At first I used to go to Hila on Wednesdays. When I came each week to help her with her homework, as part of a university project, her older sisters were always washing the floor, doing sponja. I suggested perhaps that we changed the day if it was not convenient, but they just laughed and said it was fine.

They were always finished in no time anyway. One minute all the living room furniture was up on the sofa and the floor was wet, and the next, everything was in its place, as if it had never happened.

Then we switched to Monday for some reason. I thought it would be easier now, but Hila's sisters seemed to have switched sponja day along with me. Still the same ritual, furniture up on the sofa, the rubber magav with the wet rag thrown over it whipped round the floor faster than I could see, and then, in an eyewink, everything back in place.

It was only when we switched day for the third time that I realized that these young teenagers were washing the floor every day. I was fascinated that there were more differences between us than my fair skin and their exotic Bukharan eyes. And I was more than a little ashamed.

I had never done sponja in my childhood home, not even once, before moving into my rented student flat the year before. I had hardly even washed the floors in the army, because the kibbutznik girls had laughed at my efforts, and had usually just grabbed the magav off me, and finished in a third of the time.

Eventually my boyfriend had taught me how to do it. He was a sponja wizard. Born in Morocco, he had six brothers and no sisters, "So we boys take turns," he explained, "helping my mum and my grandma." But for all his lessons I was no good at it. It always took me hours, and I hated every minute.

It had always been a matter of pride for my mother, a daughter of the industrial North of England, that she didn't have to wash her own floors, that she could afford someone to do it for her. But I felt useless.

Now that I was living in my own place, I had no choice. My flat-mate and I had agreed that we would alternate weeks cleaning the communal parts of our little home, but I often forgot to clean my own room.

If I was amazed that Hila's sisters washed the floor every day, imagine my perplexity when my friend Shuli explained to me that what I had encountered was not actually seen as cleaning. No, the really cleaning was done on Thursday evening or Friday morning, in preparation for Shabbat, the Sabbath. Buckets of water would then be poured throughout the flat, to be pulled out with the magav. A home was not regarded clean enough to welcome the Shabbat otherwise.

Talk about overkill, I thought. I knew I was a hopeless case, there was no secret there, but my mother had always kept our home spotless. I had actually regarded her as obsessive. Little had I known that she could hardly qualify without a daily sponja.

"What must you think of me, not washing the floor every day?" I said to Shuli, jokingly. I was too embarrassed to tell her that I sometimes didn't even wash the floor in my room once a week. She just laughed. The daughter of Jews of Algerian origin from a development town down south, she was working her way through university cleaning people's homes.

She claimed she had seen everything. Every single person she had worked for had had completely different ideas about cleaning. "You’d be surprised," She said, "It isn't necessarily a matter of the differences between Jews originating in Western countries and Jews originating in Arab and Muslim countries, or between kibbutzniks and townies, for that matter. People are different, that's all."

I think she was just being kind.