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.

The performer, Carole King, wrote and sang a song that I come back to from time to time.  I sang it a lot when I was studying in England for a year.  It begins, sometimes I wonder if I’m ever gonna make it home again.  It’s so far and out of sight.

One thing I can say with some assurance is that home is something we often yearn for and we can’t necessarily figure out why.

We may yearn for it even as we’re living in a home – as a child in our parents’ home, as a young adult creating a home, as an older adult transitioning from one home to another – we may still yearn for home because the yearning isn’t necessarily rational and it’s not always about the physical space that we inhabit.

The book I reread is called A Pigeon and a Boy, written by Meir Shalev.  I had the pleasure of discussing it with a book group recently. 

It’s a beautifully written book which explores the notion of home.  The main characters leave homes and build homes.  The foundational dramatic moment of the book involves a homing pigeon.  Pigeons, as we know, were used to deliver messages, especially during wartime, because they could be trained to fly home from wherever they happened to be. 

I won’t give away the ending of the book, but I will say that the author suggests that while we yearn for the warmth and stability of home, we never quite get there for a variety of reasons.  One, we each have more than one home – no one place is fully satisfactory.  And two, reality is constantly shifting.

The narrator, who is building a house that his mother wanted him to build, shares the following thought with her:

"This was your house, breathing around you, expanding, teeming, contracting, enwrapping.  The ground, which here is not corseted with cement and straitjacketed with asphalt, shifts in a slow, never-ending dance, while we – the houses, the trees, the people, the animals – are carried about in its arms, moving on its thin outer crust."  (A Pigeon and a Boy, p. 179)

The book, which I highly recommend, explores the parameters and the limitations of the notion of home.  Each one of us searches for a sense of home, of completeness and belonging – each one of us recognizes that we are never completely at home because, after all, home shifts and we are all, for many reasons, moving about on a shaky foundation.

So in the story, as in our lives, emotional connection is sought, achieved, and then questioned; stability is sought, achieved, and then overturned as we all move about on a very thin crust.

Show me a human being who is constant in his or her stability and I’ll show you an awesome actor. 

Home is sought, built, enlarged, abandoned, remodeled, replaced.

The author of the book, working through the narrator, seems to suggest ultimately that home is where we are, it’s what we create, where we relate to each other.  When the narrator inaugurates his new home, it’s not the walls that make it a home, it’s the person he’s with and the energy between them. 

We think of a home as something stationery.  But in some sense, paradoxically, home travels with us.  It’s within us, it’s between us.

We’ve all been anxiously following news about the conversations between Israel and the United States regarding reactions to the nuclear threat that Iran imposes.  Of course, Israelis are anxious about the threat.  As Rabbi Adelson discussed last week, Israelis live with an awareness of the threats they face but that awareness doesn’t paralyze them.

A few days ago, I was struck by an article about Israelis’ responses to the Iran nuclear threat.  A woman who serves as a medical secretary was interviewed while she was shopping for her Purim costume.  She said that Israelis are taking the threat very seriously on the one hand, and on the other hand they have to cope with day-to-day life because the threat is too big to really comprehend.

When asked what she thinks about the different red lines that American and Israel might have, she said, “At that point, I get up and make the coffee.”

The article also described how Israelis use humor to confront the situation.  There’s a facebook page dedicated to asking PM Netanyahu not to strike Iran preemptively before May 29, which is when Madonna will be performing in Tel Aviv.

I think it’s noteworthy that Israelis of all positions and walks of life are exploring possible military responses to Iran and, at the same time, using creativity and humor to handle the tension.

For her several million citizens, Israel is home.  Despite the fact that her citizens dance on a thin crust of political tectonics constantly shifting, of internal tension and external threats, Israel is home.  Home is where politicians debate foreign policy, where fans see a Madonna concert, where medical secretaries worry about the future while getting ready to celebrate Purim. 

Home is the concatenation of creativity within and between people.

At the end of A Pigeon and a Boy, a key character offers a remarkable gift to his beloved.  The gift suggests that our most defining characteristics are our ability to love and to create. 

In ancient rabbinic parlance, a man’s wife was referred to as his home.  I would expand that.  We find home within ourselves, and we find home within each other.  Home is the outgrowth of our love and creativity and the whole enterprise is constantly in motion.

This morning, we concluded reading the book of Exodus and heard about the completion of the Mishkan, the portable sanctuary which would encourage the people to feel God’s presence.

It’s significant, I think, that the Mishkan was portable.  The churning, yearning, God-seeking enterprise is a movable home.  Where we create, we hopefully find God’s affirming presence.

We are told that when Moses saw that the people had completed the building, he offered a blessing – vayevarech otam Moshe. 

How did he bless them?  The Torah doesn’t say.  But Rashi brings a tradition from the Midrash b’midbar rabba.  Moses said to the people:  Y’hi ratzon she’tishreh sh’chinat’cha b’ma’asei yedeichem. “May it be God’s will that the Shechina, God’s presence, dwell among that which you have created.”

That’s quite a blessing.  That wherever we create, we feel God’s presence.  Meaning that it comes with us when we navigate work and love. 

Wherever we create becomes our home.

We will each pack and unpack many times in our lives, for ourselves personally and on behalf of loved ones, for happy reasons and sad reasons.

Our ancient scripture, a medieval commentator, a modern author, a people beset by existential uncertainty all seem to understand, explicitly or intuitively, that while all that may be true, our homes are far more portable than we realize.

Sometimes we wonder if we’re ever gonna make it home again.  If we pause for a moment, take a breath, look around and look within, we may realize that we’re already there.

Originally delivered at Temple Israel of Great Neck on March 17, 2012