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Loving Your Launderer: A Yom Kippur Analogy

        Rabbi Hillel L. Yarmove

Owing to the work that I try to accomplish from time to time in Eretz Yisrael, I view myself as a temporary resident of the neighborhood of Zichron Moshe (in the Geulah district) as well as  that of Mekor Baruch which abuts it. I have come to love these shechunot of holiness and their down-to-earth denizens, people who — if they are doing so at all — are barely making it. From these not-so-simple people I have learned so many lessons about the pricelessness of every poshiter Yid. And for that I am grateful beyond words!

Such being the case, I really should not have been surprised that the laundromat that I visited to wash my own soiled garments would provide me with a Yomim Nora’im lesson. But just as with every seemingly inconsequential object or event in the Holy Land, there is always an underlying current of mussar and self-instruction of which to become aware. Accordingly, a machbeisah — a laundry — would prove to be no exception.

Machbeisat Tip Top is that laundry—and the lesson that I learned therein has nothing to do with the brand of detergent which I had poured into its washing machines. My head still reels when I contemplate the great depth of that lesson.

Well then, exactly what is that lesson? And why is it so pertinent at this oh-so-very-crucial season?

Located at the top of Mekor Baruch, at 39 David Yelen Street, the Tip Top Laundromat is basically anything but prepossessing. It is even less so after you enter it, exhausted from shlepping your heavy load of dirty clothes behind you. However, what rivets your attention has indeed nothing at all to do with the washing and drying machines that fill the place.

No, it’s the love notes left attached to one of the dryers and to one of the walls! These are notes of gratitude to the Tip Top Laundry for being there when weary tourists had almost given up hope as to how they would ever wear their “sparkling raiment” again. Most of the notes were obviously written by sincere wayfarers who realized that Tip Top was their last hope at becoming clean and pristine once more. For others, it was the special touch of home that they needed to experience in what was for them a strange country (chaval!). 

And for all this, these “foreigners” were so terribly grateful. But more than that: I felt certain  that the possibility they would themselves become cleaner through a visit to the Tip Top Laundromat actually provided them with adequate justification for the composition of a heartfelt love note left to proclaim to all the world the magnificence of a launderer of this magnitude. 

Sound vaguely familiar? It should: “. . . t’chabseini umisheleg albin”: “. . . launder me, [Hashem,] and I shall become whiter than snow” (Tehillim 51:9). The Divine Launderer is always there to assist us, to help us prepare to remove the soil and the shmutz from our very essence.

Nu, where are our love notes? We owe the Eibishter everything, not the least for the immaculate job that He does on us to remove even the smallest spot from our neshamos.

So maybe at this time of year, we ought to get busy composing our very own love notes to the Cleanser of Klal Yisrael. For His purification of our souls is simply like no other. 

Indeed, it really is Tip Top!

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A kesivah vachasimah tova,  dear readers! I may be reached at hillyarm@yeshivanet.com.