One of the challenges of writing a weekly essay on the Torah portion along with a weekly podcast script while also serving as the CEO of a growing organization is that there’s not much time for other writing. My first—and to date, only—book came about entirely because I wrote each chapter for IJS’s annual Text Study program in 2020-21 (and I wasn’t yet writing these weekly reflections).

In recent months I’ve gotten some new inspiration for a larger project, which I’m hoping can become a book and which would focus on the idea of home and, even more, on the experience of at-homeness.

Regular readers will recognize that this is a theme I come back to regularly, and it feels to me like there’s something deeper going on here. Yes, clearly there’s something in the topic that animates me personally. But I also sense that questions of at-homeness underlie many of our collective questions and challenges, from borders and migration to Israel and the Jewish Diaspora, to AI and climate change. At the heart of many of these profoundly challenging issues is a deeply personal yet profoundly collective question: How do we feel at home?

I have explored these themes in many of these reflections already (you can look as recently as last week), but I share this preamble to tell you that, in service of this larger writing project, I’d like to use this frame for these reflections for the next little while. And: I hope you’ll write back with your own thoughts and experiences about not only what I have to say, but also where you might suggest we explore in this journey together.

The opening words of Parashat Emor are directed at the main characters of the book of Leviticus, the kohanim (priests): “And YHVH said to Moses, ‘Speak to the priests, the sons of Aaron, and say to them, ‘Let none [of you] defile himself for a dead person among his people’’” (Lev. 21:1). The Midrashic and Talmudic tradition reads this and the verses that follow as the basis for Jewish mourning customs, particularly in defining for whom one is required to mourn. That, in itself, teaches us something about our concept of home: Home is closely associated with the familiar and familial. Thus, who we define as a relative can inform our experience of being at home—particularly with whom we experience being at home.

Yet the verse itself uses neither the words home nor family. The key word for many commentators is the word am, “people.” Rashi, following the Midrash, comments that amav, “his people,” comes to teach that as long as someone from the Israelite people—i.e. the deceased’s extended family—is available to tend to the burial, then the priest should maintain his ritual purity and not become involved in tending to the dead. But, in the case of a met mitzvah, in which there’s no one else to do it, then the priest must become involved.

Rashi invites us to anchor the question of at-homeness in the relationship and status of the priest, who is both of the larger people but also apart from it—itself a key tension underlying the experience of being at home. What does it feel like, and what does it mean, to be at home with one’s immediate relatives? And how does that compare and contrast with being at home within a people, language, culture, civilization?

A Hasidic commentary can help us explore these questions further by interpreting the verse not merely as a commentary on the obligation of burial, but on the ethics of civic life. It comes from Rabbi Dov Ber, the Maggid of Mezritch (d. 1772): “‘Speak to the priests, the sons of Aaron…’ Those who rebuke the people and strive to return them to the good are in the category of ‘Priests, the sons of Aaron.’ And behold, the Torah says to each one of them: ‘Let none defile himself for a dead person among his people.’ At the time when one stands and rebukes the people, one must be careful and cautious not to defile or ruin their own soul through arrogance or ulterior motives.”

The Maggid, following his teacher the Ba’al Shem Tov, interprets the verse as a warning about the dangers inherent in the practice of tochacha, offering rebuke (or, perhaps, negative feedback), particularly by leaders of the people. This is not to say that leaders should avoid tochacha—the Torah just told us it’s a mitzvah in last week’s Torah portion! But, suggests the Maggid, leaders have to do real spiritual discernment to know where our tochacha is coming from: Is it pure? Or are there impure motivations? Is the leader uttering their words of rebuke from a place of genuine love and care for their fellows, or, perhaps, are their words more an expression of their own personal resentment, frustration, and even subtle (or not so subtle) desire for power and position?

While the Maggid seemingly confines his question to religious leaders in positions of authority, I think the rest of us can read ourselves into these questions too. Anyone who has ever lived in relationship with another—in a friendship, a marriage, as a parent or a child—can probably feel some resonance with this teaching. When do we speak up, and how? How do we discern our own motivations? These are intimate questions at the heart of familial relationships (and, perhaps, not a small number of hours in therapist’s office).

Read in the context of the question of at-homeness, I might therefore suggest the Maggid is extending the notion of shalom bayit, peace in the home, well beyond the confines of one’s immediate family—and thus inviting us to play with extending our notion of home as well. Indeed, he’s picking up that idea from the Torah itself. If one way of experiencing at-homeness is through a feeling of kinship and mutual responsibility, then the Maggid and the Torah are inviting us to reflect on whether we feel at home with a larger community—the Jewish people, other collectivities—and, if we do, what responsibilities and ethics might emerge as a result.

For Reflection & Conversation

• How, if at all, do you discern whether to offer tochacha/rebuke? What, if anything, motivates you to speak up? What, if anything, keeps you from doing so?
• How do you relate to Am Yisrael/the Jewish People? Is it a home for you? If so, why? If not, why not? Are there other larger collective groups in which you feel at home?

If you haven’t yet listened to the recent two-part debate between Rabbis Sharon Brous and David Ingber on the podcast “Being Jewish with Jonah Platt,” I want to suggest that you do. In addition to being a model of civil disagreement, their dialogue also expresses a debate taking place within much of the American Jewish community, particularly about our individual and collective relationships with Israel, our sense of and response to anti-Jewish rhetoric and actions, and our political affiliations and alliances.

One of the terms mentioned on the podcast is one I hear frequently these days: a sense of political homelessness. While I will leave the political part to my esteemed colleagues, I want to focus on the second half of that phrase: homelessness—or its inverse, at-homeness. Because the question of where and when we feel at home—or whether we do at all—matters profoundly. One could argue that it’s a throughline, perhaps the throughline, of Jewish life.

Home is not only a place, of course. It’s a place that enables a condition: a sense of safety, ease, agency. To quote Billy Joel in what I would argue is one of his most Jewish lyrics, home is when we feel that “I’ll never be a stranger, and I’ll never be alone.”

If that condition were easy to access and maintain, my guess is that Billy Joel, like so many other songwriters, wouldn’t have been inspired to write about it, and their songs wouldn’t have resonated with so many listeners. At-homeness seems to have a perpetually elusive quality. For so many of us, sensing it, being inside it, requires continual practice.

As my friend Rabbi Zvika Kriger observed in a conversation on this topic this week, being not-at-home seems like an underlying theme of the Torah. From the very first humans, who are expelled from their home in the Garden of Eden moments after their creation, to the Israelites, who, as the Torah ends, have not yet crossed the Jordan River into their promised homeland, the Torah repeatedly invites us to question what it means to be at home—to recognize, in God’s words, that “you are strangers and sojourners with Me.”

We, of course, live in an unusual moment in history. For most of our lifetimes, Jews have had a political and cultural home in the state of Israel. And, at the same time, many or most of us in North America have also experienced a sense of political, and often cultural, at-homeness too. Whether and how one can be at home in multiple places, multiple languages, multiple cultures—that is both a question of much of the contemporary, globalized world, and a primary question for the Jewish people collectively and many of us individually.

Parashat Kedoshim, the second half of the double Torah portion we read this week, includes one of the most famous lines of the Torah: “Do not seek vengeance or bear a grudge against anyone of your people; you shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Leviticus 19:18). Rabbi Akiva taught that the second half of this verse is klal gadol baTorah, the great principle of our tradition. Yet one of the most pressing questions of recent decades, and certainly of our moment, is, Who do we understand to be our neighbors? Who do we understand to be our people?

Underlying that question, I believe, is the question of home: Do we share and experience a collective sense of home with our people, with our neighbors? I think we certainly aspire to do so. Must we? What happens if we don’t? Do we still feel at home?

When asked by a prospective convert to summarize the entire Torah while the convert stood on one foot, Hillel the Elder famously inverted Rabbi Akiva’s dictum: “That which is hateful to you do not do unto others—this is the entire Torah, the rest is commentary. Go and study.” Rabbi Yitzchak Meir Rotenberg Alter (1799-1866), the founder of the Ger Hasidic dynasty, asks, “Why didn’t Hillel simply quote the verse in Leviticus?” He answers:

“Hillel recognized that the convert wanted to learn the principles of Judaism in an easy and accessible way. He understood that the convert’s perception was limited/fragile at that moment, and that he could only grasp the negative side—namely, not doing evil to others (refraining from what would cause himself pain).”

“However,” continues the rebbe, “to achieve the positive side of love—the level of ‘And you shall love your neighbor as yourself’—would have been beyond his capacity to understand at that time. Therefore, in his desire to bring him closer and bring him under the wings of the Divine Presence (Shekhinah), Hillel used a form of speech that the convert could understand” [in that moment].

I find I’m frequently drawn back to the story of Hillel and the convert (actually there are a few stories in the same place in the Talmud). Perhaps that’s because it’s so deeply about this threshold of at-homeness. The convert—ger, a stranger—is seeking home, which the Talmud describes as coming “under the wings of the Divine Presence.” On so many levels, that’s not a simple thing. Home is complicated (what would therapists do without it?!). And yet, the experience of at-homeness is also uncomplicated: It’s the basic yet deep feeling of welcome, embrace, safety.

While loving our neighbors, and feeling that our neighbors love us, may be the highest expression of that, the essential, irreplaceable ingredient is being able to trust that our neighbors do not seek to do us harm. For too many people—Jews and people who aren’t Jews, in Israel, in America, and around the world—that has become hard to do.

I’ll close with a final observation. This week marked Israel’s 78th Independence Day. In preparation for our 250th Independence Day here in the United States this summer, I recently read Jeremy David Engels’s wonderful little new book, On Mindful Democracy: A Declaration of Interdependence to Mend a Fractured World (Parallax Press, 2026). “To declare interdependence,” Engels writes, “is to acknowledge and celebrate a basic and inescapable fact of human existence: each of us is interwoven with other people, other beings, and this beautiful blue orb we call home.”

In my view, the project of collective self-governance is ultimately about enabling each and all of us to feel genuinely at home—on the planet, in our lives, in our languages, cultures, and traditions. Engels writes, and I agree, that awareness of our interdependence is a natural outgrowth of mindfulness, “the practice of being aware of what is going on inside of and around us.” Mindfulness, whether expressed Jewishly or in any other idiom, helps us nurture the habits of the heart that are fundamental to democratic life—and to allowing each and every one of us to be truly, genuinely at home.

For Reflection & Conversation

• When, if ever, have you felt politically at home in a country? What contributed to that?

• When, if ever, have you felt politically homeless? What contributed to that?

• How easy or difficult do you find it to trust that your neighbors don’t seek to do you harm? How do you imagine they feel about you? What, if anything, might you do to promote greater trust between you?

One of the most enduring Torah lessons I ever learned came from a 19-year-old college student named Joey. He was interviewing for a campus “engagement” (i.e. outreach) internship when I was the Hillel rabbi at Northwestern. As part of the interview, we asked the applicants to read Hillel’s famous three questions (in English) and comment on them: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? When I am for myself, what am I? And, if not now, when?”

It was Joey’s response to the third question that stuck with me the most. I had always read that question as a Jewish version of carpe diem—seize the day, which my generation learned from Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society. But Joey looked at the text, paused, and said: “Yeah, if now’s not the right time, you really gotta know when the right time is.”

It was a total 180, completely changing my understanding: Life isn’t always about seizing the moment; it’s also about recognizing what the moment is, and what it needs from us. To this day it remains one of the most beautiful moments of Torah learning I can remember.

Ever since, I have found that I often have two voices in my head. One says, “Do it now, why wait?” But another reminds me of Joey, saying, “Now may not be the right moment. Pause and consider.” A paradox, not unlike the two slips of paper that Reb Simcha Bunim taught us to carry in our pockets: one that says, “the world was created for me,” and the other that reads, “I am but dust and ashes.”

We can find a parallel dialectic in two comments on Parashat Tazria-Metzora.

While on its face this double-portion deals with the ritual laws surrounding skin diseases and impurities in the walls of the home, the Midrashic tradition has long read them as instructing us about the ethics of speech. Rabbi Jacob Kranz, the Maggid of Dubnow (1741–1804), illustrates this approach in a comment on Leviticus 14:2, the opening verse of Metzora:

“‘And the afflicted person shall be brought to the Priest.’ People treat lashon hara (evil speech) lightly because they do not know the severity of the matter or the crushing power of the mouth. They do not know how to evaluate the negative influence of evil speech. People think: ‘What have I done? I only uttered a sound from my mouth; these are just mere words.’ Therefore, ‘that person shall be brought to the Priest’ so they may see that the speech of the Priest decides their fate, for better or for worse. By the Priest’s utterance of ‘Pure,’ the person becomes pure; by saying ‘Impure,’ they become impure. From this, the person will learn to value the immense power within speech for both good and evil—’Life and death are in the power of the tongue.'”

In the Maggid’s reading, the point of the procedures outlined in the Torah is to teach us humility. Why do we engage in lashon hara, mindless speech, in the first place? Because we aren’t sufficiently humble, and thus we don’t recognize the damage our words can do. By submitting to the word of the Priest, who will pronounce the person pure or impure, the Torah teaches us to remember the power of speech and treat it with the proper care and respect.

Yet we find a different, seemingly contradictory, understanding from Rabbi Meir Simcha HaKohen Dvinsk (1843-1926) in his commentary Meshekh Chokhma. For him, the lesson here is not only about teaching humility but also reminding us that each situation has its own context, and that one rule should not necessarily apply in all situations. Here is what he says:

“‘And the Priest shall see the affliction… and the Priest shall see the afflicted person…’ Why the repetition? One can say that this speaks of two types of perception: ‘The Priest shall see the affliction’: This is according to its plain meaning—that he should look at the affliction to see if it contains signs of impurity, such as white hair and so on. ‘And he shall see the afflicted person’: There is another type of ‘seeing,’ or perception, regarding whether it is appropriate to declare the person impure, which is not connected to the affliction itself but rather to the person and the timing. For example: A newlywed is given all seven days of the wedding feast [before being inspected]. Similarly, on a Festival, a person is given all the days of the festival so as not to disturb their joy. The ways of the Torah are ‘ways of pleasantness’ (Proverbs 3:17), and this second ‘seeing’ refers to the Priest truly perceiving the person—their quality and situation—to determine if the timing and circumstances make it appropriate to declare them impure.”

While these are two divergent readings, they share an emphasis on mindful awareness of our speech. The Maggid of Dubnow invites us to be aware of the power of even the smallest speech acts, words we think are meaningless, and recognize the power they hold. If nothing else, the words we tell ourselves have the power to shape our experience of the world—and that’s before we get to how they can affect others. In many ways the Meshekh Chokhma is saying something similar: the Priest has enormous power in his hands. With his words he will create a ritual and social reality for the afflicted person. Thus, he is exhorted to be mindful before speaking, and to truly perceive the situation of the person before him.

Which brings us back to Hillel’s “If not now, when?” A core mindfulness teaching, of course, is that we can only know the present moment. That could lead us to a kind of carpe diem (or, in more contemporary parlance, YOLO) orientation. Yet mindfulness also counsels us to be fully present in the moment we’re living in. That requires taking the time to really perceive and understand the context in which the present moment is occurring. On the deepest levels, the discipline of spiritual practice is about living both of these truths simultaneously.

For Reflection & Conversation

• If you had to put yourself on a spectrum between “seize the day” (1) and “wait for the right moment,” (5) where would you put yourself? When, if ever, have you wished you were more one or the other?
• As you think about your life right now in the world that we live in, how might you want to strengthen either or both ends of this spectrum for yourself?

In a normal week, I typically send these reflections to Andrew, our wonderful senior operations associate here at IJS, on Wednesdays. Andrew formats them and gets them all set to arrive in your inbox Friday morning (hence the name, “Josh’s Friday Reflections”). Natalie, one of our other wonderful team members, puts them on our blog. And then our communications & marketing team puts them out on social media.

In a normal week, that works pretty well. Sometimes, when things in the world are a little more uncertain, I’ll wait until Thursday morning to send my piece to Andrew.

This is a particularly abnormal week. As I write, it’s Tuesday. Wednesday and Thursday for me are yom tov, the last days of Passover, when writing (even on a computer) is prohibited. And on top of that, on this particular Tuesday, the President of the United States has threatened the death of “a whole civilization” unless the leadership of the Islamic Republic of Iran opens the Strait of Hormuz.

While mindfulness practice reminds us that we never truly know what the world will look like in a few days, or even in the next moment, in some moments that truth is more acute than others. This is one such moment. I feel like I’m writing a message in a bottle. Yet I think it also reflects a deeper paradox, which is that we can never be fully secure—in our knowledge, in frankly just about anything—and yet must find a way to live with a profound sense of security. This, in so many words, is the conundrum of home.

Regular readers will know that, after years of thinking about it, I developed my bumper sticker definition of the word spirituality: It’s our capacity to feel truly, deeply at home in the world. That can be in nature. It can be with loved ones. It could be at particular moments, in particular places, performing particular rituals. It could be when we’re able to be simply and truly at home in this body, with this breath, right now.

Whatever the experience, I think a through-line is this profound sensation of being at home: Safe, held, embraced, grounded, connected, loved and able to love.

And yet, home can also be profoundly fraught. It is not necessarily always pleasant. Precisely because home should be a place we can trust, the moments when that trust is betrayed can be among the most harmful and painful in our lives.

Parashat Shemini marks the fulfillment of a homecoming. For weeks now we have read of our ancestors’ labor to build a home for the Divine Presence. Finally, the moment comes: “The Presence of YHVH appeared to all the people… And all the people saw, and shouted, and fell on their faces” (Leviticus 9:23-24). The Holy One and the Israelites are at home with one another.

And then disaster strikes, as Nadav and Avihu offer a “strange fire which was not commanded,” and are consumed by a Divine fire. All the promise and hope of that feeling of at-homeness is betrayed in an instant.

The tradition chose a fitting portion of the Prophets to pair with this portion as the haftarah this week: the story of King David bringing the holy ark to Jerusalem in II Samuel 6-7. While the two stories would seem most linked by the death of Uzzah, who is struck down by God for touching the ark, I would suggest that there are other deep connections. In particular, I think both stories are fundamentally about home.

We see this most explicitly in the second half of the haftarah, when David says to the prophet Nathan, “Here I am dwelling in a house of cedar, while the Ark of YHVH abides in a tent!” Yet the Holy One’s response is not straightforward: “From the day that I brought the people of Israel out of Egypt to this day I have not dwelt in a house, but have moved about in Tent and Tabernacle. As I moved about wherever the Israelites went, did I ever reproach any of the tribal leaders whom I appointed to care for My people Israel: Why have you not built Me a house of cedar?”

Commenting on this passage, Rabbi Meir Leibush Wisser (Malbim, 1809-1879) suggests that God’s words to David can be understood as a kind of rebuke. He reminds us of the Rabbis’ understanding that a final resting place for the Divine Presence could only be established when the people of Israel a) had a clear and fully legitimized government, and b) were finally, truly at rest from their journeys and persecutions. While David may have felt that his dynasty was now secure and that the people were finally at rest, the Holy One calls that into question (at least momentarily—the text goes on to promise that David’s son, Solomon, will indeed build the Temple).

I think it’s worth lingering on the Malbim’s interrogating impulse. I hear in his comment some deep questions about what it means to be truly at home: What does it feel like to be provisionally at home—in a tent, on the move, going from place to place, yet still somehow abiding? What does it feel like to be permanently at home? Can we ever really know that our security is finalized and guaranteed? If so, what might be the effects on our spiritual practice, our ethics—and are those effects all desirable ones? If not, what does it mean to live a life in which we never feel truly, deeply at home?

These are some of the most ancient of Jewish questions and we are, of course, asking them in our own way right now—in how we think about land of Israel, and how we inhabit our sense of citizenship in the countries in which we live. But also on more day-to-day levels, as we yearn to feel safe and secure in our homes and our bodies, while also knowing that, on some level, no safety is ever truly guaranteed. How we hold that holy fire, that space of existential insecurity, is our perpetual spiritual task.

For Reflection & Conversation

• Where, when, or with whom do you feel truly, deeply at home? What do you think enables or supports that feeling?

• Have you ever had to assemble or reconstruct a new home or a new life—after a move, a life event, an accident? How, if at all, did your sense of home change?