For reasons that aren’t worth getting into, this week I found myself on the phone for 30 minutes with an insurance broker. It was time for new home and auto policies.
In the age of automated everything, talking on the phone with my new friend Brad felt positively quaint: we kibbitzed a bit, he talked about how different insurance companies work, we commiserated about a terrible weekend for Chicago sports teams. All the stuff you don’t get from a chatbot. It was nice.
In order to prepare a quote with comparable coverage to what we have now, Brad asked me about our existing policies. Thank God, these aren’t documents I have really had much occasion to look at. Upon inspection, I was struck by the language they use to describe an accident or other kind of event: it’s referred to as a “peril.” Fire, theft, tornadoes—they’re all perils.
Now, it’s not like you and I haven’t heard of that word. (I remember playing a Batman video game with my kids where you got points for saving a “citizen in peril.” Even kids know what peril is.) But it’s not really a word we tend to use in everyday speech. And it got me thinking about what it might have to tell us about the meaning of home.
Most fundamentally, perhaps, we might think of home as a place that is generally free from peril. Not entirely free, of course—that’s why we have insurance policies (which, by the way, I would argue are one of the great advances of human civilization, no joke). But generally, home is a place free from peril.
But that’s also a pretty minimalist definition. And it’s probably not a description of home so much as a definition of a different, related word: refuge. While refuge is necessary for home, it isn’t sufficient. Home is something more: warmer, more rooted, more long-term. Refuge is the most basic, elemental freedom from a violent world—and it is meant to be temporary, a waystation en route to a more durable sense of home.
Which brings us to Noah’s Ark, the archetype of refuge. Seeing that “the earth is filled with lawlessness”—which the Midrash describes as the utter breakdown of any sense of privacy or dignity—God tells Noah to make an ark in order to survive the coming flood. This is not a steerable ship, but more like a giant raft that will simply be able to ride the waves. It is a refuge, not a home, and Noah and his family and the animals are the original refugees.
The Torah’s word for ark is tevah, which also means “word.” The Hasidic tradition makes much of this intersection in meaning. The Ba’al Shem Tov comments on God’s instruction to “Noah and all your household” to enter the ark (Genesis 7:1): “This hints that a person must enter into every single word of Torah and prayer with all their strength and all their limbs (‘and all your household’) with self-sacrifice.”
But to me this raises the question: Are Torah and prayer, our sacred words, a refuge or a home? At various points in my life I have found them to be both. In moments of crisis, when it feels like the flood waters are rising and the chaos is swirling, the words of the tradition—along with its melodies and the many other deep layers of association they carry—have certainly provided a refuge, a life raft. But in the more frequent moments when, thank God, I have not been in crisis, I often find Torah and prayer to be homey, spacious, inviting me into conversation and exploration. This is territory I know, a place that feels familiar to me and yet also enables me to grow in wisdom, a place into which I love to invite guests (which is why I write these reflections every week—to invite you inside my home in the text).
At the same time, there can be something a little dangerous in taking all of that for granted. As the conversation with Brad the insurance agent reminded me, perils can happen. Applied to Torah, that can and should provide a check of humility on our self-assurance.
Which leads to another teaching on the same verse. After telling Noah to enter the ark with his household, the Holy One explains, “for you alone have I found righteous before me in this generation.” The Seer of Lublin comments: “If I hear from someone that so-and-so is a tzaddik (righteous person), I do not believe him, for “there is no righteous person on earth” (Ecclesiastes 7:20). And if a miracle occurs and the Holy One comes directly and says to me that I am righteous—like Noah—I will believe the Holy One only for that exact moment. For no person, even a complete tzaddik, is guaranteed what that will be in another moment, or what their nature and form will be then.”
A humbling teaching—and a potentially quite destabilizing one. Peril would seem to lurk all around, in the timeless words of Robert Bringhurst: “only an issue of whether the demons / work from the inside out or from the outside / in: the one / theological question.”
The Maggid of Koznitz puts it slightly differently. In the stories of Cain and Abel, the Generation of the Flood, and the Tower of Babel, “The Holy Blessed One wrote a kind of introduction to the Torah.” Drawing on the Mishnah’s teaching (Avot 4:21) that “Envy, lust, and ego/honor remove a person from the world,” he suggests that these are “stories about the three corrupt character traits—envy, lust, and ego/honor—that a person must uproot from within themselves before approaching the study and fulfillment of the Torah.”
What I find striking about these three negative middot is that they are all part of our internal boundary-making, the calibration of our sense of at-homeness in the world. Envy keeps us from living peacefully with one another. Lust is desire that is so out of control that we can’t channel it properly. And ego/honor (kavod) can lead us to stand on ceremony, to be more concerned with our status and station than with the truth of our lives. All three of these can lead us, God forbid, to wind up abusing others and causing harm to others and ourselves.
When we are in moments of acute distress, we need a refuge—an ark in which to weather the storm. Our Torah and our practices can provide that. But a refuge is, by definition, not meant to be a long-term solution. Living as a refugee, rather than as an image of the divine truly at home, is ultimately unsustainable and corrosive. Strikingly, so is taking home too much for granted. Perils do, in fact lurk. In our lives of Torah and spiritual practice, our aim is to hold all of it lightly, to live at home with ourselves and the memory of our lives as refugees.
For Reflection & Conversation
-
When, if ever, have you experienced the words or practices of Torah and Jewish life as a refuge? When have you experienced them as home?