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?