Shabbat Sermon: How Do We Keep Clean and Pristine Things, Clean and Pristine? with Rabbi Wes Gardenswartz

I have a question for you this morning. How do we keep clean and pristine things clean and pristine?

Imagine that in your home, in your living room, you have a sofa. The sofa is clean and pristine. The sofa is white. How do you keep your white sofa white? How do you think about inviting a family for dinner that has, say, a four-child old child? Let’s further stipulate that that four-year old child loves chocolate and has chocolaty fingers. How do you think about the prospect of those chocolaty fingers encountering your formerly clean and pristine white sofa?

This is not only a practical question. It is also very much a philosophical question. How we think about keeping the white sofa white is prismatic of how we live our lives, and how we think about mess in our lives. There are basically two schools of thought.