Over the summer I sat my eldest son down for an important conversation. “Listen,” I said, and proceeded to play a recording of Leonard Bernstein conducting the closing section of Mahler’s Symphony No. 3.

Jonah was a film major in college and, former music major that I am, I have taken it upon myself to ensure that he knows something about the classical roots on which movie composers like John Williams and Hans Zimmer draw. In addition to that, I had made a summer project for myself of listening to the complete Mahler symphony recordings that Bernstein made in the last decade of his life, which are among the cultural treasures of the late twentieth century.

In case you don’t know Mahler’s Third (or even if you do), listen here starting about 1:37:00. (Still Bernstein conducting, but a different recording.) It’s gorgeous. Mahler described it as the song of divine love. And if you listen starting at 1:43:30, over the next 30 seconds you’ll hear just about the most beautiful, full resolution of anything in your life. The music comes home, emphatically, to a D-Major chord that just goes on and on, reinforced by thumping timpani. This is a triumphant homecoming into a divine embrace. If you experience tears, they are likely tears of joy at the magnificence of the sound.

In the years after he composed the Third, Mahler suffered quite a bit: a near-death illness, the loss of a child, and continuing health problems. All of that affected his music. By the time he composed his Ninth Symphony a decade or so later, he was acutely aware of his mortality (and, in fact, he died the following year). If you listen to the final minutes (here’s Bernstein again; start around 1:18:00), you may find it conveys a kind of homecoming into a divine embrace, but in a very different way.

Mahler referred to this adagio movement as his farewell to the world, and thus there is nothing grand or triumphant here. No brass or timpani, just the faint sound of small gestures in the strings, the last gentle breaths of a human life. And there’s only the subtlest of resolutions: the violins end on an A-flat, part of the final D-flat Major chord but markedly not its home note, as though they are hanging in the ether. When performed live, the ending is one of the most magical moments in a concert hall, as thousands of people—including the musicians and the conductor—are in a netherworld, not knowing whether the music is still going or whether it has ended. If tears come, they are tears of a sadder, wiser sort.

Mahler famously observed, “I am thrice homeless: as a native of Bohemia in Austria, as an Austrian among Germans, and as a Jew throughout the world. Everywhere an intruder, never welcomed.” Yet he wrote these symphonies in which homecoming is such a profound theme. In this season of teshuva—returning to our deepest sense of home—I find myself reflecting on him, on the contrasting endings of these two symphonies, and what they might help us understand about our own experience of finding our way home.

“The paths of teshuva,” writes Maimonides (Laws of Repentance 2:4), include calling out to God, giving charity, changing our actions, and changing our names (“as if to say, ‘I am a different person’”). Finally, and perhaps summarily, one may “exile oneself from one’s home. Exile atones for sin because it causes a person to be submissive, humble, and meek of spirit.”

While the first part of the Rambam’s list is drawn from one Talmudic passage (Rosh Hashanah 16b), the last part quotes another (Sanhedrin 37b), which records three opinions about the efficacy of exile: The first says it atones for half a sin, the second for a whole sin, and the third, attributed to Rabbi Yochanan, says “exile atones for all transgressions.” Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz, perhaps with Maimonides in mind, explains Rabbi Yochanan to mean that exile “renders the sinner like a new person.”

Exile is the polar opposite of being at home. Yet, the Rambam teaches, it is potentially a necessary part of the spiritual journey of homecoming. Part of the task of this season between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, is to discern whether we are at home—and if not, what, if any, forms of exile the route home might entail.

“Where penitents (ba’alei teshuva) stand, the completely righteous cannot stand” (Brachot 34b). Rabbi Simcha Bunim of Peshischa comments: “A completely righteous person—that is, one who sees themselves as entirely complete and perfect in their words and actions—such a person is at a lower level than a penitent whose heart is broken within them.”

While Reb Simcha Bunim doesn’t use the words exile and home here, I think we can hear him playing in a similar key: If we are so sure that we are at home—in control of our lives and thus happy and satisfied with our own goodness—it could well be that we’re fooling ourselves. Look a little harder, perhaps. There is always more teshuva to do.

And yet we also need that self-assurance. We need to know we’re at home. As the Mishnah says about the search for chametz in our homes on the night before Pesach, we have to draw a line somewhere, otherwise ein l’davar sof, there would be no end.

In the conclusion of Mahler’s Third, I hear a homecoming that is strong and sturdy, a sense of home that doesn’t second-guess itself. At times we need that sense of at-homeness. Yet the end of Mahler’s Ninth offers a softer, subtler, perhaps more mature kind of homecoming, one that is sure of itself but doesn’t broadcast it, something more akin to the words of Rabbi Shefa Gold’s classic chant: “I am resting in this Divine embrace, timeless time and placeless place.”

Among the opportunities Yom Kippur invites us into is a rehearsal of our own death. That is one of the ways to understand abstaining from the quintessential physical behaviors that make us human: eating and drinking, wearing shoes, bathing, having sex, on top of the observances of Shabbat. On one level, that prefiguring of death is an experience of exile from our regular lives. On another, the exile opens up a path to come home—reborn, renewed, and capable of allowing our lives to be a sukkat shalom: a home gently holding and held in a Divine embrace. May we find our way to that home this year.

For Reflection & Conversation:

• As you listen to the endings of Mahler’s Third and Ninth Symphonies, what do you hear in them? If you hear a kind of homecoming, what does that evoke for you—and how might it inform your experience of Yom Kippur?