I said this, in part, because of my own experience as a student. In college, I lived across the street from the Hillel building. I have always been an early riser. Put those two facts together and it was easy for me to be a mainstay at morning minyan. I went dutifully every day for my first three years.
But in the fall of my senior year, in a moment I can still feel in my kishkes, I found myself davening, reciting the shemona esrei, the central prayer of the service, and I felt the bottom fall out from underneath me. Whoosh. Like Diana Morales trying to be an ice cream cone in Mr. Karp’s class in “A Chorus Line,” I realized that I felt nothing. With the passionate morality of a college student, I judged myself a hypocrite, put down my siddur, wrapped up my tefillin, turned and walked out of the room. I didn’t come back for weeks.
Decades later, I can still remember the profound feeling of estrangement of that moment. This practice, which had been such a home to me for years, suddenly felt foreign, and I felt out of place.
Eventually, I would come to recognize that experience through the work of the scholar Sharon Parks, whose book Big Questions, Worthy Dreams was and remains enormously influential to me. “To become a young adult in faith,” Parks writes, “is to discover in a critically aware, self-conscious manner the limits of inherited or otherwise socially received assumptions about how life works—what is ultimately true and trustworthy, and what counts—and to recompose meaning and faith on the other side of that discovery.” Emerging adulthood, she suggests, is a period marked by “transformations by which we may become fittingly at home in the universe.” (I note here that in both the phrases Big Questions and “at home in the universe,” Sharon seems to have seeded ideas that would become quite central to my own meaning-making and work in subsequent years—for which I am grateful.)
As I have gotten older, I have also come recognize that this cycle continues. While the stage of young adulthood might have its own particular contours, we continue to recompose our experience of home—what Parks and I would both characterize as faith—at every stage of life.
The Ninth of Av is centrally about the loss of home. Eicha, “Alas, lonely sits the city once full of people,” opens the Book of Lamentations. Jerusalem is described as “without ones to comfort her,” Judah “gone into exile,” the Jewish people “without a resting place.” Where once they—we—had experienced these dimensions of home, the profound destruction of this day has shattered that to pieces.
Rebuilding, reconstituting home, is a physical act, of course. The return described by the Psalmist, “When YHVH brought back those who returned to Zion” (Psalm 126), which we traditionally sing every Shabbat—that is undoubtedly a physical return, a geographic and material recomposition of home.
But/and: It is a spiritual return as well.
In Parashat Vaetchanan, Moses forecasts that “YHVH will scatter you among the peoples.” But, he says, “from there you will seek, and you will find YHVH your God, if only you search with all your heart and soul.” (Deuteronomy 4:27-29). Rabbi Simcha Bunim of Peshischa comments, “This is finding yourself. For you should know that you do not need to search for YHVH anywhere except inside your own heart, for divinity is within it. ‘And from there you will seek’—first, search there, in all of Creation, and you will find that the Holy One is in your heart, if only you will refine the traits of your character.”
One of the lessons of Tisha B’Av, perhaps, is that if we don’t pay attention to the home for divinity within our hearts, our physical homes can become empty, something like an idol. A synagogue without a soul is just a building. Jerusalem without life-affirming character traits is a hollow shell. A Jewish body mouthing words without feeling or connection is unfulfilled.
Which brings me back to my story. How did I find my way back to minyan—and start to recompose that sense of home? I tried studying Maimonides’s 13 Principles of Faith with a rabbi, but that didn’t really help. I read books, to no avail. Ultimately it was a conversation with a friend who wasn’t actively Jewish. “You know where you come from,” he said to me. “That is an amazing inheritance.”
What he was really saying to me was this: Focus less on the externalities for a minute and listen to your heart, and you’ll recognize you have a home. You might need to change things a bit—some rearranging, some redecorating, maybe even moving to a different house or a different neighborhood—but you have a home.
On the Jewish calendar, we’ve begun our ascent from this low point of dislocation and homelessness towards the renewed relationship with home we are to experience in the sukkah. May these weeks be ones of reflection, repair, relationship, and renewal—for each of us individually, and for all of us together.
For Reflection & Conversation
- When, if ever, have you felt your faith really challenged? What did it feel like? Who or what helped you navigate it? How, if at all, did it lead to a different understanding of home for you?