QUESTION: Should religious Jews be careful to have neat and clean homes?
ANSWER: Now pay attention to what I’m going to tell you now. This subject you must understand as follows – but don’t be prejudiced by what I’m going to tell you in the beginning. There was an Ilse Kuch. Ilse Kuch, y’mach sh’mah, was a famous Nazi woman. And in the concentration camps she used to walk around with a whip and she would beat the dying inmates. She was called The Beast of Buchenwald. If you want a picture of one of the lowest characters in history, that’s it. Now at her trial, there were Germans who spoke up for Ilse Kuch and defended her. And what did they say in her defense? They said that her kitchen is spotless! And I believe it; I’m sure it was. So, keep that in mind while I give you the answer now because that was the introduction to the answer.
Now, if you’re going to have a Jewish house, it means you’re going to have children. And if you have children, it means one, two, three, four, five, six; various ages. And in a house full of children, it’s not near impossible, it’s impossible to have a spic and span house. If you’re one of these women, one of these modern orthodox women who want to live a selfish life, so you’ll have one baby and then you’ll practice “spacing.” Until this baby is already an old man, and then you’ll have another one. So maybe that woman will succeed in having a nice clean house. But if you’re not doing any spacing, if you’re trying to raise a Jewish generation, it’s impossible to expect such a thing. It’s only in these castles of selfishness, where people live only for themselves, so the house is nice and clean – because there is nobody there to make it dirty. That’s number one.
A House of Love and Warmth
And the second thing is this. I was once in a Jewish house in Boro Park. And it was a house of love and warmth. Any wayfarer who would knock on the door at night and say, “I have no place to sleep,” they wouldn’t ask any questions. “Come in, there’s place here to sleep.” Now, if you have a fancy home, so you’ll think, “Maybe this man is filthy; maybe he’s a bearer of bedbugs.” How can you let him sleep on your nice bed? You’ll let him into your bathroom?! He’ll contaminate your nice toilet seat. It’s hard for a nice ba’al habus to let a stranger into his fancy and clean home. So, he says, “Go someplace else; go to the rabbi. Go to this one or go to that one.” He sends him away to the rabbi.
And now, a third thing; something else. If you’re poor, if you don’t invest a lot of money into your house, it’s going to be shabby. Now, don’t tell me this fairy tale, ‘poor but clean.’ A shabby house is shabby! The linoleum is worn through! And if the linoleum is worn through and there’s a big hole in the linoleum, don’t tell me that you get down on your knees three times a day and scrub out the hole. Dust accumulates in that hole and that’s it. There’s a nail sticking out where the linoleum used to be. It’s impossible!
The House of Rav Aharon Kotler
I once walked into the house of Rav Aharon Kotler, zichrono l’vracha. Now, I’m not an expert on a neat house, so I’m not judging its neatness. But it was a poor house, a very poor house. And because of that, Rav Aaron rose in my eyes all the way up. I saw that he didn’t take the money from the Yeshiva and spend it on expensive things. He lived poorly. He lived very poorly. He gave the money to the boys in the Yeshiva who were hungry. There were poor boys who needed it. So, if you want to have a spic and span home, that means that you’ll invest in this world instead of the next world. Instead of charity, you’re buying things for yourself, for the house, expensive things. Don’t bother telling me fairy tales. It means expensive! It means investing a lot of money, besides for investing a lot of time.
So along came some goy with a new Torah that cleanliness is next to you know what. And the Jews swallow this bait and they repeat the same thing. You know, people who say “Cleanliness is next to G-dliness” they are the people who hold that G-dliness is meaningless. It’s a hundred percent rule. And so, there are different ways of looking at this subject. But one thing is certain; if you have a lot of children spilling out all over the place, and you have a guest sprawled on the sofa, and you’re trying with a broom and a brush to do the best that you can, so your house is the neatest and cleanest house that could be.
Excerpted from a recent email of Toras Avigdor based on Rabbi Avigdor Miller’s Tape #132 from his classic Thursday night lectures.
