Dirty laundry needs to be washed sooner or later. You
can dump the dirty clothes into a huge vat to postpone the unpleasant moment
when you have to wash that huge pile. The problem is that over time the dirt
penetrates deeper into the fabric, and it becomes harder to rub it off. You may
have to boil the laundry, burn your fingers and rub skin off your palms, and
rub, rub, rub it as hard as you can… Many days, many years. Imagine how many
dirty shirts can one accumulate in her lifetime? Alternatively, you can do the
laundry as soon as your clothes become dirty. While the spots are still new,
you can wash them away with water. Other spots will require soap. The deepest
blemishes will require caustic alkali, which irritates your eyes. Every
laundress will tell you that grease and blood are the most difficult kinds of
dirt to wash. Our sins and bad actions are our dirty laundry, and each of us is
his own laundress. We have a unique opportunity — great in some ways and bitter
in other ways — not to accumulate our sins throughout our entire lives, until
the very last moment when our actions will be judged, but to start compensating
for them during our earthly lives, i.e., during the time when it is still
possible to change something. It is a proper and reasonable way to go, so we
shouldn’t be surprised when each white stripe in our lives is followed by a
black one: imagine what blackness would await us after absolute whiteness?
Translated by
The Catalog of Good Deeds
CONVERSATION