Last Shabbos was a snow day in Chicago. A big storm moved through and dumped nearly a foot on us. The weather folks said it was the biggest November snowfall in a decade.

On Sunday I dug out the snow blower from the back of the garage (we’ve had pretty light snow in recent years) and joined the lovely civic ritual wherein neighbors say hello to one another, commiserate a little bit, and help each other keep our driveways clear as the city trucks plow us back in while clearing the streets.

The days since have been cold, so the snow is still on the ground. And I’ve noticed that on my walks with the dog, I am drawn to keep the air pods out of my ears and just listen. It’s quieter when there’s snow, almost like there’s a blanket muffling the usual noises of cars and wildlife. Most of all, my ears are drawn to the sound and sensation of snow crunching under my boots. Combine that with the special kind of air that can follow a snow storm, the smell of a winter hat on my head and a scarf around my neck, and it transports me right back to being a little kid walking to elementary school in Ann Arbor. It’s fabulous.

As it happens, I spent my Shabbat snow day reading Rodger Kamenetz’s new book, Seeing Into the Life of Things. (I was cramming for the exam: I interviewed Rodger about the book on Wednesday night, ahead of his teaching an online IJS course about the book next month. I’ll be taking it, and I hope you will too.)

While I read plenty of books, and while many of them are wonderful, this one stood out. Why? I’ve been trying to put my finger on it.

It’s a smart book, for sure: There are discourses on Wordsworth (the source of the title) and Freud and Einstein. The Ba’al Shem Tov and Rabbi Isaac Luria make appearances, alongside Rumi and the Dalai Lama and other deep wells of insight. I like that kind of intellectual stimulation. And as one who writes myself, Rodger’s writing is like a cup of chamomile tea with honey on a cold day—warm and smooth and sweet, the kind of thing you drink in slowly and savor. (He said Wednesday he’s much more of a “re-writer”—revising and sculpting and crafting every page over and over again. I wish I had that kind of patience.)

But ultimately I think what drew me in was what Rodger invites us all to do: be present with our experiences without rushing to label and analyze them with words right away. When we do that—when we slap a label onto something or someone, when we reactively move to interpret a dream rather than lingering with the ineffable sensations it beckons us to dance with—we forfeit something precious: our imaginative capacity. As Rodger writes in his introduction, “The sacred takes place in the imagination. A poetic state of mind is the ground of visionary experience.” (Like I said, tea with honey.)

This week we reach the climax of the Jacob and Esau story, a story that is so much about this human challenge of knowing and not knowing—and how to hold, or even embrace, the not-knowingness. We sensed it in Isaac’s not-quite-knowing encounter with Jacob-dressed-as-Esau last week, and this week we touch it again with Jacob’s profound uncertainty about Esau’s intentions as he approaches with a small army.

“And Jacob feared greatly, and it troubled him, and he divided the people who were with him… into two camps.” (Gen. 32:8) Rashi, in one of his most famous comments, says: “He feared—that he would be killed; and it troubled—that he might kill others.” This is an ethical reading, highlighting what I certainly like to think of as a classically Jewish approach. It holds the fullness of the stakes without minimizing the positions.

Yet Rabbi Yaakov Yitzchak HaLevi Horowitz, the Chozeh or Seer of Lublin (d. 1815), offers a different reading: “And Jacob feared—he experienced fear because of Esau, but immediately ‘and it troubled him’—the fact that he was fearful, particularly after the Holy One’s promise, ‘and I will protect you wherever you go’ (Gen. 28:15).” Jacob’s initial fear is a perfectly understandable one: It seems like his brother is coming to kill him. Yet the Chozeh turns the “troubling” of the verse into something like the “second arrow” in Buddhist teachings: Jacob is aware of his fear, and the fact that he’s afraid makes him even more upset—because he should be trusting in God.

I didn’t ask Rodger, so this is just me, but I sense an opening here to understand Jacob as struggling in the space between reactivity and wisdom, which might also be the space between analyzing and being-with, or between the illusion of knowing and the reality of not-knowing. Yes, Jacob needs to make a decision, and he needs to be careful—mindful, even. Can he do so in a non-reactive state?

I think that’s what the Seer of Lublin is asking of Jacob—and of we who are his descendants. As Rodger and I discussed on Wednesday, the age and world we live in is built on so much reactivity. (Jane Eisner told me this week that the Oxford English Dictionary’s word of the year is “rage bait.” Q.E.D.) But we are so much more than that. So maybe stay close to your breath a little more. Linger with the taste of your coffee or the light of the Shabbat candles. And maybe take out the air pods when you’re walking and listen to the sound of the snow under your feet.

I recently downloaded an app called Flighty. As Ben Cohen described it in the The Wall Street Journal, “Flighty was built by aviation geeks for aviation geeks.” It uses all kinds of data to predict whether your flight will be on time or late, and if so by how much. It often beats the airline apps with updates. As an app it’s beautifully designed. And it’s insightful, showing your most frequent airports, the number of miles you flew last year—and how many times around the Earth (or the Moon) that represents. I’m hooked.

While I expected to travel a lot when I took this job nearly six years ago, the first couple of years I didn’t go anywhere because of the pandemic. But now the world has largely returned to its pre-Covid pace, and Flighty tells me that my 47 flights so far this year (and there are still a couple to come in December) have taken me 47,012 miles, which is 1.9x around the Earth. I’ve also evidently spent 10 hours in flight delays (which frankly ain’t bad given those numbers)—and 48 percent of my flights have actually landed early!

So that’s fun and all. But for a perhaps unexpected question, I want to ask you: How do you feel reading all that? What, if any, sensations do you notice arising?

There could be some judgment (“That’s a big carbon footprint”). There could be some envy (“You must have airline status”). There could be some pity (“Oy, that must suck to travel so much”). It could be something else, or a combination of multiple thoughts or feelings.

The French sociologist Pierre Bordieu coined a term he called “habitus.” Here’s a fairly standard definition of the idea: “A set of attitudes and beliefs embodied in how people think, feel, speak, and gesture. The habitus conditions and shapes how individuals perceive the world around them, their sense of place, and life choices.” Where a “vibe” in our contemporary parlance is a superficial, momentary feeling about the atmosphere in a particular setting, “habitus” gets at deeper structural stuff: the ways we’re conditioned to act and speak, the things we’re conditioned to value, within cultural structures from families to communities to societies.

Applying habitus to an analysis of Flighty, one might start to think about the culture (or cultures) of frequent flierdom. One can start to ask questions like, “What are we really talking about when we talk about this culture of airports and flights and airline rewards programs?”

Perhaps because of Flighty, perhaps because last week I was in fact on four flights in four days, all of this was in the background when I encountered Anand Giridharadas’s essay about the Epstein emails in the New York Times. Giridharadas has been issuing some deep and blistering critiques of philanthropy and elite culture for years, and he analyzed the situation with that in mind. While not undermining the culture of rape and abuse at the heart of the story, Giridharadas also aimed to flesh out the habitus illustrated in the emails. Here’s his central point:

What [Epstein’s] correspondents tended to share was membership in a distinctly modern elite: a ruling class in which 40,000-foot nomadism, world citizenship and having just landed back from Dubai lend the glow that deep roots once provided; in which academic intellect is prized the way pedigree once was; in which ancient caste boundaries have melted to allow rotation among, or simultaneous pursuit of, governing, profiting, thinking and giving back.

I will be honest and say that I felt myself implicated in that, if not directly—I’m not jetting into and out of Davos or Aspen on a private jet; I fly commercial between O’Hare and LaGuardia; and I have told philanthropists directly when I thought they were misbehaving—then indirectly. I went to an elite private university (Yale) and received a Wexner Graduate Fellowship that paid my way through rabbinical school and had a large (and overwhelmingly positive) influence on my career. I’ve rubbed shoulders with people like the folks Giridharadas describes and, like many other nonprofit leaders, I have felt the gravitational pull of their philanthropy—again, if not directly, then indirectly.

But there is something about this depiction of flying around constantly, jetting in and out of cities and making that the basis of valuation, that is both a little familiar and a little icky. (“Many of the Epstein emails begin with a seemingly banal rite that, the more I read, took on greater meaning,” Giridharadas notes: “The whereabouts update and inquiry… ‘Just got to New York — love to meet, brainstorm,’ the banker Robert Kuhn wrote to Mr. Epstein.” And later: “Whereabouts are the pheromones of this elite.”) Again, I don’t generally text people when I land and ask if they’re free—that reflects a pretty phenomenal level of presumptuousness/entitlement—but I recognize the conversation that involves a sentence like this: “I was in Manhattan to do a talk, then I went up to Westchester for an event, then back to Riverdale for a meeting, then flew back to Chicago in time for bedtime, and was on a plane to DC the next day.” That, in fact, was my first half of last week.

Where does the ick factor come from in all this? At root, I think, it’s the sense of rootlessness—the constant moving about, never being truly being at home anywhere, and the sense that these very powerful people were trying to fill the related spiritual abyss in their soul with power and domination. And that, of course, butts up against an antisemitic trope, most powerfully deployed by Josef Stalin against Russian Jews, who the Soviets referred to as “rootless cosmopolitans.” So on top of the original ickiness, there are layers of additional complication.

Jacob, whose story we come to focus on centrally in Parashat Vayetzei, is notable for many reasons, one of which is that he is our ancestor who struggles the most to be at home—with himself, his family, and his geographic place. Even more than his grandfather Abraham, Jacob moves around—from his childhood home in Be’er Sheva to his uncle’s home in Padan-Aram, then back to the land of Canaan, then finally to Egypt. His name Yisrael, of course, connotes his constant struggle: to come to terms with his twin brother, with himself, with his wives and children, with the Holy One. He is never settled, never at ease.

All of that can sometimes make it feel like Jacob is a rootless character. Yet our tradition suggests that Jacob’s lesson is precisely the opposite: What Jacob figures out is that, wherever he is, he can in fact be deeply rooted. This is the reading that Rabbi Aharon of Karlin offers on the words vayifga bamakom, which the Torah uses to describe Jacob’s encounter with Mount Moriah when he first sets out on his journey: “Pegiah connotes prayer [as the Talmud posits], but it also connotes a genuine, sudden, deep encounter. Thus a person should pray that they find the ‘place’ that is particularly their own… Here, in this world, we should try to be at one in whatever place we find ourselves… Your heart should not be separate from the actual place you are standing or sitting.”

A few years ago historian James Loeffler published a book about the creation of human rights law, which was largely led by Jews. In a rejoinder to Stalin, he called it “Rooted Cosmopolitans.” It’s a great phrase to consider, particularly at a moment when our community, our people, is engaged in deep and often contentious reflection about particularism and universalism—or, more simply, where and when we feel at home.

Here in the United States, many of us, including me, are celebrating Thanksgiving this week. As it does like clockwork every year, the holiday causes me, and perhaps you as well, to reflect on some key questions: Where, when, why, and how do we feel at home here, if at all? Do we feel at home as Jews today? If so, why? If not, why not?

But the holiday also offers us an opportunity to experience some deeper at-homeness, perhaps: The spiritual rootedness that’s available to us when we can gather with family and friends, when we can take a walk among trees whose leaves are falling away, when we can, in moments of stillness, express gratitude for the blessings in our lives. If we allow it to do so, Thanksgiving might remind us that we can, in fact, be spiritually at home in whatever moment we find ourselves. And there is nothing more Jewish than that.