Does a Laundry Room Need a Mezuzah?
March 5th, 2008 . by AaronI get this question all of the time. The answer is that it depends on how you use your laundry room. If it is a pretty tidy room which has a washer and dryer, then you would put a Mezuzah.
If your laundry room is generally piled up with loads of dirty, smelly laundry. Then you would not put a Mezuzah. This is because it would be considered disrespectful to put a Mezuzah there. The same law applies to a bathroom.
Of course, we are assuming that your laundry room has the minimum 36 square feet that any room needs to be obligated in a Mezuzah. We are also assuming that the laundry room has some sort of door frame. If it doesn’t meet both of these requirements, it is not obligated no matter how immaculate it might be.
Let us say that a laundry room appears to require a mezuzah on account of its square footage and door frame, but there still remains the issue of the unpleasantness of the dirty and, perhaps, smelly laundry that routinely takes up space in the area. Since the recurring responsibility of someone visiting the laundry room is to continually restore the environment, by transforming all that nasty laundry back into clean, healthful, and fresh-smelling laundry, should the necessarily positive, though transitory, outcome for the laundry room and its contents overrule the unfavorable, though similarly transitory, conditions that usually precede the good results?
That is an interesting, almost mystical take on the whole matter. I would love to agree with you, and in that way be able to view the whole issue as a sort of moral thing.
However the issue here, essentially, is whether you use your laundry room as a place to do laundry, or you also use it as a storage place for dirty laundry.
Actually, I did not mean to suggest that I have taken a position on this issue. But, working with your narrowing of the issue, I should say that a laundry room is definitely “a place to do laundry”–and it is also a place where unlaundered laundry has to be expected to accumulate to some extent. Realistically, the implied notion of an immaculate laundry room is just a wishful homemaker’s fantasy. However, in the real world of imperfect and inhospitable laundry rooms (and other small utility rooms), is there some documented and creditable formula for determining objectively just where to draw the fine “clothesline” between the decision to affix a mezuzah and the decision not to affix one?
I have just bought a mezuzah, but I think I have no right to affix it to one of my doorposts, for I am not Jewish. I believe in the Jewish rabbi Jesus, who was a real Jew and certainly has used the mezuzah in the proper way. What am I allowed to do with it?
I am a woman of 75 years old and was in a Japanese concentration camp. After the war I came back in Holland.