When Is Home?

Our journeys can take us to many wonderful and not-so-wonderful places. How do we find a sense of home along the way?

Parashat Ki Tisa

To know where you’re going, you need to know where you’re from. So, where are you from?

I am asked this question many times and I ask it of many different people. It seems to be an easy question with an easy answer. And at one point it was. But that simple question, “where are you from?” can be answered in many different ways.

When I talk to anyone outside of Pittsburgh, I’m from here, because this is where I live. But most Yinzers would not accept that answer, so when I’m here, I say that I’m from New Jersey, where I was born and raised, and where my mother’s family has lived for over a hundred years. But I’m also from Israel, where I’m a citizen and where my father’s family has lived for over a hundred years. Both of my parents’ families came from various places in Europe—Russia, Latvia, Moldova, Czech Republic, Hungary. And my ancestors who were from the Czech Republic were originally from Spain and left after a wave of pre-Inquisition pogroms. So my ancestral home is Spain.

And when I looked up one of my more famous ancestors from Spain, his lineage traces back to the prophet Samuel. And the prophet Samuel descended from Levi, Jacob’s son. Which means that, originally, my family is from Canaan, and before that, Ur, depending on how literally you want to understand the biblical narrative. And if I go all the back to Jacob and his grandparents Abraham and Sarah, then I guess I can trace my lineage back to Adam in the Garden of Eden.

Pittsburgh, New Jersey, Israel, Eastern Europe, Spain, Judea, Canaan, Ur, Eden. I’m from all of these places. Yet, where’s home?

There’s a cycle in my family history—paralleling Jewish history—of home and exile. No matter where my family has lived, and no matter how long, the family left. Sometimes the leaving was a much desired choice: my father’s maternal grandfather left the United States for Palestine to build up the future State of Israel. My mother’s great-grandfather eagerly moved his family from Kansas to New Jersey where there was a larger Jewish community. But more often than not, leaving was the best choice given the circumstances—pogroms in Spain in the 14th century led my ancestors to move to Eastern Europe. Pogroms in Eastern Europe in the 19th century led my great-great-grandparents to move to the US or pre-state Israel.

Each generation looks back on the family’s previous homelands with a sort of longing for what had been. Each generation makes pilgrimages to those homelands, hoping to transcend the generations of time that have passed by being in the same space, hoping to feel part of a chain. Hoping to know where we’re from so we can know where we’re going.

Our ancestors in this week’s parashah, Ki Tisa, seem pretty confused by where they’re from, where they’re going, and even how they got to their current place. Ostensibly, they’re Israelites, the descendants of Jacob, who were promised the land given by God to Abraham and Sarah. But despite relatively recent ancestral connections to the Promised Land, they seem to see themselves as being from Egypt. Not necessarily Egyptians—that’s a tribal and religious identity that they don’t claim—but most, if not all of them have spent their entire lives in Egypt. And then there are the actual Egyptians and other folks who joined the Israelites as they were leaving Egypt.

So are the Israelites going home? Or are they leaving home? Have they been exiled or are they returning from exile? How long will they be stuck in the wilderness in between the home they knew and the home they don’t know? Will the Promised Land feel like home when they arrive? How will they manage to feel at home when they arrive and what are they supposed to do until they get there?

The Israelites try their best to make the wilderness a home—they build tents and structures, including a tabernacle for God to have a physical home among them as well. God knows they need this physical, tangible representation in their midst. But God also knows that this is not sufficient, the Israelites long for the home they knew, so they need to feel home. Now.

Our text flips the answer on its head and teaches us that home is not where but when. Both before and after the primary story of the Golden Calf, the parashah reminds us to observe Shabbat. We even have the text of V’shamru, which we sang earlier, in this parashah. It’s as if the Torah is telling us that home is not found in the realm of space, but in the realm of time. Wherever we are, we can always find home, because it comes every week.

The first Shabbat, it turns out, was the gift of home following the very first exile in the Torah. Anyone know what that first exile was? It was when Adam and Eve were banished from Eden. For them, it was the only home they ever knew, even if they were only there for a few hours, according to a midrash. Although the story of Adam and Eve follows the creation of Shabbat, the traditional commentators understood the story of Adam and Eve to be a detailed explanation of what happened on the sixth day of Creation. On the morning of the sixth day, the midrash tells us, God formed Adam from the dust of the earth. By afternoon, God had formed Eve as well. Before the sun set, Adam & Eve had eaten of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Bad, and, as punishment—lest they become like gods, living forever AND knowing good and bad—Adam and Eve were forced to leave. And they were prevented from returning by an ever-turning, fiery sword.

Exiled and afraid as the sun started to set and the world became darker, Adam and Eve began to cry. So God taught them to make fire. And God gave them another gift to comfort them in exile: Shabbat—a taste of Eden every week. Adam and Eve would always long for what they could no longer have, but Shabbat returned them to that time.

To know where we’re going, we need to know where we’re from. On Shabbat, we transcend space by being in the same time. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, the great thinker and activist of the last century, suggests that on Shabbat we can experience eternity in a day (The Sabbath). We experience where we’re from, where we are and where we’re going, all in one day.

Even though the Israelites in our parashah are in the wilderness, exiled from Egypt, the home they knew, and not yet in the Promised Land, the home they will receive, they are given the chance to be at home, at rest, at peace, in the time of Shabbat. They carry the soul-memory of Eden with them throughout their lives, especially on this journey through the wilderness. While they long for a physical home, the time to experience home comes with them as long as they remember to observe it.

Wherever you’re from, wherever you’re going—whether this is your lifelong home or a stop along the journey—you also have the soul-memory of home that goes all the way back to Eden. So just imagine it. What does it look like? What does it sound like? What does it smell like? What does its fruit taste like? What does it feel like? And most importantly, how can you experience your Eden on Shabbat?

Even though we are far away from the Eden of Adam and Eve, even though we are far away from the homelands of our ancestors, even if we are far away from our own birthplaces or homelands, we can still be connected to our first home right in our homes—with the gift of Shabbat.