A few months ago, after I shared that I would be devoting more of these reflections to the topic of home and at-homeness, a package arrived in the mail. I opened it to discover a book I hadn’t ordered, The Longing for Home (University of Notre Dame Press, 1996). Included was a note from one of the contributors, Werner Gundersheimer, a retired academic and former director of the Folger Shakespeare Library. Dr. Gundersheimer, it turns out, is a regular reader, and upon reading of my project he thought of this volume.
It has turned out to be quite a wonderful and unexpected gift, full of (mostly) accessible academic essays on a range of aspects of home. Gundersheimer’s own contribution is a moving reflection on his experience as a child fleeing Nazi Germany and being raised for a year by the family of a Presbyterian minister in New Hampshire. There are other essays by legends like Martin Marty and Wendy Doniger (with whom I can claim to have exchanged emails and a few pleasantries while working at the University of Chicago Divinity School), as well as physicians, activists, and fiction writers. Bottom line: If you like this topic, highly recommended.
Among the luminaries featured here is Elie Wiesel, whose essay opens the volume. Unsurprisingly, he has what to say about home. “[Children] know where home begins—inside certain gates—and where it ends: outside familiar doors. Children know that beyond home lies the frontier.” But adults, he notes, love to complicate things. Striking a characteristically dialectical tone born of his own personal history, Wiesel observes that “to some, home means an infinite capacity to dream; to others, it is a peculiar attraction to nightmares.” Ultimately, he says, “the opposite of home is not the prison—which may, eventually, become home—but exile. More than prison, exile suggests uncertainty, anguish, solitude, suspicion, hunger, thirst, and a constant feeling of guilt.”
“Only mystics draw their strength from exile,” Wiesel writes. “Yet even they experience nostalgia. Even they one day hope to return home. But where is home for them? God. Always God. God everywhere. For mystics, nothing is worse than to be exiled from God.” In this, Wiesel evokes the Hasidic tradition from which he emerged, which so often spiritualizes what at first blush appears to be physical or historical statements in the Jewish textual tradition.
The opening words of Parashat Masei provide a classic example: “These are the stages of the journey of the children of Israel,” says the Torah (Numbers 33:1), before enumerating 42 stops between Egypt and the banks of the Jordan River. The Ba’al Shem Tov immediately makes his move: “All 42 of these stages of the Israelites are likewise found in each individual, from the day they are born until the day they arrive in the world to come.” As my friend Yiscah Smith, drawing from her book Planting Seeds of the Divine, pointed out on our Daily Sit this week, the teaching here equates the historical event of leaving Egypt (Mitzrayim = the place of constriction) to the human experience of passing from the womb into the world, and the event of arriving into the Promised Land with the ultimate spiritual homecoming at the moment our soul departs the world.
Where is home in this spiritualized understanding? Is it in the physical place of Eretz Yisrael? Is it in communion with the Divine Presence—which is potentially available anywhere?
“When we are mindful, fully living each moment of our daily lives,” writes Thich Nhat Hanh, who, like Wiesel, survived tremendous loss and exile and became a spiritual teacher and peace activist, “we may realize that everyone and everything around us is our home… Sometimes we have a feeling of alienation. We feel lonely and as if we are cut off from everything. We have been a wanderer and have tried hard but have never been able to reach our true home. However, we all have a home, and this is our practice, the practice of going home.”
This feels close to the aphorism attributed to the Besh”t: “Wherever your mind is, there you are.” But I’m not sure it’s actually the same. Because as much as Judaism maintains that the Shekhinah is indeed present with us everywhere—including, amazingly, in exile—we don’t abandon the reality of a particular place as being our historical and physical home and homeland. “The Jewish soul,” writes Wiesel, “is open to only one influence and knows only one home: Jerusalem.” He unpacks this powerfully towards the end of his essay:
“Wherever I go, said Rabbi Nahman, my steps lead me to Jerusalem. It was the dream of my dreams. No city, no landscape nourished my dreams with as much passion and fire. In Sighet, I knew Jerusalem better than Sighet. I knew how to go to the Temple, at what time, with whom. I could easily describe the color of its dawn, the density of its dusk. I heard the prayers of the priests and the songs of the Levites. I was there in spirit.”
Yet, Wiesel writes, the physical reality of Jerusalem, miraculously made possible to him in the years after his liberation, wasn’t a full homecoming. “Having longed for Jerusalem since the beginning of our life in exile, why aren’t all Diaspora Jews going there? Is it that, for my part, I prefer the longing over reality? Years ago, I was asked by a reporter where I felt most at home. I answered: ‘In Jerusalem … when I am not in Jerusalem.’”
One of the superpowers of the Jewish people, developed over millennia of exile punctuated by moments of sovereignty, would seem to be this capacity for both being at home and not quite being at home at the same time, to be fully present while also dreaming, to approach life—experiences, places, sensations, texts, ideas—with a firm caress. Grasping too tightly can lead to a kind of certainty that begins to resemble idolatry; letting go completely can lead to physical danger and spiritual exile. Perhaps, at least for us, this dialectic, this paradox, is the essence of what it means to be at home.
For Reflection & Conversation
Reading Elie Wiesel’s concluding words, that he feels most at home “in Jerusalem… when I am not in Jerusalem,” how would you paraphrase this? What do you think he means? What might it mean for you—in physical/historical terms? In spiritual terms?