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?

There is a serious debate among knowledgeable people about a very important question: What is the best baseball movie of all time? In my experience the choices often come down to Field of Dreams (starring Kevin Costner and featuring an immortal monologue by James Earl Jones that is guaranteed to bring the hardest-edged person to tears) and Bull Durham (also starring Kevin Costner—I know, I know—and featuring an immortal dialogue with Tim Robbins about the effective use of platitudes in press conferences). 

In my own humble opinion, both of these views are misguided. The best baseball movie of all time, hands down, is The Natural, a 1984 adaptation (well, a transformation) of Bernard Malamud’s 1952 debut novel of the same name, starring Robert Redford as the aging wunderkind Roy Hobbs, with an incredible orchestral score by Randy Newman. 

My family got our first VCR (that’s video cassette recorder for those who may not remember or never heard of it) when I was seven years old, and I watched The Natural many, many, many times. I probably don’t really need to watch the movie anymore, because the whole thing seems like it lives in my memory. I can see young Roy playing catch at home with his father on their family farm, with Newman’s Coplandesque clarinet playing underneath them. I can visualize the scene in the hospital where Roy tells his childhood sweetheart Iris (Glenn Close) that he’s glad she never sold their family farm down the road from his, because “It’s home.” And (spoiler alert) I can picture Roy rounding the bases towards home after his final, dramatic home run to win the pennant for the New York Knights, the exploding stadium lights raining down on the infield.

In that final scene, the picture actually fades out just after we catch a glimpse of a happily weepy Iris as Roy approaches home plate to the embrace of his ecstatic teammates. The screen fades to black and then reemerges with Roy standing in the fields of Iris’s family farm, playing catch with their son (also spoiler alert), Iris looking on—a family that is, after a long odyssey, at home.

Bart Giamatti, the late Commissioner of Major League baseball, was a professor of English Literature at Yale before his career change. He is among the best baseball writers I know of, and he was fond of pointing out the Hero’s Journey that baseball enacts in every at-bat. “Baseball is… entirely about going home,” he once said. “It is the only game you ever heard of where you want to get back to where you started (all the other games are territorial; you want to get his or her territory; not baseball). Baseball simply wants to get you from here back around to here.” Roy coming to home plate and coming back home on the farm—these are one in the same.

Yet in the same talk, Giamatti observed that “Home is a concept, not a place; [it is] a state of mind.” If that’s the case, then the journey home is not only about reaching the physical destination of home plate or the farm, but also about arriving at—or perhaps simply realizing—the sense that one is at-home right here and now.

“No harm is in sight for Jacob, no woe in view for Israel. YHVH their God is with them, and their Sovereign’s acclaim in their midst,” says Balaam in one of his curses-turned-blessings (Num. 23:21). Rabbi Avraham Bornsztain (1838–1910), the Sokotchover Rebbe, comments that as long as we have the symbols of holiness—among them Shabbat, tzitzit, tefillin—then, like lost sheep finding our way home, we can sense that the Holy One is always with us. Or, as the Ba’al Shem Tov put it, we are never alone: “In every place we travel, and in every place we stand, YHVH is with us.” 

The story of our ancestor Jacob tells us as much. On his journey away from home he stops for the night to sleep and has his famous dream of a ladder ascending to heaven. The spot where his head rested is, according to tradition, the very same location as the Holy of Holies. Jacob calls this place—or is it a state of mind?—beit Elohim, the home of the Divine (Gen. 28:17) “God was in this place, and I did not know it”—that is, our awareness of the Divine, which is perhaps our deepest sense of feeling at home, is potentially available to us at all times, but we have to attune ourselves to be aware of it.

We always read Parashat Balak (or the double parasha of Huqat-Balak) just before the fast of the 17th of Tammuz, which Rabbi Alan Lew noted is the beginning of our journey through the fall holidays. In historical terms, it is the anniversary of the breaching of the walls of Jerusalem by the ancient Babylonians, culminating three weeks later with the destruction of the Beit Hamikdash—the sanctified spiritual home of the Holy One and the Jewish people—on Tisha b’Av. From that low point we rebuild our sense of home through Elul and Tishrei, ultimately experiencing a reimagined and renewed homecoming sitting in the sukkah. 

“The dream of the lost home must be one of the deepest of all human dreams,” Lew writes in a chapter entitled, Everywhere He Went, He Was Heading for Home. “Certainly it is the most ancient dream of the Jewish people, embodied in our national resolve to someday rebuild the Bayit—the Home—the Great Temple in Jerusalem. And,” he adds, “this dream is the basis of that most profound expression of the American psyche, the game of baseball, a game whose object is to leave home in order to return to it again, transformed by the time spent circling the bases.” Lew concludes the chapter by noting, “If you open yourself to them, these Holy Days carry you home.”

For Reflection & Conversation

• Do you associate feeling at home with a certain place? Certain people? To what extent do you feel you can be at home anywhere? What enables that? What prevents it? How, if at all, does your spiritual practice help?

The other night I had dinner with a dear old friend and colleague. After catching up about our families and personal lives, the conversation moved, inevitably, to the state of the Jewish people.

My friend, an astute observer of history, offered that our generation experienced a unique set of circumstances in the life of the Jews: We were born in America the wake of World War II. Having vanquished Germany and Japan, the United States made them and much of the rest of the world into markets and trading partners, leading to an unprecedently long economic boom. And, in the shadow of the Shoah, antisemitism was banished from polite society. American Jews flooded into universities and rapidly ascended in the economy and general society. A Jewish state was founded, largely underwritten by American support.

American Jewish life, which for so long had focused on basic survival, now shifted in large measure to focus on thriving: The question now was less how to ensure safety and physical wellbeing than how to convince Jews to remain identified as Jews when society no longer forced it up on them.

That was the social context in which the two of us, both born in the 1970s, came of age. In the long history of the Jewish people, it was a phenomenally rare moment. In many ways, we might say it was a luxurious one. Until the last decade or so, it was the world we thought we were operating in.  And, it turns out, we were probably naïve to think that it would last, that history wouldn’t revert toward the mean.

I have no idea what the events of recent days and years will mean for the Jewish people. What I do know is that I feel fear and anxiety rising, as I expect many other Jews do too. (I’m reminded of the old Jewish telegram: “Start worrying, details to follow.”) I also know that my mindfulness practice is indispensable in such moments, and I’m grateful for it. It helps me to notice that fear and anxiety—and not be trapped by it.

On another evening this week, I had occasion to wander in a bookstore. Unsurprisingly, I found myself in the religion and spirituality section. And I noticed that it comprised two bookcases. One of them was called, “World Religions” and had books on Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and so forth. The other bookcase was labeled, “Judaism.” There it was: our tiny but ancient people, representing one five-hundredth of the world’s population today, producing ideas and wisdom far out of proportion to our size.

I smiled and remembered a teaching of Rabbi Meir Shapiro of Lublin (1887-1933). He comments on the phrase, “Thus it is written in the Book of the Wars of YHVH” (Numbers 21:14): “The nations of the world triumph by means of good weaponry and sophisticated armaments… But the people of Israel have a completely different weapon—the Book… As the verse states: ‘Not by military might, nor by power, but by My spirit, says YHVH (Zechariah 4:6).”

That is certainly true, and certainly an aspiration I share. But as Rabbi Shapiro witnessed in his own lifetime and would have beheld at even greater scale had he lived just a few more years, spiritual strength alone was not enough to save Jewish lives in the face of violent actors committed to our destruction. That realization, as much as anything, has driven much of Jewish life for the last 80 years—and it is at the heart of an increasingly violent debate in Israel over military service among Haredim.

A popular theory has it that the Magen David (Star of David) can be understood as two triangles. One of them points up, symbolizing transcendence: ultimate reality is not in that which we experience, but in something beyond this world. The other points down, symbolizing immanence, the very opposite: The Divine dwells here in the world in which we live. The two triangles together embody a paradox at the heart of Jewish life, namely that we live both in the world and apart from it, in our bodies and in our books, in the workweek and in Shabbat, in our will to survive and our aspiration to flourish.

I don’t know what the coming days and months will bring. But I do know I will be meditating, praying, and acting as wisely and mindfully as I can to bring about a world in which Jews and all people can be safe, free, and at peace. I hope you will too.

One of the best pieces of advice I ever received was from a high school girlfriend. Like many hormone-filled teenagers (which is to say, teenagers), I was trying to figure out in my mind how she and I might eventually kiss. And, like many teenagers, I was having an awkward go of it.

I had probably learned too many unrealistic lessons from watching fake romance in the movies. I was waiting for the dramatic scene where we would look at each other, the camera would zoom in and, as we inched closer, the magic would happen as the music swelled in the background.

Needless to say, that’s not generally how it works in real life.

Luckily for me, this young woman a) felt similarly about kissing, but b) had a wiser head on her shoulders. Thus, the advice: “Josh, if you want to know whether someone wants to kiss you, the best way is probably just to ask.” I did, she did, it was nice.

It turns out the lesson isn’t only applicable in romantic contexts. As the famed philosopher Big Bird puts it: “Asking questions is a good way to find things out.” Yet so many times, I find that I, and other people I know, forget it.

Our base condition feels like it’s been exacerbated in recent years by our technologies. Any number of studies have demonstrated an enormous rise in social anxiety disorders in the last 30 years. And anyone who has been around teenagers today (like this guy) is likely to have witnessed a general discomfort with the idea of talking to a stranger to schedule a doctor’s appointment or handle customer service—much less ask if their date would like to kiss.

But if this situation has gotten worse in recent decades, that’s perhaps because it’s building on how we human beings arrive from the factory. Our minds are generally lousy at living in the unknown. They’re hungry to establish a narrative to fill the space. As the science of confirmation bias has shown, we often wind up constructing a story before we’ve done our homework. Our minds, desperate to get a foothold, form an opinion and then push us to understand the facts in a way that fits.

That, in turn, makes us uncomfortable with the idea of even doing the homework—talking to the stranger, making the ask. Many of us are far more comfortable living in our wonderful little mental world of assumptions. And it seems like that’s not a recent phenomenon. (Look no further than another example of teenage love, 16th-century style: Romeo and Juliet, which is based on a chain of false assumptions and un-had conversations.)

It could be that not even Moshe Rabbeinu is beyond this basic challenge of assumptions and communication. Rabbi Simcha Bunim of Peshischa comments on the verse, “And Moses sent to call Dathan and Abiram” (Numbers 16:12), which comes in the midst of their rebellion alongside Korach. He asks, “Why was it that Moses our Teacher did not succeed in establishing peace within the camp of Israel?” He answers: “Because Moses did not trouble himself to personally go to them and persuade them with words of appeasement and reconciliation. Instead, he sat in his tent and sent [messengers] to call them to come to him. Therefore, the path to peace failed.”

According to Rabbi Simcha Bunim, while Korach and his band hold their share of responsibility for the rebellion, Moses failed significantly in this episode. He was unwilling to make himself personally vulnerable and instead hides behind his office and works only through emissaries. Had he personally engaged, the rebbe suggests, peace would have had a greater chance.

Where does Moses’s reluctance come from? My own sense is that it’s rooted in the basic human impulses we’ve described. For whatever reason, Moses, in Reb Simcha Bunim’s reading, closes himself off from a genuine encounter with the unknown. He thus sends the message that he isn’t really open and listening. That, in turn, exacerbates a loss of trust, the result of which is a deadly uprising.

Our spiritual practices are intended to support us in living mindfully in the space of the unknown. We seek to be at home in our own lives such that we can confidently, openly, genuinely engage with the lives of others. As Rabbi Jonathan Sacks puts it, our aim is “being secure in one’s home, yet moved by the beauty of foreign places, knowing that they are someone else’s home, not mine, but still part of the glory of the world that is ours… In the midst of our multiple insecurities, we need that confidence now.”

While Rabbi Sacks wrote those words in the wake of 9/11, they ring just as true a quarter century later. And they were probably true 3,000 years ago too.

For Reflection & Conversation

• In general, how do you feel about asking questions of others? Does the prospect excite you? Scare you? Something else? Why?
• How, if at all, does your spiritual practice support you in engaging with the unknown, especially when it comes to human interactions?