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?

When my youngest child was four years old, our local movie theater had a special showing of the original Lion King movie (not to be confused with the star-studded remake from a few years ago). It started at 7 pm, so I knew we’d be pushing the limits of his bedtime, but this seemed like an important special opportunity, so off we went. The movie was great.

As we pulled out of the parking lot, I felt some trouble with our minivan’s engine. By a few blocks later, the transmission was kaput. We were stuck at a traffic light. At 9 pm on a Sunday evening, I started looking for a tow truck. When I finally found one, they told me it would be 45 minutes until they could fetch us.

Toby had always been an easy child. I remember one day when he was 2 or 3 years old and said, “I’m tired. I’m going to go take a nap.” (If you haven’t been around a toddler recently, this is, in my experience, highly unusual.) As long as he had his thumb to suck and a tag on the back of his shirt to play with, he was comfortable pretty much anywhere.

So, when I turned around and said, “Hey kiddo, they say it’ll be 45 minutes,” he just said, “Okay,” stuck his thumb in his mouth, and went to sleep in his car seat.

For that and many other reasons, Toby has been one of my great teachers in equanimity.

Earlier this week I was listening to a Dharma talk about equanimity (Upekka in Pali) by Gil Fronsdal, who discussed this particular quality as the fourth in the series of the Brahmaviharas, four particular kinds of love in Buddhism. The other three are: Metta (lovingkindness), karuna (compassion), and mudita (sympathetic or appreciative joy). Equanimity, Gil pointed out, is the kind of love that’s useful when the other three are not:

“Goodwill or loving‑kindness… wants the best for people. Compassion wants suffering to end. Appreciative joy wants other people’s joy and success to be celebrated… But there are times when those three are not really called for. So, equanimity… is less complicated. It doesn’t involve any desire, any wish that something continue, or someone be better, or may they be happy. It kind of leaves the situation, leaves the person, much more alone, but we stay present with love.”

It’s important to point out that this is different from indifference. As Gil summarized it, the posture here, at least when applied to other people, is one of, “You make your choices, and I’ll love you anyway.” The point of the practice is to avoid becoming agitated into anger or other afflictive states, which would only obscure the basic form of love and care with which we aim to approach other people and situations—and often lead us into unhelpful responses born of reactivity. For a young child, that might involve sucking a thumb, saying “okay,” and taking a nap. For grownups, it could mean lovingly practicing the Serenity Prayer: “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change the courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference.”

This is also an essential element of leadership, as Parashat Pinchas reminds us. After Moses is told he will not enter the Promised Land, he implores the Holy One, “Let YHVH, Source of the spirit of all flesh, appoint someone over the community who shall go out before them and come in before them, and who shall take them out and bring them in, so that YHVH’s community may not be like sheep that have no shepherd” (Numbers 27:16-17).

Rashi, following Midrash Tanhuma, comments on the unusual reference to the Divine here as the source of the spirit of all flesh: “Moses said, ‘Lord of the Universe! the personality of each person is revealed to you, and no two are alike. Appoint over them a leader who will tolerate each person according to their individual character.’”

Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Kotzk adds, “When Moses saw the immense significance of Pinchas’s zealotry, he became deeply concerned. He feared that perhaps a zealous person would be chosen to lead Israel next, and Moses did not believe it was a good thing for Israel to have a zealot as a leader. Therefore, he requested of the Holy Blessed One that the leader of Israel should be someone who can tolerate and bear each individual—meaning, a leader who is patient and understanding, and not a leader who is a zealot.”

While Pinchas’s bold, perhaps reactive, action may have been important in the moment, this interpretive tradition points to an overriding general preference for leadership that is more equanimous: patient, understanding, able to bear—that is, to hold—the reality, the suffering, and the fullness of each member of the community, and the community as a whole.

This weekend the United States celebrates 250 years of independence. As I’ve been exploring on the Soulful Jewish Living podcast for the last six weeks, I think this is an opportunity for all of us who live here to do some serious reflection on not only our independence, but our interdependence. I think equanimity is foundational to the ability to live together in peace—which is perhaps, ironically, why the Holy One grants Pinchas a brit shalom, a covenant of peace: it is in the prayer that our reactivity give way to spaciousness, that we might be able to receive and hold one another with loving hearts.

For Reflection & Conversation

Do you find it easy or difficult to maintain equanimity? What supports you? What hinders you? How might your spiritual practice help you increase your capacity to do so?