I was blessed to grow up in the same house my entire childhood. My parents moved into 1258 Crosby Crescent in Ann Arbor in 1969, and my mom only left the house after my dad died 49 years later. I have no memories of moving during childhood; the first time I packed a moving box was when I went to college.

My father, God bless him, had a hard time parting with material things, and by the time he passed away there was a lot of stuff in the house that had to be cleared out and repaired in order to get the place in condition to sell. That was a big enough job on its own, and it became significantly more complicated when the pandemic hit about 15 months after he died, especially because my oldest brother lives in Israel and the three of us generally wanted to work on this project as a team.

As time dragged on and the magnitude of the task took on greater and greater weight—physically, but especially emotionally and psychologically—I came to feel that it was more than I could handle. The enormous task of going through everything while also juggling job and family responsibilities—which included care for my aging mom, who moved to live near us in the Chicago area—was fueling resentment and anger towards my father, and I didn’t want to continue to stew in those juices. So I told my brothers I didn’t want to go to Ann Arbor anymore, and that they were free to do whatever they liked. Thankfully, they took up the task and completed it, and eventually the house was sold to a great guy who wanted to live in it and fix it up himself. (He even sent us pictures of his work.)

In December 2023, our family took a road trip from Chicago to visit relatives and friends in Toronto. Ann Arbor is just about half way on the journey, so we stopped there for the night. (It was the first time I ever stayed in a hotel room in my hometown.) Before we went on to Canada, I decided I wanted to drive by the house. It had been more than four years. I didn’t need to go inside, I just needed to see it. So we pulled up on Crosby Crescent, and I stopped the car across the street, looked, and took it in. I felt some softness towards my dad, some loosening of knots that had been tight for too long. It was enough.

One thing I’ve noticed over these years since my dad died and the house was sold is that my relationship with home has changed. While my primary sensation of home in my adult life has always been wherever my wife and children and I have been living, as long as my parents lived in our childhood home, I still felt a gentle tether there. Sitting next to the eastern window in shul, I found myself imagining that just over the treeline was Lake Michigan, and just beyond the eastern shore of the lake was the state itself, and if I went just a little further (to exit 172 on I-94), I could walk home. Since that visit on the street outside the house, I don’t have that sensation anymore.

Parashat Pinchas includes the final census of the Israelites in the Torah, which is clear about the rationale: “Among these shall the land be apportioned as shares” (Num. 26:53). The Sefat Emet comments: “The essence of the giving of the land of Israel is in the spiritual root: Every one of the children of Israel has a root in the land of Israel—in both its upper (spiritualized) and lower (physical) manifestations. Thus the counting, which took place before the people entered the land, was to establish each person with their spiritual root—the written and oral Torah, in which every one of the children of Israel has a share. As we say [in the closing meditation after the Amidah prayer]: ‘…May You grant us our portion in Your Torah.'”

The Sefat Emet points us towards what I have come to understand as the telos of spiritual practice: to find and sense ourselves as truly, deeply at home in the universe. And he invites us to consider the multiple registers in which that at-homeness plays, as reflected in his comment that our inheritance—that is, our spiritual root, our place of deepest spiritual home—includes both a physical dimension (the actual land) and an intellectual and spiritual one (Torah). It is not either/or, it is both/and. Like all human beings, we have bodies, and thus need a physical home and homeland; and we have hearts and minds and language, and thus need an intellectual and spiritual home. Our roots lie, simultaneously, in both.

As my own story illustrates, however, our relationship with home is not a simple thing. A blessing and curse of our humanness is that we can experience, seemingly simultaneously, a host of conflicting emotions vis a vis home. These can be bound up with thoughts and feelings about parents and siblings, with deep chords of memory, with our very sense of self.

One of the great invitations and challenges of Jewish spiritual practice is to acknowledge and welcome the fulness of that complexity, the fullness of ourselves—and to do it together, as a community. As the Sefat Emet writes: “Each person is meant to inherit the particular place [embodied/physical and spiritual – JF] that is uniquely right for them. When that happens, they can love one another”—which, he adds, is the necessary condition for re-making a home for the Divine on the earth.

This is the season when the Jewish calendar challenges us to remember the disconnection and hatred that led to the destruction of that home two thousand years ago. Yet the problem highlights the solution, one that is so profoundly simple and also so terribly hard: To help ourselves, and to help everyone, sense they are truly, deeply at home in the universe.

I was recently watching a television interview with a woman in her 60s. Her husband, about the same age, still works long hours, though they’re already quite financially wealthy. “If he says to me on his deathbed that he regrets working too much,” the woman said, “I’ll kill him.”

It’s a funny line, of course. What makes it funny is that, in this imagined scene, the man is dying, so the words, “I’ll kill him” don’t carry literal weight. Yet, to quote the great sage Homer Simpson, “It’s funny because it’s true.” The word “kill” here functions as an exaggerated metaphor: The emotional distress the woman would feel (and, perhaps, already feels) on account of her husband’s choices about spending his time on work are existential—they’re affecting their lives in a significant way, so much so that she’ll be upset enough to kill, even though she isn’t really going to do that. So, it’s funny—but it’s also true.

Now, those same words uttered in a different context could carry a different meaning: If two people were in a fight and one shouted at the other, “I’ll kill you,” and then, God forbid, did so, their statement would probably be used as evidence against them at a murder trial. In this case, based on the context and the subsequent action, the meaning of the words is not metaphorical, but literal. Not funny, but still true.

We encounter questions of literal versus metaphorical meanings all the time: “Life is a rollercoaster.” “She’s a walking encyclopedia.” “Like a bull in a china shop.” We don’t mean these words literally; we employ the metaphors as idiomatic figures of speech.

Metaphorical speech is the starting point for midrash—which many would argue is the essence of Torah study itself. As a teacher of mine, Rabbi Baruch Feldstern, said decades ago in a class at the Pardes Institute on the Book of Samuel, “Jews don’t read the Bible; Jews read the Bible the way the Rabbis read the Bible.” Which is to say, understanding the plain or literal meaning of a verse is not the goal of a Rabbinic approach to reading the Bible. Instead, the project of the ancient Rabbis of the Talmud and Midrash was to play with the text, to find deeper meanings within it—to push the limits of interpretation to their most creative ends, but not so far that they would break. (If an interpretation were completely unmoored from the meaning of the words, then it wouldn’t pass the smell test.)

A classic Talmudic discussion goes to the heart of the matter. The Mishnah (Shabbat 6:4), teaches: “One may not go out with a sword, bow, shield, club, or spear [on Shabbat] and if one does go out, they incur a sin-offering [because the person is carrying them, which is prohibited on Shabbat; if they were considered clothing, however, then the action wouldn’t be carrying, and thus would be permitted]. Rabbi Eliezer says: they are ornaments for the person wearing them [meaning that they are, in fact, clothing, and thus permitted to wear on Shabbat]. But the Sages say, they are nothing but a disgrace, as it is said, ‘And they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore’ (Isaiah 2:4).” The Sages’ view, contra Rabbi Eliezer, is that weapons of war are not clothing.

A Talmudic discussion ensues (Shabbat 63a) in which the later Rabbis try to understand both positions. Explaining Rabbi Eliezer’s view, they cite as a prooftext the verse from Psalms (45:4), “Gird your sword upon your thigh, mighty one, your glory and your splendor.” The Talmud continues, “Rav Kahana said to Mar, son of Rav Huna: Is that really a proof? This verse is written in reference to matters of Torah and should be interpreted as a metaphor.” That is, according to Rav Kahana, when the verse from Psalms talks about a “sword,” what is obviously meant is Torah. If so, how could it support Rabbi Eliezer’s view? Mar replied, “Nevertheless, a verse does not depart from its literal meaning.”

What’s striking in this passage is that the peshat, or plain meaning of the verse in Psalms, is treated as an afterthought. “Of course the verse is talking about Torah and not a sword,” Mar seems to be saying, “but still, we do have to concede a little bit to the unembellished meaning of the text.” But it’s the exception that proves the rule: In general, the default preference in Torah study is for thicker, richer, more creative and more intertextual interpretations.

That brings us to Parashat Balak, and specifically to the words of Balaam, which are the subject of much Midrashic discussion. “How beautiful are your tents, O Jacob, your dwelling places, O Israel” (Num. 24:5) is one that may be familiar. Yes, it may literally have referred to their tents, but metaphorically the Rabbis understand this as an allusion to the site of the Temple.

A particularly timely example comes earlier, when Balaam compares Israel to a lioness (Num. 23:24)

Lo, a people that rises like a lioness,
Leaps up like a lion

Predictably, the Midrash understands this verse as referring to Torah study, alluding to rising up early to recite the Shema and perform mitzvot. Yet attuned readers may recognize the words “a people that rises like a lioness” from recent events. In Hebrew those words are am k’lavi yakum, and the name of the Israeli military operations against Iran last month was Am K’lavi. And in that sense, the Israel Defense Forces were clearly not reading these words as a (perhaps attenuated) metaphor about Torah, but as something closer to the plain text itself (which, of course, is a metaphor to begin with).

All of this is perhaps a reflection of the challenge Balaam presents us overall: The gap that can exist between intention and utterance, between spoken or written words and the deeper meanings they may not only convey, but arouse and inspire in us. Likewise, it reflects the ever-flowing possibilities of abundance inherent in our study of Torah, of language, and of our lives—which are lived in and through language. As Ouaknin writes, “The real meaning of a text, as it addresses itself to the interpreter, does not depend on accidental factors concerning the author and his [sic] original audience. Or, at least, these conditions do not exhaust its meaning… In fact, it is not the text that is understood but the reader. He understands himself.”