Welcome to my laundry room, where laundry happens… every day. It has to, or else I would simply drown in the task. Every morning, I throw in a load of darks and a load of whites and forget about both until the moment my brain starts begging for a distraction after a loooong stretch of brain-spinning work. (A really long stretch. Sometimes even as long as fifteen minutes!)

Laundry is a cunning way to escape work, because your yearned-for break is clad in a guise of productivity. Plus, it gets done. Win-win.

I guess I was growing a little smug with my I’ve-got-this attitude, because one nice day, somebody dared touch my holy laundry system.

That somebody was Ezra Hasofer.

Ezra Hasofer, I learned, had imposed a takanah that women should not wash laundry on Friday. I’d never known about this. The moment I learned this, I immediately assumed that the takanah is irrelevant in our days. He was talking to people who went to the river to wash laundry. He wasn’t referring to our generation, a generation that throws in a load while talking on the phone, a generation that presses a button and then complains about the folding.

All I needed to do now was confirm my assumption with a dayan.

Except the dayan wasn’t as dismissive as I expected him to be. “It’s actually a pretty serious takanah. Women should not wash laundry on Friday, even in today’s day.”

What? What? He couldn’t really mean that!

“So…” I spluttered. “I’m really not allowed to do laundry on Friday?”

“No. Unless…”

Oooh, he said unless! I listened attentively.

“Unless you have cleaning help on Friday. The reason behind this takanah is that women shouldn’t be distracted from cooking and cleaning for Shabbos, but if you take help, it clears your time, and then it’s okay to do laundry.”

Pheeeeeew.

Yes, I took cleaning help on Friday. Yes, I could continue to wash my dear laundry.

And that’s what I did. Happily and rigidly. For about a year, until my cleaning help quit on me.

And I couldn’t find new help for Friday.

Welcome back, takanah from Ezra Hasofer.

I begged my husband to research this. “If my cleaning help does all the work on Thursday and I’m not busy cleaning on Friday, isn’t it the same idea?”

Turned out, no. All the sources my husband found arrived at the same conclusion. It seemed it would take a talmid chacham of equal caliber to Ezra Hasofer to break the takanah for our dor. And since no such person has revealed himself, the takanah remains in effect.

You know where that left me? With a system breach. If I couldn’t do laundry on Friday, I would face a mountain of laundry after Shabbos. Every week.

I felt like a loser in a game of Jenga. There I was, with a tower of neatly stacked bricks, and now I was forced to remove one block — an entire day of laundry.

My tower was going to topple.

That first Friday, I stared at the two piles of unwashed laundry — darks and whites — with a strange mix of feelings.

Frustration. I mean, come on. You know how easy it is to wash those two loads?

Disbelief. How did this restriction show up in my life out of the blue?

And then, very faintly… pride.

“I feel like a baalas teshuvah,” I reflected to a friend. “Is this how someone feels when they take on new mitzvos?”

I’ve always been in awe of people who turned around their lives to experience the truth of Torah. I’ve marveled at their courage. Imagine what it must be like to take on one restriction and another and yet another. To start keeping Shabbos. Kashrus. Tzniyus. How impossibly difficult it must be.

My tiny new restriction is nothing compared with the lifestyle changes a person new to Yiddishkeit makes. It barely requires any restraint. It’s not an issue of giving up the glitz, pleasures, or conveniences. And look how hard it is. Look how it throws me off-balance.

I’m still hoping to find cleaning help for Friday morning. I do wish I can get my important laundry day back.

But until then, call me whatever you choose, but I’ll take pride in my little sacrifice.

(Originally featured in Family First, Issue 976)