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?

 

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?

My wife Natalie is a woman of many talents, and she always has a craft project of one variety or another that she’s working on. At one point she made beautiful cloth banners with Hebrew letters that still adorn our home at Jewish holidays. For the last few years, she’s been working on a special kind of embroidery in which she overlays black and white photos with splotches of color.

About a decade ago, she was also doing embroidery, but of a different kind: funny/ironic takes on what you might find more traditionally on a throw pillow in an antique store. (I know this was around 2016, as one of them said, in traditional black serif letters on a white background, “A woman’s place is in the White House.”)

Chip off the old block that he is, my youngest child, who is also our most artistically inclined, recently redecorated his room and included a small black felt board with white plastic letters that were arranged to read: “Home is where people don’t judge you if you fart.” To quote Homer Simpson, it’s funny because it’s true (at least in our home).

Why is that? Probably for the same reason that home is a place where we might be known by a special nickname, or we can recite merely the punchline to a joke and elicit a knowing chuckle. As the queer literary theorist Michael Warner puts it in Publics and Counterpublics, “The difference between genres of private and public speech anchors the sense of home and intimacy, on one hand, and social personality, on the other.” Home, we might like to imagine, is the ultimate shared private space, connoting a place and time in which we are known and accepted for who we are, without performing in the ways we do in public (e.g. holding a fart in).

Drawing on earlier feminist theory, however, Warner goes on to upend this notion of home. He points out how the concept of home, with its very strong protections for privacy, has also been deployed a shield for oppressive behavior: domestic (i.e. in the home) abuse, child abuse, and domination rooted in a concept of dominion that gives nearly absolute power to a man in his castle (i.e. his home). That critique, in turn, surfaces a truth about home, which is that, like all concepts, it is subject to multiple meanings and a variety of experience.

This is, in part, why I like to talk about the feeling or sensation of being-at-home, because I think it provides some more flexibility. Warner himself argues that for groups who may have historically experienced “home” as an oppressive place—he writes particularly about queer folks—the creation of alternative, sub-public spaces (think of bars, bookstores, or the shared readership of a magazine or digital space) has been essential for cultivating a feeling of being-at-home. In such cases, it’s less about holding it in when one needs to pass gas, and more about being able to let out the tension of holding in one’s essence.

“Now I take the Levites instead of every first-born of the Israelites; and from among the Israelites I formally assign the Levites to Aaron and his sons, to perform the service for the Israelites in the Tent of Meeting and to make expiation for the Israelites, so that no plague may afflict the Israelites for coming too near the sanctuary” (Numbers 8:18-19).

Like you, I expect, Rashi observes the surfeit of “the children of Israel” in this passage: Why five times when one would do? He responds: “In order to show in what affection they are held by the Holy One: the mention of them is repeated five times in one verse, corresponding in number to the Five Books of the Torah.” Rabbi Dovid Morgenstern, the second Kotzker Rebbe, adds: “This is to teach that even though each one of them was a book unto themselves, nevertheless together they constituted one Torah.”

We might hear in this a variation on the foundational Hasidic teaching that each of us has a soul-root (shoresh haneshamah) in a letter in the Torah. That is, each of us has a spiritual home in which we can experience the reality that we belong.

“Vayehi binsoa ha-aron, When the Ark would begin to travel” (Num. 10:35): I would suggest that our work to find and make home in our bodies, minds and hearts, within and among one another, is our ongoing avodah. It is our personal craft project whereby we aim to craft our person and shape a home. “Uvenucho yomar, When the Ark would come to rest” (10:36): The moments we can experience profound at-homeness individually and collectively are precisely those in which we might sense the divine Presence in our midst.

For Reflection & Conversation

• When, where, or with whom do you feel particularly at home (i.e. able to let it out)? What makes those times, places, or relationships different from others?
• Does your spiritual practice help you to experience being-at-home on a regular basis? If so, why? If not, why not?