’t all meaningless because even if the outside of the car is filthy, with a layer of Saudi sand blanketing the roof, the inside of the car remains crumb-free for Passover. All this underlines the fact that spring cleaning and Passover cleaning are not the same.

TRUTH BE told, over the years I’ve also become mellower about spring cleaning. So much so that this year I will not spend hours rearranging my closet, moving winter clothes – sweaters, sweatshirts, flannel shirts, and the like – to upper shelves and bringing the short-sleeved summer shirts down to where they can be reached.

I always found this chore cumbersome and envied those with a closet big enough for all seasons. This was a biannual exercise, once in the spring, before Passover, to bring down the summer clothes, and once in the autumn, right after Simchat Torah, to switch the summer clothes with the winter wear.

This year, however, the war – which began on Simchat Torah – changed all that. It made me realize it was all unnecessary. With no patience, energy, or desire to do anything after Oct. 7 beyond worry about my kids and the state of the nation, I let this ritual fall by the wayside. I just made do this winter with the summer clothes I never moved from the closet and a couple of long-sleeved shirts within reach.

And it worked. This year, for the first time, I got by without spending hours moving clothes. Of course, it meant wearing the same few shirts all winter, since the rest remained tucked away on an upper shelf where I stored them the year before.

Were my kids still living at home, I couldn’t get away with this, as they would complain that it was embarrassing that I always wore the same shirts. But not The Wife – she could care less, one of the secrets of our compatibility.

“Our life is frittered away by detail,” Henry David Thoreau wrote in his memoir Walden. “Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million, count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb nail.... Simplify, simplify!”

Those words, which I remember reading in college, have unexpectedly come back to me now. Who would have thought that it would be within the context of closets... and Passover cleaning? 