If you’re a doting husband who helps his wife clean for Pesach by standing over her and telling her what parts of what she’s doing are not halachically required (“What? Now she has less work to do!”) then perhaps at some point she’ll tell you to clean your sefarim shranks.
Silly woman. There’s barely any chametz on the sefarim shranks.
Even if you bring sefarim to the Shabbos table, the amount of chametz in them is negligible. There’s definitely not a k’zayis in there, and if there were, you would know it. Unless you’re using a slice of pizza as a bookmark.
“Oh, that’s from Avos Ubanim!”
And holding every sefer face down and ruffling through them and hoping gravity will do the work will not get everything out of the spine. The only way to be thorough is to open up to every page that you learned at the table that year, which is a nice chazarah and will keep you out of your wife’s hair for longer. Though speaking of hair, you’ll probably find more beard hairs than crumbs.
So a lot of cleaning sefarim shranks is about dust. All the dust in your house seeks out your sefarimshrank. Every sefer has dust that you have to blow off the top, but not right back onto your sefarim shrank. But you have a lot of sefarim to get through, so you pull out a sefer, turn your head, and blow; pull, turn, and blow. And no one wants to help you, because you keep taking out sefarim, turning to the side, and blowing dust on them.
And you have to dust in front of the sefarim.
That one’s on the kids. Your kids have a habit of pushing every sefer as far back as it goes, so that area in front of the sefarim can breed dust, and also a random collection of items that mostly belong to the kids.
It’s a constant war, with them pushing stuff back and then you pulling it forward so things look neater. And also so you can store a random collection of stuff behind the sefarim. Like the screw you found under the dining room table that looks like it came from a chair, but you don’t know which chair. You find it every year while you’re Pesach cleaning. It could be from your old set of chairs; you have no idea. You could flip your chairs over, but the dining room is not your department right now.
Other things you put back there include your Hoshanos cards, dreidels, graggers, and various simanimbooklets that all contradict each other. And if you really don’t want the kids to push things back, you can put a layer of sefarim behind the sefarim—perhaps sefarim you don’t use as often and want to have to go hunting for when you need them.
The kids, meanwhile, like storing things up front, in the dust. In my house, for example, we have folded pieces of paper, a shoehorn, various writing implements, the kids’ mail, and multiple half bottles of water that belong to no one. Also various Rubik’s cubes, and one puzzle toy that has a hundred wooden blocks stacked in a very specific way in a case that doesn’t stay closed, and if you bump it, it takes 10 minutes to put back together if you know what you’re doing. In case I enjoy doing a ten-minute puzzle several times as part of my Pesach cleaning.
You also want to figure out what sefarim you can clear out so you can fit more sefarim. Unless your wife is the type that says, “You’re getting more sefarim? You haven’t even finished the sefarim you have!” Like you do with her clothes.
But you have no room now for the sefarim you want to learn because of the sefarim that friends of your parents bought you when you were 13 because they didn’t know what you would be into. I bought my cousin aDarash Dovid for his bar mitzvah just because his name is David. I have no idea if he cares. It’s not like I’m obsessed with learning all the Mordechais.
And then there are all the duplicates. For example, we have way too many little Siddurim. Not to mention Tehillims. In my house, based on a count I just now did, I have 32 Tehillims. This includes the fact that most of our Siddurim have Tehillims, and all of our Nachs have Tehillim.
Oh, and the one super-tiny Tehillim that we’re never going to use because it’s too tiny. But everyone has one. Someone gets you a tiny Tehillim, and it’s adorable, but where do you put it? Do you have a tinier shelf? You’ll never find it, except once a year when you clean for Pesach. (“I’m saying Tehillim!”) What are you going to do; get rid of it? How much space is that going to save you?
I don’t think you’re supposed to put it on a bookshelf. I think you’re supposed to keep it in your pocket, so you can have some hashgacha pratis story wherein it stops a bullet.
And then every one of your kids has a Gemara for every masechta he’s ever learned. No one reuses each other’s Gemaras. Using someone else’s yeshiva Gemara is like using someone else’s pillow. Literally. Every rebbi tries to get the kids to punctuate their Gemaras, because they assume the kids know what punctuation is despite not paying attention when the teacher tries teaching it in the afternoons. And the next kid does not want to spend the year staring at his brother’s incorrect punctuation.
Plus, every yeshiva now requires that the bochurim bring in something called an “Oz Vehadar” Gemara, which has two amazing features:
1. All the meforshim the rebbi would ever speak out are in the back, and
2. You can fit maybe three of these side by side on a bookshelf.
So I have Oz Vehadars on top of every row of sefarim, and every single one is a duplicate, because there are only about ten masechtos that the yeshivas have heard of.
When I was growing up, my parents used to put their heaviest sefarim on the bottom shelves, and the babies always went for them. I think that’s why my little brothers are such huge talmidei chachamim.
My wife and I try to prevent that by having doors at the bottom of our bookcase. (I mean prevent the… you know what I mean.) The doors look like they’re supposed to add an aesthetic look to the bookcases, but they’re really so babies won’t play with whatever’s at the bottom. Which in our case, is mostly toys, except for one closet where it’s English sefarim. And all the Avner Gold books my wife brought into the marriage. Either way, the babies are supposed to know which identical closet has what.
In fact, I asked around, and for the most part, no one uses the doors to protect their more precious sefarim. They mostly put things in there they don’t want people seeing. Like whatever sefarim no longer have covers.
For example, JD uses it for what he calls “off-brand sefarim.” In his words, “Like if your rav made a chasunah and they were giving out some sefer that talks about Shavuos from his other son-in-law, and he made you take it.”
SN1 and FH put in seasonal items—Machzorim, Selichos, Haggados… A lot of people seem to put seasonal items in there, despite that they’re used more often than some of the other sefarim. It takes you 7 years to get through Shas, but the Sukkos Machzor you use every year is “seasonal.” I do keep a book on BirchasHachamah down there, though. I feel that’s seasonal enough.
RTD uses her closet for “regular sefarim, but it’s less organized than the others.”
JFJ agrees, saying, “Whatever’s put there, you can be sure it’s a disorganized mess.” Basically, every sefer is in there at a diagonal.
Basically, the only people being kept out by the doors are guests. Guests would never go behind the doors to get a sefer, because they’re not sure what’s going to fall out on them. Most likely a shower of Oz Vehadars.
In fact, you yourself are scared to go through what’s behind the doors, plus you’re going to have to sit cross-legged on the floor to get in there, and you’re never going to get up to get all the things you forgot before you sat down. It’s like—Hey, look at that! Your wife did 3 rooms in the time it took you to go through your sefarim shrank! Cleaning things that mostly weren’t even cham—wait a minute.
Mordechai Schmutter is a weekly humor columnist for Hamodia and is the author of seven books, published by Israel Book Shop. He also does freelance writing for hire. You can send questions, comments, or ideas to MSchmutter@gmail.com. Read more of Mordechai Schmutter’s articles at 5TJT.com.
