Safe at Home (Huqat-Balak 5786)

There is a serious debate among knowledgeable people about a very important question: What is the best baseball movie of all time? In my experience the choices often come down to Field of Dreams (starring Kevin Costner and featuring an immortal monologue by James Earl Jones that is guaranteed to bring the hardest-edged person to tears) and Bull Durham (also starring Kevin Costner—I know, I know—and featuring an immortal dialogue with Tim Robbins about the effective use of platitudes in press conferences). 

In my own humble opinion, both of these views are misguided. The best baseball movie of all time, hands down, is The Natural, a 1984 adaptation (well, a transformation) of Bernard Malamud’s 1952 debut novel of the same name, starring Robert Redford as the aging wunderkind Roy Hobbs, with an incredible orchestral score by Randy Newman. 

My family got our first VCR (that’s video cassette recorder for those who may not remember or never heard of it) when I was seven years old, and I watched The Natural many, many, many times. I probably don’t really need to watch the movie anymore, because the whole thing seems like it lives in my memory. I can see young Roy playing catch at home with his father on their family farm, with Newman’s Coplandesque clarinet playing underneath them. I can visualize the scene in the hospital where Roy tells his childhood sweetheart Iris (Glenn Close) that he’s glad she never sold their family farm down the road from his, because “It’s home.” And (spoiler alert) I can picture Roy rounding the bases towards home after his final, dramatic home run to win the pennant for the New York Knights, the exploding stadium lights raining down on the infield.

In that final scene, the picture actually fades out just after we catch a glimpse of a happily weepy Iris as Roy approaches home plate to the embrace of his ecstatic teammates. The screen fades to black and then reemerges with Roy standing in the fields of Iris’s family farm, playing catch with their son (also spoiler alert), Iris looking on—a family that is, after a long odyssey, at home.

Bart Giamatti, the late Commissioner of Major League baseball, was a professor of English Literature at Yale before his career change. He is among the best baseball writers I know of, and he was fond of pointing out the Hero’s Journey that baseball enacts in every at-bat. “Baseball is… entirely about going home,” he once said. “It is the only game you ever heard of where you want to get back to where you started (all the other games are territorial; you want to get his or her territory; not baseball). Baseball simply wants to get you from here back around to here.” Roy coming to home plate and coming back home on the farm—these are one in the same.

Yet in the same talk, Giamatti observed that “Home is a concept, not a place; [it is] a state of mind.” If that’s the case, then the journey home is not only about reaching the physical destination of home plate or the farm, but also about arriving at—or perhaps simply realizing—the sense that one is at-home right here and now.

“No harm is in sight for Jacob, no woe in view for Israel. YHVH their God is with them, and their Sovereign’s acclaim in their midst,” says Balaam in one of his curses-turned-blessings (Num. 23:21). Rabbi Avraham Bornsztain (1838–1910), the Sokotchover Rebbe, comments that as long as we have the symbols of holiness—among them Shabbat, tzitzit, tefillin—then, like lost sheep finding our way home, we can sense that the Holy One is always with us. Or, as the Ba’al Shem Tov put it, we are never alone: “In every place we travel, and in every place we stand, YHVH is with us.” 

The story of our ancestor Jacob tells us as much. On his journey away from home he stops for the night to sleep and has his famous dream of a ladder ascending to heaven. The spot where his head rested is, according to tradition, the very same location as the Holy of Holies. Jacob calls this place—or is it a state of mind?—beit Elohim, the home of the Divine (Gen. 28:17) “God was in this place, and I did not know it”—that is, our awareness of the Divine, which is perhaps our deepest sense of feeling at home, is potentially available to us at all times, but we have to attune ourselves to be aware of it.

We always read Parashat Balak (or the double parasha of Huqat-Balak) just before the fast of the 17th of Tammuz, which Rabbi Alan Lew noted is the beginning of our journey through the fall holidays. In historical terms, it is the anniversary of the breaching of the walls of Jerusalem by the ancient Babylonians, culminating three weeks later with the destruction of the Beit Hamikdash—the sanctified spiritual home of the Holy One and the Jewish people—on Tisha b’Av. From that low point we rebuild our sense of home through Elul and Tishrei, ultimately experiencing a reimagined and renewed homecoming sitting in the sukkah. 

“The dream of the lost home must be one of the deepest of all human dreams,” Lew writes in a chapter entitled, Everywhere He Went, He Was Heading for Home. “Certainly it is the most ancient dream of the Jewish people, embodied in our national resolve to someday rebuild the Bayit—the Home—the Great Temple in Jerusalem. And,” he adds, “this dream is the basis of that most profound expression of the American psyche, the game of baseball, a game whose object is to leave home in order to return to it again, transformed by the time spent circling the bases.” Lew concludes the chapter by noting, “If you open yourself to them, these Holy Days carry you home.”

For Reflection & Conversation

• Do you associate feeling at home with a certain place? Certain people? To what extent do you feel you can be at home anywhere? What enables that? What prevents it? How, if at all, does your spiritual practice help?