The Feigelson-Blitt house is a bit of a physical mess right now. Our eldest graduated from college and brought all his stuff home. Our middle child finished his first year of college and brought a lot of his stuff home. And both of them have had a lot of laundry to do. The effulgence of stuff—sheets, blankets, towels, winter coats, phone charging cables, electronic devices, assorted college tchotchkes—has been oozing out into the hallway. Conversations have been had, but it’s a challenge.

Plus, having five people in the house, including three who qualify as teenage boy or young adult man, means we need to have approximately seventeen times as much food in the house as normal. The fridge is jammed with leftovers, a round-the-clock supply of schnitzel at the ready, and the various condiments each seems to require. The shelves are bulging with boxes of protein bars, bananas, and Trader Joe’s dried mango (my God, our capacity to eat that stuff).

First-world problems, 100%. We are fortunate to be able to afford to feed everyone, especially with prices soaring the way they have in recent months. I recently read that a food bank in New Mexico used to have a monthly fuel bill of $10,000. Since the latest war began, that has increased to $22,000, which ultimately impacts the increasing number of people who need to use the food bank. As I’ve grown used to saying when people ask how I’m doing, “Thank God for the problems I have.”

Despite that awareness, I find my attention still tends to focus on the mess. Why can’t everything be neat and tidy? (Which is to say nothing of my wife’s attention—she has a higher standard than me.) Why can’t we figure out a storage solution so that we don’t have a box of protein drinks sitting on the floor? And why are there clothes on the floor of the kids’ bathroom—what happened to the laundry hamper?

Rabbi Moshe Chaim Ephraim of Sudilkov (1748-1800) was the grandson of the Ba’al Shem Tov and author of the Degel Machane Ephraim. He offers an apt comment on God’s commandment to Moses to assemble a band of people to reconnoiter the land of Canaan: “Send someone from each of their ancestral tribes, each one a nasi, a chieftain, among them” (Numbers 13:2). The word nasi in Hebrew is spelled nun-shin/sin-yod-aleph. Thus, the Degel points out, “it includes within it the letters of the words ‘ayin’ (nothing) and ‘yesh’ (something). A nasi, a leader, who thinks of themselves as ayin is ultimately a yesh; while one who thinks of themselves as a yesh is ultimately an ayin.”

On one level, there’s a simple message here about literal selflessness, particularly in leadership (though, following my teacher Parker Palmer, I would argue nearly of us exercise leadership much of the time). When spiritual or psychological myopia takes hold, it is possible to perceive oneself as yesh, that which is, while perceiving others as ayin, nothing. In such a view, other people become instruments to us while we live out our egoistic fantasy. Ultimately, that’s a path to a broader ayin, nothingness—not in the transcendent spiritual sense, but quite plainly: under such circumstances, it doesn’t take long for relationships and communities to fall apart.

But I think the Degel is also saying something deeper about our perceptions. So often, our evaluation of a situation rests on how we answer the questions, “What is yesh—what’s here? And what is ayin—what’s not here?” Consciously or subconsciously, our minds are making this evaluation all the time. We can bring our attention to what is true now, or to what we wish were true instead. We can focus on that which we perceive to be present, or that which we perceive to be absent. And when we do so, we might actually find that things aren’t quite what they seem.

Yes, the house is full of clutter right now. Yes, I’m making a lot of trips to the grocery store and spending more on food and running the dishwasher more frequently with all these people home. There’s messiness and complexity and a lot more laundry to do. It might be nice not to have to do all that.

And: the house is full. All my kids are home for a few weeks—a rare and precious event. The chessboard is out on the coffee table because they’re playing each other in the evenings. The house is noisier—and it’s a good kind of noise.

Famously, the Torah portion that begins with a charge to the spies latur, to scout out and perceive the land ends with the mitzvah of tzitzit—to make, and then look at, the fringes on our four-cornered garments, so that lo toturu, we will not follow after only our hearts and eyes. “Do not form judgments by following the impulses of your hearts and eyes,” explains Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch. “Do not rely on them in deciding what to accept or reject. Do not call anything ‘good’ merely because your hearts are drawn to it and your eyes yearn for it. Do not call anything ‘evil’ merely because it is distasteful to your hearts and eyes.”

A key aim of our spiritual practice is to help us hold these questions, to create space within our heart-minds in which we can perceive clearly, discern, and make wise judgments. On a fundamental level, those judgments center around the questions, what is present and what is absent? What might it be that we think is absent but is actually present? What is yesh and what is ayin?

For Reflection & Conversation

• When have you held one reflexive view of a situation that, upon further reflection, turned out to be quite different than you assumed? What supported you in coming to a new understanding? What, if any, was the role of your spiritual practice in that change?

My wife Natalie is a woman of many talents, and she always has a craft project of one variety or another that she’s working on. At one point she made beautiful cloth banners with Hebrew letters that still adorn our home at Jewish holidays. For the last few years, she’s been working on a special kind of embroidery in which she overlays black and white photos with splotches of color.

About a decade ago, she was also doing embroidery, but of a different kind: funny/ironic takes on what you might find more traditionally on a throw pillow in an antique store. (I know this was around 2016, as one of them said, in traditional black serif letters on a white background, “A woman’s place is in the White House.”)

Chip off the old block that he is, my youngest child, who is also our most artistically inclined, recently redecorated his room and included a small black felt board with white plastic letters that were arranged to read: “Home is where people don’t judge you if you fart.” To quote Homer Simpson, it’s funny because it’s true (at least in our home).

Why is that? Probably for the same reason that home is a place where we might be known by a special nickname, or we can recite merely the punchline to a joke and elicit a knowing chuckle. As the queer literary theorist Michael Warner puts it in Publics and Counterpublics, “The difference between genres of private and public speech anchors the sense of home and intimacy, on one hand, and social personality, on the other.” Home, we might like to imagine, is the ultimate shared private space, connoting a place and time in which we are known and accepted for who we are, without performing in the ways we do in public (e.g. holding a fart in).

Drawing on earlier feminist theory, however, Warner goes on to upend this notion of home. He points out how the concept of home, with its very strong protections for privacy, has also been deployed a shield for oppressive behavior: domestic (i.e. in the home) abuse, child abuse, and domination rooted in a concept of dominion that gives nearly absolute power to a man in his castle (i.e. his home). That critique, in turn, surfaces a truth about home, which is that, like all concepts, it is subject to multiple meanings and a variety of experience.

This is, in part, why I like to talk about the feeling or sensation of being-at-home, because I think it provides some more flexibility. Warner himself argues that for groups who may have historically experienced “home” as an oppressive place—he writes particularly about queer folks—the creation of alternative, sub-public spaces (think of bars, bookstores, or the shared readership of a magazine or digital space) has been essential for cultivating a feeling of being-at-home. In such cases, it’s less about holding it in when one needs to pass gas, and more about being able to let out the tension of holding in one’s essence.

“Now I take the Levites instead of every first-born of the Israelites; and from among the Israelites I formally assign the Levites to Aaron and his sons, to perform the service for the Israelites in the Tent of Meeting and to make expiation for the Israelites, so that no plague may afflict the Israelites for coming too near the sanctuary” (Numbers 8:18-19).

Like you, I expect, Rashi observes the surfeit of “the children of Israel” in this passage: Why five times when one would do? He responds: “In order to show in what affection they are held by the Holy One: the mention of them is repeated five times in one verse, corresponding in number to the Five Books of the Torah.” Rabbi Dovid Morgenstern, the second Kotzker Rebbe, adds: “This is to teach that even though each one of them was a book unto themselves, nevertheless together they constituted one Torah.”

We might hear in this a variation on the foundational Hasidic teaching that each of us has a soul-root (shoresh haneshamah) in a letter in the Torah. That is, each of us has a spiritual home in which we can experience the reality that we belong.

“Vayehi binsoa ha-aron, When the Ark would begin to travel” (Num. 10:35): I would suggest that our work to find and make home in our bodies, minds and hearts, within and among one another, is our ongoing avodah. It is our personal craft project whereby we aim to craft our person and shape a home. “Uvenucho yomar, When the Ark would come to rest” (10:36): The moments we can experience profound at-homeness individually and collectively are precisely those in which we might sense the divine Presence in our midst.

For Reflection & Conversation

• When, where, or with whom do you feel particularly at home (i.e. able to let it out)? What makes those times, places, or relationships different from others?
• Does your spiritual practice help you to experience being-at-home on a regular basis? If so, why? If not, why not?