This past summer I found myself in a writing partner relationship with Rabbi Zvika Krieger who, among other things, is in our Marbeh Fellowship for Senior Jewish Mindfulness Teachers at IJS. Zvika is working on a book and sent me chapters to read and comment on (it’s about God and it’s fantastic), and he made me commit to sending him 5,000 words of the book I’m trying to write about at-homeness.
There’s nothing like a deadline to focus one’s attention. So a few days before I was due to send Zvika my material, I sat down on a Sunday morning and started writing. Five hours later, I was still in the same chair in my kitchen and had cranked out a solid effort. I felt fantastic.
I know this isn’t true for everyone, but for me writing is frequently entering a flow state. Words pour out. My attention is totally focused on the page/screen in front of me. And at the end of it, there’s this thing that emerged through me into the world. (That’s the fun part. Editing sucks.)
I don’t honestly know if that process is ‘home’ for me. I suppose it resembles the feeling other people have of being in a workshop or an art studio, or the way many musicians will describe playing their instrument. I’m much less aware of my surroundings, much more centered in my focus. There is no real sense of here and there, there’s just the writing.
I’m not quite sure that’s home. It’s not about comfort or safety, and it’s not really a moment when I want to invite guests in. If anything, it’s a very intimate moment on the way to sharing something with the world—which feels more like being at home to me. (I’m realizing as I write these words in that same kitchen chair early in the morning that I’d actually be kind of upset if someone walked in on me right now. Which means I’m not in a particularly hospitable mood. Which probably means I’m more a writer in his writing space than someone at home welcoming guests.)
In all this reflecting on at-homeness, one thing I keep coming back to is that I think the Jewish tradition has something quite unique to contribute to the conversation. Where Thich Nhat-Hanh taught that the whole world and everything in it is our home (a teaching I love and appreciate), I keep finding myself reflecting that that’s perhaps half of a Jewish take on the question, the downward-pointing triangle in the Star of David: Home is here, in this world, this moment.
But for so much of Jewish life, thought, and practice, home is also there, somewhere else: the land of Israel, Jerusalem, the Holy of Holies, shamayim (heaven), a place or a country we came from or are on our long way back to, even Torah itself. It’s the upward-facing triangle that points toward transcendence.
And, of course, the star itself is both of these triangles braided together: here and there, immanent and transcendent, then and now, all at once.
That paradoxical relationship with at-homeness seems baked into our story from the very beginning: Lekh-lekha, “Go forth from your homeland, from your birthplace, from your ancestral home to the land that I will show you” (Genesis 12:1). Our people and our Torah springs from a moment of estrangement, leaving one home and journeying toward another. It could well be that everything else is commentary.
In her recent book Unbelonging: A Life in Search of Home, linguist Catherine Jagoe quotes the writer Pico Iyer: “It’s only by stopping movement that you can see where to go; it’s only by stepping out of your life that you can see what you most deeply care about and find a home.” That leads Jagoe, who lived in many homes growing up and whose career as a Spanish-English translator has led to a rather unstable notion of home, to a reflection on what home might mean, at least for some, in the post-modern world: “The word identity comes from the Latin root idem (sameness). But we are not always the same; each of us is a constantly evolving kaleidoscope of selves over our lives and in different places and contexts. Just like postmodern identity itself, home is no longer fixed but, increasingly, seen as fluid. There is no one answer to the question ‘Where are you from?’ and perhaps I don’t have to pick; all of them are true.”
That’s a rich reflection. Child of Abraham and Sarah that I am, I resonate with it quite a bit. Yet simultaneously, as a descendant of those home-leaving/home-seeking/home-making ancestors, I think there’s more to say. There is a deep at-homeness I can and do sense that isn’t about multiplicity or all of that complexity, but is grounded in simplicity and familiarity: of language and texts and stories, of songs and rituals, of foods and humor, of places and landscapes, of a tradition that I know I belong to. I find so much, perhaps even the essence, of my own Jewish spiritual practice is about holding both of those triangles together at the same time.
“And look from the place where you are there,” says the Holy One to Abram (Genesis 13:14). The Ba’al Shem Tov, in one of the foundational teachings of Hasidism, comments: “A person is bound after their thoughts; in the place where a person’s thoughts are, that is where they are. A person can physically stand in the synagogue and pray, but their thoughts sail to the ends of the earth and are drawn after business affairs; then it is as if they are where their business is, and not in the synagogue.”
Guilty as charged.
He continues: “This is what is written: ‘And look’ — that you should perceive with a spiritual, psychological vision; ‘from the place where you are there’ — that you should not let your thoughts sail off to other places, diverting your mind and scattering your thoughts.”
When I tell people that Judaism properly understood is a mindfulness practice, this is one of the teachings I have in mind.
Yet I think we can also understand the Besh”t to be teaching us something deep about at-homeness here. Even, or perhaps precisely, amidst all the movement of life—between here and there, between past and future, between being and becoming—we are most fundamentally at home when we are present with our experience, when we are here now. That homecoming is always available to us, ready to welcome us at every moment.
For Reflection & Conversation
Consider Catherine Jagoe’s observation that, “Just like postmodern identity itself, home is no longer fixed but, increasingly, seen as fluid.” Now consider the Ba’al Shem Tov’s teaching that, “In the place where a person’s thoughts are, that is where they are.” What might they say to each other if they were talking together? What parts of either teaching resonate most or least with you? Why?