My father, may he rest in peace, used to say that there were two vistas, two views on the road, which made him feel like he was coming home. One was driving south on US-23 towards Ann Arbor, where he lived most of his adult life, as the road slopes down towards the Huron River yielding a view of downtown and the University of Michigan. The other was heading east on Highway 1 in Israel, coming up the hill towards Jerusalem.
Though my parents and my older brothers lived for a year in Israel before I was born, and though my Dad visited many other times, that year was the only time he spent extended time living in the country. Yet there was something about driving up that hill that made him feel like he was coming home.
My guess is you likely have some views that evoke similar feelings in you: a landscape on a highway, a smell as you cross a threshold. If my social media feed is any indicator, my Dad was not alone in feeling like arriving at Ben-Gurion Airport, much less making that ascent up Highway 1, aroused deep feelings of homecoming–despite the fact that he didn’t actually live there.
Earlier this week, the Israeli religious singer Ishay Ribo played a concert at Madison Square Garden. Tens of thousands attended, with many expressing a feeling of solidarity and strength in being together in the midst of this profoundly difficult year. On the day after the concert, a friend of mine, who is a rabbi living in Israel, shared on Facebook that, as much as he was glad that people went to the concert, if they really cared about Israel they should be going not to 34th Street and Eighth Avenue, but making aliyah: “Bring Them Home isn’t just a slogan for the hostages,” he wrote. A lot of Israelis commented on his post, saying that they were grateful he had said what they were thinking. A few pointed out that not everyone has the means to be able to make the move.
To me, what the post most illuminated was the very deep animating tension of the idea of home in Jewish life. “Ki tavo el ha’aretz,” “When you come into the Land,” are the opening words of the Torah portion of Ki Tavo (Deut. 26:1-29:8). The land, of course, is Canaan–the land of Israel. It’s home. And yet, even just those words–“When you come into the land,” and the fact that the name of the land changes from Canaan to Israel, reflect tensions built into the very narrative of Jewish history we tell ourselves: Abraham came from a different land into this one; this people came out of Egypt into this land. It is as though the Torah wants us to be simultaneously at home and not fully at home. Perhaps that’s why it constantly reminds us to be mindful of our experience as strangers in a foreign land.
One of the great and necessary innovations of the ancient Rabbis, which was deepened and amplified by the Hasidic masters, was articulating a way of simultaneously longing for our ancestral homeland and being spiritually at home wherever we are. Ashrei yoshvei veitecha, Happy are those who dwell in Your house (Ps. 145:1), which we say three times a day in the traditional liturgy, can refer both to the beit hamikdash, the ancient Temple in Jerusalem, and, simultaneously, to the spot where you are right now as you read this. It is, I believe, not either/or but both/and.
This tension has been the incredible–and incredibly difficult–challenge and invitation of Jewish life and spiritual practice for virtually our entire existence as a people: to sense the Divine presence and long for it; to accept the moment as it is while also seeking to mend and improve it; to be at home and not-at-home, all at the same time. It is the challenge and invitation embodied in the sukkah, the ultimate destination of our spiritual journey of this season. May our practices help us to enter and live within it with strength, wisdom, and compassion.
