JWOW

jewish women of wisdom

Up from Upkeep

By Rebbetzin Faigie Horowitz, MS

The joy of maintenance is an intermittent one.

Or shall I say the appreciation of maintenance? Joy has become an important word, especially in terms of required chores. Even if Marie Kondo left the word out of her first groundbreaking book on minimalist housekeeping, the presence of joy in an experience has become a contemporary criterion. If an item doesn’t give you joy, she says, get rid of it. Spark Joy is her second one. If a job doesn’t give you joy and you don’t feel passionate about it, the current wisdom says pivot, to use an even more up-to-the-minute word. Change things that don’t give you joy is the message.

I disagree with the importance of joy. Joy is not a value in my book. It’s a bonus. It’s like the misplaced worship of self-care. Both are means to an end. They are not goals unto themselves. They have value when they help us accomplish. Joy is a natural outcome of sustained, focused effort. Americans may have the right to pursuit of happiness but I don’t think this is the mark of a thinking adult, let alone a believing Jew.

Home maintenance and self-maintenance are repetitive and regular. You are never finished with them once and for all. They do not bear omission. If we don’t clean, do laundry, empty the trash, organize, pay taxes, water our lawns, etc. there are consequences to our comfort as well as appearance. The same is true of skin, teeth, clothing, physical health and hair. They all require regular attention.

When we were younger, maintenance tasks stood in the way of what we really want to do with our time. There was so much we wanted to do and needed to accomplish. We want to move ahead in our careers, spend relaxing time with our families, devote time to interests, and experience new things.

The duties of upkeep are definitely annoying because we don’t enjoy them. They are adult chores that we do. A lot of today’s so-called hacks are things we figured out in our effort to streamline the unpleasant stuff and get to the stuff we liked. You can’t hack them all, we learned. Some can’t be delegated. You just have to go through them. You cannot get around responsibilities for maintenance.

As family life slowed down when the kids left home, we got on with things. There was quiet and fewer demands on our time and pocketbooks. There was more time to think about them. Some chores that got neglected during the busy years got more attention. For some, we established new routines that met our changed lives. We outsourced some, upscaled others. We figured out what and how things worked best for us and didn’t kvetch. We developed routines to do dry cleaning drop-offs, when to schedule annual medical checkups, handle invitations and correspondence, and deal with grooming, shopping, and exercise systemically. That’s what adults do.

In the New York Times bestselling book Make Your Bed, retired Admiral William H. McRaven talks about the values he acquired in his military career. He starts off with the importance of this eponymous chore. He says if you want to change the world, start off by making your bed. Navy SEAL discipline required perfect hospital corners with a blanket pulled so tautly that a coin bounced on it. This routine not only taught him self mastery and orderliness, but became a source of comfort and control when he was injured or depressed. An accomplishment be it as minor as making one’s bed can motivate you. A structured regular activity in the morning signals that you can accomplish something and be proud even when you cannot accomplish your big goal such as winning the battle during the day. McRaven does acknowledge the support of faith for soldiers in combat and people in crisis, but he tells us to value the simple acts of disciplined maintenance.

Rebbetzin Rochel Sorotzkin’s legendary example is one that is closer to home even if it is further back in time. It happened in 1940, just after she and her new husband, Harav Boruch Sorotzkin, zt”l, fled their native Telshe to Siberia when the German invasion of Lithuania occurred. Her father, the Telsher Rav and Rosh yeshiva Harav Avrohom Yitzchok Bloch, who later perished, together with all the townspeople and his yeshiva students after instructing the

town’s Jewish populace about how die al kiddush Hashem, similarly prepared her for the journey.

Act normal, he told the kallah who left home during sheva brachos. Establish routines, he instructed her during their final goodbyes. And so, she did. She served her husband their meager food on a nice tablecloth with cutlery on the trans-Siberian railroad, day after day. Despite her fear and the jeering comments by the fellow refugees, she kept it up in between her husband’s learning sessions. This lesson of structure during uncertainty served her well throughout their war years in Kobe and Shanghai and the rebuilding years that followed in Cleveland.

During our COVID quarantines, without structure and away from the pressures of outside performance, we all struggled with fear, uncertainty, and lack of motivation. For many of us midlifers, keeping to our routines became a source of joy. We all did a lot of housekeeping and a lot more physical work for months before we let our help back in the house. We had the luxury of letting go in certain areas because we were confined. But most of us took pleasure, and yes, joy, in accomplishing the maintenance routines. We took care of our wigs, handled our paperwork, and whatever we could do under the circumstances. And we did even more maintenance than the regular duties: a lot of organizing, decluttering, and closet editing. The discipline of maintenance helped us through the crisis.

I can’t say that I love doing these

Americans may have the right to pursuit of happiness but I don’t think this is the mark of a thinking adult, let alone a believing Jew.

tasks, even now after so many decades of adulthood. But accomplishing them gave me sense of motivation and mastery of the situation. I can do it, as the Sesame Street book reinforced the toddlers’ sense of skill. I can keep to my maintenance routines even when I can get away without doing many of them.

The young mothers got the gold stars during corona. They homeschooled. They worked. They kept house. They cooked and entertained antsy young ones in constricted quarters.

We midlifers can also take pride in our accomplishments during this stressful season. We managed uncertainty, stuck to our confinement months after our adult children, and upped our tech skills. We persevered at our maintenance routines and took joy from our resilience. We made our beds.

Take that, Marie Kondo! It’s not magical. It’s work and you gotta earn that magic. And we did it!

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