*Making the Bed | Maya Tevet Dayan | 6 Minutes on Friday | December 12, 2025*
I spent the entire week in bed with the flu. At first I collapsed into a terrible weakness, a kind I had never known. I slept all day and thought that would be the end of it, but then the fever came, and pain in my back, my neck, my arm, and after a few days - my throat, and then I began to cough and lost my voice. When it became clear it wasn’t passing, I canceled the first gathering of the Inspiration Season and told hundreds of people we would begin a week later, and I didn’t make it to my event in the Upper Galilee either. I lay in bed silent, coughing, lowering the fever around the clock. At some point the congestion arrived, and the tears in my eyes, which were from the cold but not only from that. Whenever I am sick in bed, more than any of the other aches, the orphanhood starts to hurt in every part of me.
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How much I needed my mother this week. To tell me everything would be alright. That it’s just congestion. Just a cough. Just a throat. It will be alright. And I needed her to remind me to eat soup. To take vitamins. And most of all, I needed her to say, get out of bed for a moment and I’ll make it for you. I always stood there in my room shivering with cold and she would make the bed as fast as she could, until I crawled back into a fresh bed and it was worth everything. I think that act alone healed me.
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So on the fifth day of the illness this week, I told myself Maya, get out of bed, I’ll make it for you. And I really did get out of bed. I stood there trembling a little in the room from weakness and fever. But I didn’t have the strength to strip the sheets, let alone put on new ones. Then the door opened and my daughter walked in and said what’s going on mom, why are you standing here. And I whispered without a voice, nothing, I’m just changing the bedding, and she said move, I’ll make it for you. She said it exactly the way my mother used to say it. “I’ll make it for you.” Then she climbed onto the bed, made a hundred movements in every direction, and within four minutes, I swear, the bed was fresh and crisp and clean, and my daughter said alright, go lie back down.
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I had no voice so I couldn’t tell her all the gratitude I felt for her at that moment. Or explain that for a second, my mother paid me a quick visit through her. And now I think that was the moment I began to get better.
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I lay there, in my clean bed, and remembered how my grandmother used to starch all the linens, and the sheets had a particular scent and were even slightly crisp, a little like thin crackers under the skin. And how her mother, my great grandmother, would place three blankets one over the other: a thick one, and above it a medium one, and on top a thin one she had brought with her from Russia. And when you lay beneath all three blankets it was as if you entered another world.
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And I remembered how I changed sheets every week with my grandmother at the kibbutz, when she already struggled to do it alone. From her I learned how to tuck the corners of the sheet under the mattress, as if you are wrapping yourself a weekly gift. How to arrange the pillows, how to spread and fold the edge of the blanket. Years in which my grandmother repeated the same instructions again and again and again. Not because I didn’t understand. She repeated them the way you repeat an oral teaching, because it mattered.
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I grew up in a family where beds were small sanctuaries. Sleep was important and protected. And with it the bed, the bedding, and the rituals of making the bed. After I gave birth, my mother used to come every morning, all the way to Tel Aviv, to stretch the sheet tight and smooth the blankets. So that I and my babies could begin the day. But when I gave birth to my third daughter in Canada, I no longer had a mother. Twice a week, as is customary there, a public health nurse came to the house. She came to weigh the baby and take my blood pressure. When she saw I didn’t have a mother of my own beside me, she offered, shall I make the bed for you. And suddenly, the foreign place wasn’t foreign. It was home.
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What is this power that beds have? When I asked on Facebook this week, I learned that not everyone makes the bed at all. Some explained that it’s important not to make it in order to air out the dust mites that collect there. Others, very much like me, wrote that a made bed for them is the beginning of a calm and ordered day. For ordered thoughts. I learned that some fold the blanket, some roll it, some have eight pillows and some have two, some have all white linens, and many for whom the bed is a lineage, a tradition.
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But mostly, after reading hundreds of comments, I thought with sadness about how making the bed never made it into poetry or literature because we were taught it’s a marginal subject for women’s magazines or shopping. But in many homes the bed is a ritual, and memories, and power. And perhaps only because women are the ones who usually make the beds, beds are not considered a worthy story, just like the kitchen, or menstruation, or any domain marked as “feminine.”
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Anat sent me this week Admiral William McRaven’s book from the US Navy, which lays out ten principles for handling hardship in life, and is titled “Make Your Bed.” It has the famous sentence “If you want to change the world, start by making your bed.” He explains that this way you begin the day with a task you completed fully.
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Well, bed making in the army is already something masculine. It’s a field bed. It is connected to orders, even to security. And changing the world is no small thing. No wonder it is worthy of a book. But I think of my grandmother. How every morning she stripped the sheet and the blankets and carried them in a tall stack above her head out to the balcony, where she spread them for a few hours to air out, the sheets puffing in the warm breeze through the windows, before she stacked them again, carried them back inside in the same tall stack, and stretched them over the mattress for the night.
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She wasn’t a soldier for anyone. She didn’t aim to change the world. She was a secular Tel Aviv grandmother, 1.47 meters tall, who made one bed for eighty eight years. It passed to my mother. It passed to me. It passed to my daughters. We care for each other through this bed. And we care for ourselves so that we can care for others. We heal in it but also try to heal through it. Our movements are small. Who knows how many generations before us made their beds in this way. Our movements are small. But what a great act it is to make a bed.
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Wishing us all a Shabbat Shalom,
and beds that are made, soft, crisp, and comforting.
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*Maya Tevet Dayan*