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?

Like many other people, the Covid pandemic brought my extended family a bit closer. Like many Jewish families, that happened as a result of “Zoom kiddush,” a Friday afternoon gathering of first cousins, aunts and uncles, that included some catching up, some reminiscing, and a performance of a few Shabbat rituals.

Six years later, our family’s Zoom kiddush is still going. Every Friday afternoon I go over to my mom’s place and the two of us get on the call together. At this point in her Alzheimer’s journey, she doesn’t have all that much to say, but she’s very happy to be there. Yet when the time comes and she sings the Shabbat evening kiddush, it’s as though a light switch has flipped, and she is, for a moment, the same Happy we have long known and loved.

These days I also try to visit her on Sunday afternoons. While I usually bring a treat to snack on, the main event is when I get out my iPhone and call up a playlist entitled, “Happy’s Tunes:” Rogers and Hammerstein, Lerner & Loewe, Peter, Paul and Mary. Last Sunday my eldest son, a freshly minted college graduate as of this weekend, came with me. We put on Fiddler on the Roof. As Zero Mostel sang “Tradition” through the phone’s speaker, my mom’s face lit up in a smile: “This is such a good one,” she said.

Another metaphor I often hear to describe the effect of familiar music on dementia patients is a thirsty plant coming back to life after watering. The blank look disappears, the disorientation gives way to a sense that, for a moment, the patient knows, in the words of Tevye, “who they are and where they come from”—and, on an even deeper level, “what God expects them to do.” It’s like you’re witnessing the regrowth of roots that have been severed in mind, body, and soul, the momentary returning home of a being that, most of the time, is somewhere else these days.

The Book of Numbers, which we begin reading this week, is starkly different from its predecessors. From the get-go, it is concerned less with individuals than with the corporate identity of the Israelites. Hence its emphasis on counting—the men of fighting age in each tribe and the people as a whole and, later, the gifts brought by the head of each tribe for the dedication of the Tabernacle. The lives of individuals are, seemingly, a secondary concern for much of this book.

Yet the Jewish interpretive tradition has long understood this shift as an invitation to explore questions of individual and group identity. Or, put differently, the shared project of making a home together. In a teaching from 1872, the Sefat Emet offers a psycho-spiritual reading of the second verse of the book: “‘Take a census of the whole Israelite community according to their families, according to their ancestral houses” (Num. 1:2). “Even though the Children of Israel changed, increased, and spread out until they reached six hundred thousand,” he says, “they remained attached to the root of their birth—’And they established their genealogy according to their families.’

“This is the meaning of the verse (Psalms 131:2): ‘Surely I have stilled and quieted my soul; like a weaned child with his mother.’ A person must be connected to their source, for that is their essential point, like an infant clinging to its mother.

“And so,” continues the Sefat Emet, “Rabbi Bunim [Rabbi Simcha Bunim of Peshischa (1765–1827)] explained the words of our Sages: ‘A person must always say: When will my actions reach the actions of my ancestors, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob [Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel and Leah]?’ Seemingly, who is foolish enough to seek to equate their own actions to the actions of the Patriarchs [and Matriarchs]? Rather, the intention is: When will my actions reach (touch) their actions? Meaning, that they should be a continuation of them. For surely the actions of the generations are not equal, but through the attachment to the root—meaning, to the Patriarchs [and Matriarchs]—we bring all of our actions close to their root: ‘to their ancestors’ houses.’”

I hear in the Sefat Emet’s reading an affirmation of a truth that psychologists have rediscovered in recent years: the fundamental importance of rootedness and connection. While a particular thrust in Western society came about through the assertion of our rugged individualism, Jewish life, like many other traditions, has long understood that we are profoundly connected and interconnected. Rootlessness is not really an option. Our bodies and spirits know it, even if our minds might try to think otherwise.

Reflecting on his novel Roots after it became a massive television event in 1977, Alex Haley observed, “In all of us there is a hunger, marrow-deep, to know our heritage—to know who we are and where we have come from. Without this enriching knowledge, there is a hollow yearning. No matter what our attainments in life, there is still a vacuum, an emptiness, and the most disquieting loneliness.”

I would only add to that the connection with roots is not only a matter of intellectual knowledge. The kind of knowledge Haley is talking about is, in my experience, one that lives in our bodies and hearts, as well as our minds. Our rootedness, and our desire for that rootedness, is something that lives deep inside, ever ready to be reawakened and reconnected through the songs and words, laughter and tears, we share with our spiritual ancestors.

For Reflection & Conversation

• How connected do you feel to your spiritual roots? If you feel connected, what has supported that connection? If you don’t, what has inhibited it?
• Is there anything you wish you knew that would help you feel more connected to your roots? If so, what? If not, why not?

Happy birthday to me! I’m in the midst of turning 50. My birthday on the Jewish calendar was last week, my birthday on the Gregorian calendar is next week. As my teacher Rabbi Dov Linzer remarked when I saw him the other day, “Some people refer to that as chol hamoed,” the intermediate days of the festival. Thank you in advance for all your good wishes.

Having a birthday in mid-May has long meant that I grow a year older in the midst of an emotionally rich time. Spring is in full bloom. Walking to elementary school in my neighborhood growing up, I would pass the flowering crabapple trees that always blossomed this week, loudly displaying their pink petals and spraying their sweet fragrance into the air.

When I arrived at school, there was a sense of wistfulness as the academic year was about to end and no one, not even the teachers, really wanted to be inside. The environment was one of end-of-year ceremonies, concerts, proms and their attendant angst about romantic relationships, graduations, and the mad dash to summer and its seeming liberation—along with, in high school, the anxiety of final exams.

All of that is part of my personal coding around my birthday.

So, it’s probably not surprising that I’ve found myself daydreaming about my childhood home more frequently in recent weeks. Images of those crabapple trees and their scent have been wafting through my mind. In meditation I’ve found my memory calling up unbidden the aroma of our family’s house, the smell of my dad’s pipe, the feel of our living room’s pea soup green shag carpet on my bare feet.

That has led me to wonder, what’s going on here? Is this nostalgia operating? I remembered a quotation from the scholar Svetlana Boym in her book, The Future of Nostalgia (2001): “At first glance, nostalgia is a longing for a place, but actually it is a yearning for a different time—the time of our childhood, the slower rhythms of our dreams.” But don’t get too comfortable, because Boym critiques that: “In a broader sense, nostalgia is rebellion against the modern idea of time, the time of history and progress. The nostalgic desires to obliterate history and turn it into private or collective mythology, to revisit time like space, refusing to surrender to the irreversibility of time that plagues the human condition.”

Maybe. But I don’t think this is me mounting resistance, at least not actively. It’s something else, perhaps closer to Maya Angelou in A Letter to My Daughter: “Thomas Wolfe warned in the title of America’s great novel that ‘you can’t go home again.’ I enjoyed the book, but I never agreed with the title. I believe that one can never leave home. I believe that one carries the shadows, the dreams, the fears and dragons of home under one’s skin, at the extreme corners of one’s eyes and possibly in the gristle of the earlobe.”

As I ride the carousel for my fiftieth turn about the sun, I find Angelou’s words more resonant. These sensory images of home—not only or even primarily visual, but aural, tactile, and especially olfactory—are finding their way to the surface, seemingly beckoning me to revisit them. Or, perhaps, more emphatically reminding me of the incessant demand to reckon with home and my experience of being at-home.

“You shall count off seven weeks of years—seven times seven years—so that the period of seven weeks of years gives you a total of forty-nine years,” the Torah commands. “Then you shall sound the shofar; in the seventh month, on the tenth day of the month—the Day of Atonement—you shall have the shofar sounded throughout your land and you shall hallow the fiftieth year. You shall proclaim release throughout the land for all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you: each of you shall return to your holding and each of you shall return to your family. (Leviticus 25:8-10)

I wrote about this passage last fall as I prepared to encounter my fiftieth High Holidays. I quoted then Rabbi Judah Loew of Prague (d. 1609), who explains why the shofar for the Jubilee year is sounded on Yom Kippur rather than Rosh Hashanah, as we might have expected: “The Jubilee and Yom Kippur—the two are really one. For the Jubilee is the return of each individual to their original place of security, to be as it was in the beginning. And so too with Yom Kippur: everyone returns to their original place of security as the Holy Blessed One atones for them.” (Gur Aryeh Behar, s.v. “Mimashma”)

“Everyone returns to their original place of security.” Or, as Angelou might have put it, home: “The ache for home lives in all of us, the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.” While the Jubilee envisions this, perhaps in the Torah’s own daydream, as a physical return home, the Yom Kippur dimension makes clear that, as in my own experience, home is not only or perhaps even primarily a place, but a state of being. Again, Angelou articulates it best: “I believe we feel safest when we go inside ourselves and find home, a place where we belong and maybe the only place we really do.”

“The land must not be sold in perpetuity,” cautions the Holy One, “for the land is Mine, and you are strangers and sojourners with Me” (Leviticus 25:23). I hear in Angelou an evocation of the Sefat Emet, who interprets this passage to mean that “in this world, we must be like strangers—we must know that our essence is from something beyond only the physicality of this world… ‘The land must not be sold in perpetuity’ suggests that we must not become fully estranged and removed from our supernatural roots.”

There is much more to say, of course, which is why I’m turning to this theme repeatedly in these writings. But it’s time to sum up this piece, and I cannot do so without expressing my profound gratitude to the many people who have aided and supported me for this first half-century, and the Source of Life. I have been blessed in far too many ways to count. I pray that the coming years will enable me to repay the many extraordinary gifts I have received—and to help us all to be and feel more truly, deeply at home.

For Reflection & Conversation

• When you think of positive sensory images from home, what comes to mind? What do you notice about how you feel?

• How does the idea of returning to home, physically or spiritually, feel in your body and mind?