Happy birthday to me! I’m in the midst of turning 50. My birthday on the Jewish calendar was last week, my birthday on the Gregorian calendar is next week. As my teacher Rabbi Dov Linzer remarked when I saw him the other day, “Some people refer to that as chol hamoed,” the intermediate days of the festival. Thank you in advance for all your good wishes.
Having a birthday in mid-May has long meant that I grow a year older in the midst of an emotionally rich time. Spring is in full bloom. Walking to elementary school in my neighborhood growing up, I would pass the flowering crabapple trees that always blossomed this week, loudly displaying their pink petals and spraying their sweet fragrance into the air.
When I arrived at school, there was a sense of wistfulness as the academic year was about to end and no one, not even the teachers, really wanted to be inside. The environment was one of end-of-year ceremonies, concerts, proms and their attendant angst about romantic relationships, graduations, and the mad dash to summer and its seeming liberation—along with, in high school, the anxiety of final exams.
All of that is part of my personal coding around my birthday.
So, it’s probably not surprising that I’ve found myself daydreaming about my childhood home more frequently in recent weeks. Images of those crabapple trees and their scent have been wafting through my mind. In meditation I’ve found my memory calling up unbidden the aroma of our family’s house, the smell of my dad’s pipe, the feel of our living room’s pea soup green shag carpet on my bare feet.
That has led me to wonder, what’s going on here? Is this nostalgia operating? I remembered a quotation from the scholar Svetlana Boym in her book, The Future of Nostalgia (2001): “At first glance, nostalgia is a longing for a place, but actually it is a yearning for a different time—the time of our childhood, the slower rhythms of our dreams.” But don’t get too comfortable, because Boym critiques that: “In a broader sense, nostalgia is rebellion against the modern idea of time, the time of history and progress. The nostalgic desires to obliterate history and turn it into private or collective mythology, to revisit time like space, refusing to surrender to the irreversibility of time that plagues the human condition.”
Maybe. But I don’t think this is me mounting resistance, at least not actively. It’s something else, perhaps closer to Maya Angelou in A Letter to My Daughter: “Thomas Wolfe warned in the title of America’s great novel that ‘you can’t go home again.’ I enjoyed the book, but I never agreed with the title. I believe that one can never leave home. I believe that one carries the shadows, the dreams, the fears and dragons of home under one’s skin, at the extreme corners of one’s eyes and possibly in the gristle of the earlobe.”
As I ride the carousel for my fiftieth turn about the sun, I find Angelou’s words more resonant. These sensory images of home—not only or even primarily visual, but aural, tactile, and especially olfactory—are finding their way to the surface, seemingly beckoning me to revisit them. Or, perhaps, more emphatically reminding me of the incessant demand to reckon with home and my experience of being at-home.
“You shall count off seven weeks of years—seven times seven years—so that the period of seven weeks of years gives you a total of forty-nine years,” the Torah commands. “Then you shall sound the shofar; in the seventh month, on the tenth day of the month—the Day of Atonement—you shall have the shofar sounded throughout your land and you shall hallow the fiftieth year. You shall proclaim release throughout the land for all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you: each of you shall return to your holding and each of you shall return to your family. (Leviticus 25:8-10)
I wrote about this passage last fall as I prepared to encounter my fiftieth High Holidays. I quoted then Rabbi Judah Loew of Prague (d. 1609), who explains why the shofar for the Jubilee year is sounded on Yom Kippur rather than Rosh Hashanah, as we might have expected: “The Jubilee and Yom Kippur—the two are really one. For the Jubilee is the return of each individual to their original place of security, to be as it was in the beginning. And so too with Yom Kippur: everyone returns to their original place of security as the Holy Blessed One atones for them.” (Gur Aryeh Behar, s.v. “Mimashma”)
“Everyone returns to their original place of security.” Or, as Angelou might have put it, home: “The ache for home lives in all of us, the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.” While the Jubilee envisions this, perhaps in the Torah’s own daydream, as a physical return home, the Yom Kippur dimension makes clear that, as in my own experience, home is not only or perhaps even primarily a place, but a state of being. Again, Angelou articulates it best: “I believe we feel safest when we go inside ourselves and find home, a place where we belong and maybe the only place we really do.”
“The land must not be sold in perpetuity,” cautions the Holy One, “for the land is Mine, and you are strangers and sojourners with Me” (Leviticus 25:23). I hear in Angelou an evocation of the Sefat Emet, who interprets this passage to mean that “in this world, we must be like strangers—we must know that our essence is from something beyond only the physicality of this world… ‘The land must not be sold in perpetuity’ suggests that we must not become fully estranged and removed from our supernatural roots.”
There is much more to say, of course, which is why I’m turning to this theme repeatedly in these writings. But it’s time to sum up this piece, and I cannot do so without expressing my profound gratitude to the many people who have aided and supported me for this first half-century, and the Source of Life. I have been blessed in far too many ways to count. I pray that the coming years will enable me to repay the many extraordinary gifts I have received—and to help us all to be and feel more truly, deeply at home.
For Reflection & Conversation
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When you think of positive sensory images from home, what comes to mind? What do you notice about how you feel?
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How does the idea of returning to home, physically or spiritually, feel in your body and mind?