In the wake of Oct. 7, 2023, many Israelis felt abandoned by their government. Facing an absence of leadership, volunteer operations popped up to help victims recover. People from around the country stepped in to help with agricultural work and gathered donations for 130,000 internally displaced people.
At first, I felt immobilized by the stress and agony of the unfolding war.
Then I saw a Facebook post calling for volunteers to clean people’s homes in the kibbutzim that had been invaded by Hamas on Oct. 7. I signed up immediately. This, I thought, was something I could do. Something concrete, useful.
Somehow, in a world that made increasingly less sense, the straightforwardness of cleaning felt like a balm. The basic fact of it — you clean and it’s changed, you clean and it’s restored — felt like a miracle.
All through my childhood, my mother cleaned. Early morning, I’d wake up to the sounds of her moving furniture, wheeling appliances, hoisting up chairs, the scent of bleach stinging my nostrils. Our house in a small suburb east of Tel Aviv was pristine. Laundry was folded promptly. Shelves and surfaces were free of dust, the sink clear of dishes.
As a teen, I didn’t understand my mother’s need to clean or why she took such pride in it. I thought of myself as sophisticated for not caring about something so mundane.
When I mentioned my mother’s penchant for cleaning to new friends, they nodded. Everyone in Israel knew Yemeni women cleaned. It was one of the less offensive stereotypes about us. But also, it was grounded in fact: As early as the late 19th century, when the first Yemeni migration arrived in Palestine, women were encouraged to fill the role of cleaners by the European-led Zionist movement. The Yemenite Jews were “born laborers,” David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, once said.
