You may know the old Chinese story about the farmer and his son. A farmer experiences a series of alternately tragic and wonderful events: a runaway horse, a sudden windfall of wild horses, his son’s broken leg, his son exempted from the army draft because of said broken leg. In each instance, the farmer’s neighbors rush to declare the outcome a catastrophe or a blessing. But in each case the sagacious farmer replies, “We’ll see.” Don’t rush to judgment. Or, in the wise words of my friend Raffi Stein-Klotz, “You always never know.”
I will confess to feeling that way this week after the midterm election in the United States.
Despite predictions of a fascist takeover of the voting infrastructure, it seems that American voters were able to deliver an overwhelming message of disapproval. Both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal ran headlines Wednesday morning that included the words, “Sharp Rebuke to Trump.” Given the incompetence and cruelty the Administration has demonstrated in too many of its actions, to say nothing of the shameless self-dealing and corruption of the President and those around him, I’m buoyed by the prospect that some of the suffering they’ve caused will be alleviated and some officials may begin to be held to account.
And yet. Maybe it’s my age, or maybe it’s having internalized that Chinese story a little too much, but I also find myself not thrilling to this moment but approaching it cautiously. I hear myself saying, “We’ll see.” Primarily that’s because of the discomfort I feel around the centrality of Israel and Jewish life in this election. I felt unease hearing Steve Kornacki talk on national television about Jewish voters in Michigan’s Oakland County, and what effect they might have on the senate election there. I felt similar unease when post-election analysis talked about the centrality of the Iran War (read: prompted by Netanyahu = Israel = Jews) to voter disaffection. And I felt it, too, when the President announced an early end to military aid to Israel—not because of the ultimate decision itself, but because this, of all things was what Trump chose to highlight on Election Day.
All of which is to say, we’ll see. While I’m happy with many elements of this election outcome, I’m also wary, particularly when it comes to what the coming months and years will mean for Jewish life, Jewish politics, and Jewish safety—i.e., my/our sense of at-homeness.
I’m not a political analyst and this isn’t a politics newsletter, so that’s really as much as I want to say about the election. But I am a rabbi and teacher of Jewish spiritual practices grounded mindfulness, and I’ve been writing the spiritual questions of feeling at-home in recent months. So I want to explore that a little more—and I’ll leave it to you to decide how it can inform your/our politics, i.e. our collective effort to be at home together.
Iris Marion Young was a feminist political theorist at the University of Chicago who died, too early, two decades ago. In the 1990s she wrote an important essay about home in which she took on some important feminist critiques of the concept of home. Most notably, perhaps, was the fact that a lot of writing and theorizing about home and the longing for it was not only written by men but also overlooked much of the labor of women who were charged with keeping house and home for men to come home to. In Young’s telling, that led some feminist writers to question and even reject the idea of home altogether.
Young offered a reappraisal which I find helpful. “The home is an extension of and mirror for the living body in its everyday activity,” she writes. One of the key things about home is that it’s often made up of objects that have meaning to us: pictures of loved ones, family heirlooms, or even just a pair of pajamas on the floor—but they are my pajamas. When it comes to house and home, Young observes, “our very identity is at stake.”
But here Young takes a surprisingly spiritual turn: “Personal identity in this sense is not at all fixed, but always in process. We are not the same from one moment to the next, one day to the next, one year to the next, because we dwell in the flux of interaction and history. We are not the same from one day to the next because our selves are constituted by differing relations with others.” To me, this sounds like an ad for mindfulness practice, an exhortation to cultivate our awareness of what’s going on internally and externally from moment to moment.
This leads Young, finally, to offer a way to reclaim the idea of home for those who might have found it overly fixed and static: “Home as the materialization of identity does not fix identity, but anchors it in physical being that makes a continuity between past and present. Without such anchoring of ourselves in things, we are, literally, lost.” In this understanding, home is not some unchanging thing, but an anchor—in much the same way one might relate to the breath in meditation practice. A refuge, a safe place, but also floating and able to move with us.
Ger v’toshav anochi imachem, “I am a stranger and a resident among you” Abraham tells the Hittites. “I am a stranger from another land,” Rashi interprets, “but I have settled down as a resident among you.” Jacob ben Wolf Kranz, The Maggid of Dubow (1741-1804) observes, “The tzaddik is like a ger, a stranger in this world; the essence and ultimate fulfillment of their lives is in the world to come.” He contrasts this with the perhaps more common worldview that one is a toshav, a resident: “It does not occur to them that the time will come when they must separate themselves from life upon the earth.”
In both the Maggid and Iris Young, I think we can sense an idea of home as something that involves holding on but not gripping tightly, an open-armed embrace. To be at-home is, yes, to be able to hold those things and relationships and other elements of our lives that give us a sense of our who we are. And, in the same breath, to be at-home is to hold those things lightly, to let them go even as we hold them, to recognize that nothing is fixed—no political party (or notion of a “political home”), no landscape, no relationship, no sense of ourselves. We and the world are constantly in motion. To be at home within it, to be at peace within and without, is to practice resting in that motion again and again, from moment to moment.