Conventional wisdom tells us you shouldn’t make too many big life changes at once. Two weeks after I finished rabbinical school in the summer of 2005, Natalie and I welcomed our second child. And two weeks later we moved halfway across the country so I could start a new job. We bought our first home, we bought a new car. All to say that we made a lot of big life changes all at once. Sometimes, it seems, you just can’t abide by conventional wisdom.
A lot goes into furnishing a new place. Up until that time, we had eaten our Shabbat meals at a desk-cum-table from Ikea that could seat six in small folding chairs if you really smushed. But knowing that we’d be hosting students from campus, and generally just feeling like it was time, we splurged and purchased a beautiful chocolate brown dining room table and eight chairs (with leaves in, it seats 12). Over two decades later, it’s still the table we gather around for Shabbat and holiday dinners, for playing board games and making craft projects, and, in the age of Zoom, for a good chunk of my workday.
Yet of all the memories that have been formed around our table, the most lasting one is the earliest: when we sat down to our first Shabbat meal there and I looked around at everything—our family, this new place that was ours, this life that now felt less precarious and more secure, and this table that felt solid and real and lasting. I sighed, and said out loud, “Now I feel at home.” (My mother-in-law, who was there, likes to remind me of this story whenever she visits. I can’t blame her.)
Beginning with Parashat Terumah, the Torah invites us into an extended reflection on many of these same themes: furniture, yes, but more generally objects, place, the material world, home. Numerous commentators point out the significance of the verse, “And they shall make me a sanctuary, that I may dwell among them” (Exodus 25:8)—among them, not it. From the very outset, the Torah is clear that we avoid the delusion that the Holy One resides inside the Mishkan or the objects within it. Its ultimate purpose is to help us recognize and manifest the Divine in our midst—something, perhaps, like my experience with our Shabbat table.
This meta issue of spiritual orientation reflects the story hovering in the background, namely that of the Golden Calf. While Nachmanides and many others follow the chronological order of events and thus understand the Mishkan as God’s original plan, Rashi draws on a midrashic tradition that inverts the sequence. This sees the Golden Calf as having taken place before the commandment to construct the Mishkan. If that’s the case, then the Mishkan can be understood more as a concession to our human need for physical places and objects through which to experience the divine Presence.
Yet according to either reading, the calf represents a profound warning about the spiritual and moral dangers that lurk in our relationship with material things. Rabbi Marc-Alain Ouaknin writes, “The temptation of idolatry is strong—one need only remember the golden calf, made right after the Revelation; it is the temptation of appearances, of Presence… The idol… reassures; the idol brings things closer.” In a similar vein, Avivah Zornberg quotes Jacques Derrida, who writes about the notion of caressing, i.e. holding neither too tightly nor too loosely, somewhere between seizing and letting go: “The caress, like contact, is sensibility. But the caress transcends the sensible… The caress consists in seizing upon nothing, in soliciting what ceaselessly escapes its form… in soliciting what slips away as though it were not yet. It searches, it forages. It is not an intentionality of disclosure but of search: a movement unto the invisible.”
There is a profound seductiveness at either end of the spectrum: The seeming permanence of physical objects can offer the reassurance of presence in a world in which presence is fleeting; the non-physical nature of an entirely spiritual life can offer transcendence from a world mired in physicality. Zornberg rightly suggests that this registers the depth of the human struggle. Reminding us of the Israelites’ cry at Massah (Ex. 17:17), “Is there (yesh) God in our midst or not?” (literally, “or else nothingness [ayin]“), she writes, “Beneath all the fluctuations, the myriad shapes of desire, this is the radical question.” At root, she suggests, it is our desire to both hold the Divine and be held in the Divine embrace that drives us—and, potentially, consumes us.
My last two reflections have named specific issues and people in the news. Regular readers will know that that’s a bit unusual for me. Following the halakhic principle that three times makes a hazakah, i.e. a presumption, I’m going to avoid directly commenting on current events this week for fear that that will become my default M.O. But I would certainly suggest that we can and should read current events through this lens. Because I think Zornberg, and our larger tradition of Torah, are so profoundly helpful in offering this understanding. She writes that we seek lives of density or meaning; I say something similar, that we seek to feel profoundly at home in the universe. Given that we are this glorious and messy combination of both bodies and heart-mind-spirits, we engage in spiritual practices to help us do that—to avoid desecrating our “home” through our need to seize and hold, and simultaneously to avoid escaping the demands and joys of “home” through not engaging in the housework.
For Reflection & Conversation
When, if ever, have you felt a profound sense of being spiritually at home? Do you feel that way in a place that’s also a physical home for you? Why or why not?