Re’eh 5785: Inch by Inch, Row by Row

Re’eh 5785: Inch by Inch, Row by Row

Ever since we moved into our home 12 years ago, we have faced a challenge whenever there’s a heavy rain: our backyard turns into a small pond. Thankfully the water has not posed an issue for our basement (though the presence of three sump pumps in the house tells me that it probably did for the previous owners). Mostly it has just been a wet inconvenience. Depending on the amount of rainfall, it can put our backyard out of commission for a week or more—and in the Chicago area, every day that isn’t winter is a precious chance to be outside.

We’ve looked into various solutions. The one that would most effectively solve the problem is regrading, but it’s expensive. So for years, every time there’s a big rain, I have donned my rubber boots and schlepped an electric pump that sends the water through a hose out to the drain in the street. Not pretty, not fun, but effective.

This spring we tried a new solution: We planted a rain garden. Our neighbor Ron runs a landscaping business that specializes in native plants. He came over and designed an L-shaped garden of beautiful flowering plants that are indigenous to this area of northern Illinois: Rose milkweed, white turtlehead, cardinal flower, brown-eyed susans. It didn’t take long for them to grow, and by the middle of summer there were beautiful reds, yellows, blues and pinks throughout, along with monarch butterflies and hummingbirds and even a pair of goldfinches.

Earlier this week the garden got its first real test: 2.5 inches of rain in the span of about 4 hours on Monday night. The next morning I was eager for the dawn so I could get a look. And lo and behold, while there was water in the garden, much of it had been sopped up by the plants—and it was much prettier to look at than the muddy pond that would have been there otherwise. Success!

“There shall be no needy among you” (Deut. 15:4) declares Moses as he explains the mitzvah of shemittah, which involves both cancelling debts every seven years—and continuing to lend to those in need, even with the knowledge that the loan will be cancelled. (N.B. This is what led Hillel the Elder to come up with the pruzbul, whereby debts could be sold to the Rabbinic court and carried over through the sabbatical year—thereby ensuring that those with capital would lend to those in need.)

Yet despite this categorical statement—”There shall be no needy among you”—just a few verses later Moses contradicts himself: “There will never cease to be needy ones in your land, which is why I command you: open your hand to the poor and needy kindred in your land” (15:11). The medieval commentator Abraham Ibn Ezra observes this seeming contradiction and suggests a resolution based on the language of verse 6: “For YHVH your God will bless you as promised: you will extend loans to many nations, but require none yourself.” Ibn Ezra says, “Moses knew that a generation will arise that will not be mostly meritorious. He therefore said, ‘For the poor shall never cease out of the land.'”

I would suggest an additional way of resolving the contradiction: Moses’s first statement is an aspirational one; his second is realistic. We should aspire to a society in which everyone has what they need. Yet we know from our own experience that our desire not to see need can lead us, through motivated reasoning, to overlook it altogether. Thus we hold the vision on the one hand while perceiving clearly and honestly on the other. Living in that tension between ideal and real enables us to make progress—however partial and incomplete it may be.

The rain garden isn’t going to stop the storms that will continue and intensify. As I found when the morning finally came, it’s not even going to soak up all the water. But it undoubtedly makes things better than they were, providing beauty for us to enjoy and a habitat for plants and creatures to live in their glorious interdependence.

In a casual line of conversation years ago, Rabbi Nancy Flam pointed out that “contemplative” means “with time.” I think about that observation nearly every day. These days I find myself thinking about how we who engage in and teach contemplative practices approach questions that seem to have great urgency: How do we end suffering right now? How do we bring about action before it’s too late? I’m still working on my answer to that. But I know that a key element is continuing the practice so that we can live in this tension between ideal and real, to plant and tend the garden as best we can.

Ekev 5785: Dance Like Nobody’s Watching

Ekev 5785: Dance Like Nobody’s Watching

I was at a wedding the other night when an elderly woman collapsed unconscious on the dance floor. It happened last Sunday.

The wedding was beautiful. My wife and all of our kids and I were there together. We sang and danced and celebrated at this wonderful simcha of a family who have been our collective friends for many years. As my father, may he rest in peace, said after our own wedding: “To make a wedding really festive, it helps to have great music—and a lot of young people.” This one had both.

Like so many of our people’s rituals, a Jewish wedding typically incorporates multiple and contradictory themes. There is of course the joy and hopefulness of a couple who have found each other and are coming together to build a home and a life. The language of the sheva brachot, the seven special blessings recited at a wedding, reminds us of this: “Bring great joy to these loving friends, just as You brought joy to Your creations in the ancient Garden of Eden.” A wedding is a rebirth, a renewal, the creation of something wholly new and wonderful in the world—and that’s a cause for celebration.

The counterpoint, of course, comes from our recognition that not all is or can be wholly joyful in a world so broken. The Talmud records that since the destruction of the ancient Temple, Jews have tempered the festivities at our weddings. Most famously, we do that by breaking a glass. At this wedding, as at many others, the glass-breaking was introduced by the singing of im eshkakhekh Yerushalayim, “If I Forget Thee, O Jerusalem,” (Psalms 137:5), as well as a prayer for the return of the remaining Israeli hostages in Gaza and an end to the war.

All of which is to say that we are used to the simultaneous presence of these major and minor keys. But this experience was a deeper lesson in holding it all.

I was standing just behind the woman as she collapsed. The band stopped playing. For a moment it felt like time stood still. I found myself shocked and momentarily paralyzed. The father of the bride called out, “Is there a doctor in the house?” Two people raced over. They determined she needed CPR. Someone called 911. I remembered that I had seen a defibrillator in the coat room and ran to retrieve it. By the time I came back, someone was doing chest compressions.

The rest of us moved out of the ballroom and into the foyer as we waited. Our festivity turned to worry and apprehension. Parents spoke to their young children about what was happening. And though I was one of many rabbis in the room, it occurred to me that this isn’t one of those scenarios most of us are taught to prepare for, or, thank God, encounter in our careers. I found myself praying, and accessing my own mindfulness practice to try to calm my anxiety.

After a few minutes, the police, followed by the paramedics, arrived. The woman had, thank God, regained consciousness. As she was wheeled to the ambulance, we all clapped. And then, because the mitzvah of bringing joy to the newlyweds was still the evening’s prime directive, the band struck up again, we set aside the heaviness for a moment, and danced again.

One of the big themes of Parashat Ekev is practicing anava, humility. Moses exhorts the Israelites not to be deluded into thinking that they have brought success upon themselves. “Remember that it is YHVH your God who gives you the power,” he says (Deut. 8:18). That’s the purpose of the mitzvah of birkat hamazon, reciting grace after meals; “When you have eaten your fill, give thanks to YHVH your God for the good land given to you.” (8:10) We cultivate an awareness that our food, like the rest of our lives, isn’t ultimately about “me, myself, and mine,” but part of a much larger whole.

Yet anava involves not just this act of self-limitation or even negation, but also self-affirmation. As Alan Morinis famously teaches, “No more than my space, no less than my place.” An unbalanced sense of humility can lead to a sense that “nothing is in my hands—it’s all in God’s—so therefore there’s nothing I can or should do.” And of course that’s not true. As I remarked when one of my children said, “Thank God” upon seeing the now-conscious woman wheeled out to the ambulance, “Thank God—but also thank the first responders.” (And, if you’re like me, let this be a reminder to renew your CPR certification regularly.)

One of our great challenges today is living in the gap between our feeling that we bear the weight of such large, heavy problems—on a national, international, and species-existential level—and the comparatively tiny amount of agency most of us actually have to respond to them. And while we undoubtedly have a responsibility to do everything we can to address those problems, this week reminds me not to lose sight of the ways each of us can and must be vehicles for making the divine Presence manifest in the world: in healing, in showing up in community, in dancing out our hopes at a wedding—even at a time of fear.

Vaetchanan 5785: That’s Why They Call It “The Present”

Vaetchanan 5785: That’s Why They Call It “The Present”

I think it’s safe to assume that you’ve heard of Yoda. If you’re not of a certain age, it may be a little less safe to assume that you’ve heard of another great animated spiritual master, Oogway. He’s a tortoise who appears in the Kung Fu Panda movies. But he has one of the best lines about spiritual practice in contemporary popular culture: “Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, but today is a gift: that’s why the call it ‘the present.'” As we say in the business: Gevalt.

It’s a heck of a quote because it cuts to the heart of mindfulness practice for many of us: Our attempt to stay present with what is happening now, in this moment, and then from moment to moment, while not getting caught in thoughts, judgments, or anxieties about what was or what might be. “Be Here Now,” as Ram Dass summed it up. For those of us who embrace such a practice, it indeed feels like a gift.

I think this approach, emphasizing sitting still and calm amidst the current of history, is one of the things that has attracted so many Jews to Buddhism in recent decades. Because Jewish history—especially in the last century, but stretching back considerably further than that—has been deluged by history, and we have been buffeted by it. Many of us carry, consciously and unconsciously, family histories, collective stories, and the residue of ancestral traumas. Practices like meditation and yoga offer us a way to be present in the moment, to re-ground in our actual lived experience rather than the realm of words and ideas—realms in which our people excels. That re-grounding and recentering offers healing. When framed and understood through the language of Torah and the ritual rhythms of our calendar, the result is a renewed relationship with Judaism.

This isn’t new, of course. Jewish mystical traditions, like other mystical traditions, offer something similar. And Hasidism in particular succeeded in offering an orientation of deep, present-moment spiritual significance in the words and practices of Torah. As Moses says in our Torah portion this week, ein od milvado (Deut. 4:35)—which the Hasidic tradition, based on the Zohar, understood not only as “there is no God but YHVH,” but that “there is nothing but YHVH.” Divinity is the substance of the universe, if only we can attune ourselves to that reality.

Yet, to quote the twentieth century Jewish poet Adrienne Rich, we frequently experience that, “The great dark birds of history screamed and plunged / into our personal weather.” Even as we are meditating and seeking to be present in the present, there’s a whole lot of history happening. Perhaps nothing testifies to this more acutely or painfully than the destruction of so much of Hasidic life, and so many Hasidic lives, during the Shoah.

Since I began the phase of my own spiritual journey involving Jewish meditation and a deeper lived relationship with the teachings of the Hasidic masters, two questions have nagged at me repeatedly: First, what is the place of history in this approach? Second, what is the place of tochacha (rebuke), and, more broadly, ethical and political speech and action? In reality, I think they’re two sides of the same coin, as they are both questions about what happens outside of the moments we’re in quiet contemplation. And, of course, they are both questions driven by dominant conceptions of Jewish life, conceptions that center knowledge and understanding of Jewish history on the one hand (Jewish Studies and much of liberal Judaism), and ethics and political activism on the other (other parts of liberal Judaism, along with the many political expressions of Judaism).

I will confess that I don’t have a neat synthesis to offer. I don’t think there is a single ethics or politics that flows naturally from this view. As Emory University anthropology professor Don Seeman writes in an essay entitled, “The Anxiety of Ethics and the Presence of God,” “To put it very bluntly… any religious phenomenology that is focused too closely on the immediacy of the Divine Presence will tend to undervalue the complicated human multiplicity that calls for balance and adjudication, that which might also be called ‘justice.'” That shouldn’t come as a surprise. The fact is that many folks who are committed Jewish spiritual practitioners wind up in different places politically, with different conceptions of history and different visions of the future.

Yet it bespeaks one of the most pressing and painful challenges for all of us in this particular moment: Our people is deeply, profoundly divided. We are living through a historical moment the likes of which we have scarcely, if ever, encountered in our many long centuries. It is a moment that raises what often feel like unprecedented questions about Jewish agency, sovereignty, peoplehood, and power—profound questions about our understanding of Torah itself, of ourselves as Jews, of what it means to serve the Holy One in this moment. Our responses reveal our enormous fractures, with large swaths of our people deeply feeling that other parts are not only wrong, but evil.

We have just observed Tisha b’Av, a day which marks our most profound divisions, on which we remember how our people’s baseless hatred for one another contributed to unfathomable pain and suffering and the exile of the Divine Presence from its home. The question I want to raise is not what our politics should be—many other good people are discussing that. My question is, How can we practice loving one another despite our deepest, most profound divides? And if love seems too strong, then at least goodwill. I think that’s a question to meditate on—literally.

As we turn from this low point on the calendar and begin the ascent towards our fall holidays, which ultimately culminates in the sukkah—a symbol of diversity and unity, of fragility and gentle strength—let’s not forget this foundational piece of our spiritual work. “Nachamu nachamu ami,” as Isaiah exhorts us: Extend comfort, extend gestures of goodwill, extend grace and compassion, even as we rebuke one another, even as we labor to make the Divine Presence more visible in the world.

Devarim and Tisha b’Av 5785: Language in Exile

Devarim and Tisha b’Av 5785: Language in Exile

If you’re a full-fledged grownup in a relationship with a younger member of GenZ (born mid-1990s to early 2010s) or GenAlpha (born since then), you may find yourself, like me, sometimes at a loss when it comes to language. Some of this is normal generational churn: words like “rizz” and “sus,” phrases like “no cap,” are just as foreign to me as the incessant interjection of “like,” or the casual use of “awesome” that characterized my childhood, were to my parents. (I have regular conversations with my kids about the correct linguistic deployment of “low key.” Alas, I fear I’m a hopeless case.)

But some of the intergenerational language barrier feels like it’s bigger than the normal way the generations naturally define themselves. The inundation of our society with screen technology, social media, and video reels has led to what seem like wholesale changes in not just what members of different generations say, but how they say it—and whether they (we) say anything at all.

And that’s to say nothing of the general sense that our political lives are taking place in different languages: not only do we not agree on facts, in some cases we can’t even agree on the meanings of words. It often seems that we’re living through a long cultural moment in which language itself is just breaking down.

This isn’t particularly new terrain for me. I’ve been writing about it since October 7, and probably before that. I have noted that it’s a particularly acute problem for Jews, because we believe so powerfully in the efficacy and importance of language: according to the Torah, the world itself was created through words (“And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light.”)

But recently I’ve been wondering if part of the vexing nature of this sensation of broken language might arise because, perhaps, we’ve actually over-invested in language.

What do I mean by that?

Over dinner with friends the other night, we were trying to imagine how our immigrant grandparents and great-grandparents would respond to the way we live our lives today—in particular the emphasis on words, labels, and identities that draws so much of our collective attention. We thought about how these ancestors—who overwhelmingly were not college-educated, and who we knew had survived all kinds of traumas—would respond to the way we process trauma today, much of which verbally—through words.

We considered the need so many of us have today to feel seen, heard, and valued. We talked about the expectation that that sense of belonging is conveyed through language, and the way the absence of the right words is sometimes (often) read as a failure to value people who feel like they need to read or hear it. To me, it seemed that this dynamic applied just as much to older folks today as to younger ones.

Our dinner group surmised that our ancestors would find it hard, if not impossible, to recognize much of this. I speculated that one of the reasons might be that our relationship with language itself has changed. There are many reasons why: the disproportionately large share of American Jews who, for generations, have attended universities, where so much of life takes place in words and ideas; the rise of psychotherapy and a broader therapeutic culture; the proliferation of media that was unimaginable a century ago.

What it all leads to is not just a belief but a lived experience that life itself takes place in language, that if we can’t narrate our experience or be identified by others with just the right words, then it’s as if we don’t fully exist.

I think a lot of people are exhausted by it—folks on both the left and the right, straight people and LGBTQ+ people, people identified in the culture as privileged and people identified as marginalized. I hear from folks on every end of the spectrum who are worn out from all this languaging.

And I think that exhaustion is one of the reasons so many folks today are trying to get off their social media accounts and are flocking to meditation, niggun (wordless song), yoga, hiking, farming, the gym, crafting, and other non-verbal practices. I think we know deep down that we have to get out of our heads, that we’ve put so much pressure on language that our minds and our collective lives—which we have constructed and maintained through words—are crumbling.

“Eleh hadevarim, These are the words that Moses spoke to the Children of Israel.” From these opening words of the book of Deuteronomy we derive the name of this Torah portion, Devarim: Words. It’s a paradox, of course: Earlier in his life, at the burning bush, Moses said of himself, “I am not a man of words” (Exodus 4:10). Yet by the end, he can produce an entire book of the Torah.

In her biography of Moses, Avivah Zornberg elaborates on the paradox: “From Moses’ own idioms, we understand that he experiences an excess of ‘feelings and thoughts,’ a kind of congested intensity, as sealing his lips… The irony is that Moses who cannot speak can articulate so powerfully a fragmented state of being… desire and recoil inhabit his imagination. An inexpressible yearning can find only imprecise representation. Language is in exile and can be viscerally imagined as such. This both disqualifies him and, paradoxically, qualifies him for the role that God has assigned him.”

This notion of “language in exile” finds acute representation on Tisha b’Av. The Book of Lamentations is an exquisite paradox of poetic expressions of desolation, of silence. Here is chapter 2, verse 10: 

Silent sit on the ground
The elders of Fair Zion;
They have strewn dust on their heads
And girded themselves with sackcloth;
The maidens of Jerusalem have bowed
Their heads to the ground.

The fact that each of the book’s chapters, save the last one, are Hebrew alphabetical acrostics only serve to heighten the irony: language is broken, language itself is in exile.

The day of Tisha b’Av itself is a day of this broken language. It’s the only day of the year when we’re not supposed to greet each other. We actively avert our gazes, consciously tear at the social fabric, to allow ourselves to sit and sense, and perhaps begin to reckon with, the pain that accompanies the destruction of the home of the Divine.

From Tisha b’Av, we can begin counting an Omer of sorts: seven weeks of consolation until Rosh Hashanah, 49 days until the broken language of exile is met with the whole-broken-whole blasts of the shofar—which are both before language and after it.

In an exquisite reflection on silence published last year at Tisha b’Av, writer Cole Aronson reflects on the tortured silences and words—the excruciating efforts at language—that arose in the wake of the Shoah. He concludes, “In Genesis 8:21, God laments that the tendencies of man are evil from youth. [God] doesn’t suggest a limit to the forms that evil might take. [God] says the capacity is ordinary to us. Experience shows that it does not, like a haunting menace, exceed our powers of resistance. It also does not, like an infinite being, defeat our powers of description. So we describe and lament.”

We have so much to lament this Tisha b’Av. Our language is so broken. Our people and our world are so broken. May our silence be deep and profound. May it awaken us to the words and actions of redemption.

Matot-Masei 5785: Sleepless Nights

Matot-Masei 5785: Sleepless Nights

If you’re a regular reader of these Friday reflections, you have probably noticed that, like a Law & Order episode, they follow a pretty predictable form: I start with an engaging personal story, pivot to a lesson drawn from the week’s Torah portion, and then bring it home with a message about how Jewish spiritual practice can help us lead a more meaningful life.

This week I feel a need to write differently. Even as I reach for the right story, I can’t find it, other than to tell you that I’ve found myself waking in the middle of the night thinking a lot about Israelis, Gazans, and Jews.

Now I’m not here to offer political commentary or analysis. Much as it’s tempting, that’s neither my expertise nor, frankly, my role. Even as I wade into this water, I’m clear that my purpose is to offer a personal spiritual reflection rooted in Torah which can, I hope, be of benefit to you in your own spiritual journey. As my rebbe, Avi Weiss, used to tell us in yeshiva: “I’m talking to myself and letting you listen.”

As I said, I’ve been waking up in the middle of the night. And I’ve found myself gripped with a series of questions that have been swirling in the writings and conversations of people around the world who I read and am regularly in conversation with: How is it that Hamas still hasn’t released all the hostages, and will they ever be able to come home? How is it that Israel, Egypt, and the international community, haven’t implemented a way for the people of Gaza to be fed and housed—whether in Gaza or somewhere else of their own choosing—without facing the prospect of a violent death while waiting for food? What does it mean, and what will it mean in the future, for the Israel Defense Forces and the democratically elected government of Israel to have been the instrument of so much devastation? What will it mean for Jews—in Israel, in America, and throughout the world? What will it mean for Judaism itself? The list goes on and on.

Before I go further, I want to pause and invite you to notice how you’re feeling after reading that paragraph. How’s your breathing? How’s your heart rate? Are there any thoughts coming up for you? Maybe you feel some judgment arising because of who I mentioned or didn’t mention, the order in which I mentioned them, or how I phrased something. Perhaps you’re feeling some aversion and don’t want to read further. And/or perhaps you’ve experienced some of these same questions and you’re feeling hopeful that I’ll offer some definitive, clear answer. (Don’t get your hopes up.) Just pause to notice and, I would ask, withhold any impulse to judge for the moment.

Every year I find that reading the double Torah portion of Matot-Masei brings up some very deep questions of home for me. This is, after all, the parashah that includes the story of the tribes of Reuben and Gad, who ask Moses for permission to live on the eastern side of the Jordan River—that is, outside the Promised Land proper. And so, every year at this time I find myself asking, “Why do I not live in Israel? Why am I still in America?”

My life experience conditions me to ask this question. I was raised in a Zionist home, by parents who lived in Israel with my older brothers for a year in the early 1970s (before I was born). We had books about Israel around our house, and I heard Israeli songs growing up. My oldest brother moved to Israel 35 years ago, married, raised a family, and built a life there. My own children have grown up with visits to Israel and, like so many kids who go to Jewish day schools and summer camps, have been educated with a sense that a relationship with Israel is a foundational element of contemporary Jewish life.

So I think it’s pretty natural that reading this Torah portion brings up this question: Where is home? Where should it be? And, especially given all that conditioning—not to mention the challenges we face in the United States today, as both Americans and Jews—what am I still doing on this side of the ocean?

At the same time, this Torah portion also contains one of the most challenging passages in our tradition: “And YHVH spoke to Moses, saying, ‘Avenge the Israelite people on the Midianites; then you shall be gathered to your kin” (Num. 31:1-2). What follows is the most organized military campaign the Israelites wage in the Torah, complete with officers and regular troops. This would seem to be precisely what the previous chapters were preparing them for: to become a nation capable of conquering, holding, settling, and successfully governing the land.

And yet, moral problems abound: What does it mean to engage in a war of vengeance? What does it do to a nation to slaughter so many? Is the Torah saying that this is the price of nationhood—and, if so, is that an answer we can or want to accept, either about ancient Israel or the modern state? What is the place of values like compassion, justice, forgiveness, and diplomacy in this scheme—in a life of Torah, and in our collective life?

Again, an invitation to check in. Pause for a moment if you feel the need. My aim is not to rile you up, but to offer some acknowledgement of questions that, certainly for me and perhaps for you, are often on a regular low simmer and, more recently, have been boiling to the surface.

Amidst the sharper edges of this Torah portion, there is one moment when some softer spiritual language appears: “You shall not defile the land in which you live, in which I Myself abide, for I YHVH abide among the Israelite people” (Num. 35:34). ‘Abide’ here is shokhen, as in Shekhinah, the Divine Presence. Rashi offers two comments. First: “Do not do anything defiling to the land so that you will make Me dwell amidst its uncleanness;” Second, “Even when the Israelites are impure, my Shekhinah remains amongst them.” As I read him, Rashi suggests that there is both a call to responsibility in the first comment, and, in the second, a reassurance of the abiding availability of the divine Presence, the ever-ready possibility of return, teshuva—even when we make mistakes, as we will inevitably do, individually and collectively.

This Shabbat begins the month of Av, leading us to the lowest point on the Jewish calendar, the 9th of Av, when we read Eicha, the Book of Lamentations, and are invited to experience our deepest sense of estrangement from the Divine Presence. Yet we conclude Eicha with the cry, “Return us, YHVH, to Yourself, and let us return; renew our days as of old.” At our most acute moment of feeling God’s absence, we move in the direction of return, the direction of presence.

What might that return look like? A return of the hostages to their homes and families. A return of the soldiers. A return of the hungry and homeless in Gaza to something better than the hellscape in which they live today. A return of all of us to a life, a community, a Judaism, and a world in which we can feel safe and strong enough to risk showing compassion, to turn toward one another in a peaceful, divine embrace of presence.

Pinchas 5785: Finding Home

Pinchas 5785: Finding Home

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.