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