Finding a Home

The other day, I saw a member of our congregation whose mother passed away recently.  I asked him how he was doing, and he told me he’d been cleaning out his mother’s apartment.  This was not the home where he grew up, but nevertheless the process of cleaning it out brought back many memories from his earlier years.

That conversation, as well as a book I reread recently, got me thinking about the concept of home. 

What exactly is a home?  How do we define it?  What is the essence of a home?  How many homes does a person have, over the course of a lifetime or perhaps even at the same time?

We may think of the home where we grew up as a place of stability and strength or as a place of conflict and uncertainty.  Or, as my Israel uncle Elimelech would say, gam ze v’gam ze.  All of the above.

Keeping It Lit

In Jerusalem there’s a special zoo which contains animals mentioned in the Bible.  There’s a story told about a particular cage in the zoo which illustrates the verse, “and the wolf shall lie down with the lamb.”  (Isaiah 11:6) The purpose of the verse is to illustrates the end of days, when peace will reign even in the animal kingdom.  So the cage featured a wolf and a lamb, getting along splendidly.

A visitor was standing in front of the cage with his small children.  Noticed that the lamb is hanging out, looking content.  And the wolf is hanging out, looking content.  He saw one of the zookeepers and said, “I understand the verse, but we’re not living in the end of days.  How do you get the wolf and the lamb to hang out so peacefully in real life?”  The zookeeper said, “It’s very simple.  Every morning we put in a new lamb.”  

The joke is kind of edgy.  But it connects, in my mind, to a point the Torah makes, much more positively, about vigilance.