Rosh Hashanah 5778: Home and Welcoming

“You are walking through the world half asleep. It isn’t just that you don’t know who you are and that you don’t know how or why you got here. It’s worse than that; these questions never even arise. It is as if you are in a dream.

Then the walls of the great house that surrounds you crumble and fall. You tumble out onto a strange street, suddenly conscious of your estrangement and your homelessness.

A great horn sounds, calling you to remembrance, but all you can remember is how much you have forgotten.”

These are the opening lines of Rabbi Alan Lew’s extraordinary book, This is Real and You are Completely Unprepared: “The Days of Awe as a Journey of Transformation”

In Lew’s book, the metaphor of home – both the destruction of the home that we know and, eventually, the journey to a home that is not a home, a sukkah – plays a central role.

This time of year at Northwestern, it’s not just the Jewish holidays that bring home to mind.

Last week, we welcomed hundreds of first-year students to Northwestern, many of them away from home on their own for the first time. Away from the home they have known, and about to make a new home here.

At the same time, second-year students and others returned with different perspectives. They walk around Evanston and see all of those purple ’21 shirts and wonder, “Who are all of these people invading my home?” The more self-reflective might wonder, “Was that me a year ago? How could I have been walking around with hardly a clue?”

Yet the transformation, the sense of being ‘home’, can be nearly immediate. My wife Claire mentioned to me that she saw a student she is advising the day after move-in and that student seemed completely disoriented and, in fact, shell-shocked. But within two days the same student looked quite OK, and much more at home, at ease in her new surroundings.

What makes a place a home? And does a home have to even be a place?

Is home the place where we are born? The place where we grew up? The place where we are married? The place our children are born? Where our parents are buried? Where we’ll be buried?

Or is home simply the place where we love and are loved at any given moment in our lives?

Claire and I met in Jerusalem, were engaged and married in Boston, yet neither of those places is really our home. Evanston is now home, and – though I’ve lived 40 of my 47 years in other places – it’s more a home for me than any other. Perhaps this is because Jacob and Ethan were born in Evanston Hospital. Perhaps it’s because Claire is from here, and her parents still live just a few miles up Sheridan Road in her childhood home in Glencoe.

Or perhaps it’s because I’m helping to create a “home away from home” on this campus for Jewish students and non-Jewish students alike – at our Hillel. Though I sometimes bristle at the cliché of “home away from home”, I’m proud that students feel at home at Hillel, and I and my wonderful staff and student leaders spend countless hours trying to make it a more welcoming home to all. We’ve put in the nice TV, the keurigs upstairs (and downstairs), and the free food texting service, but we also have the friendly supportive adults who ask “How are you?” and actually care about the answer.

We care because we understand that, wherever we are, we want to feel at home.

Whenever I take off in an airplane, I say the Traveler’s Prayer (Tefillat ha-Derekh) and ask for a safe journey and a safe return, but I also add a very personal plea. “God, let me return home to Claire and Jacob and Ethan. Let me be OK. Let them be OK. Let me make it home.”

And when I say that I don’t mean Hillel. Or Evanston, or Chicago. I mean the people I love the most.

Or, as Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros sing:

“Home, let me come home
Home is wherever I'm with you
Home is wherever I'm with you”

Don’t get me wrong -- physical h

omes do matter.

During the past few weeks. It has been heartbreaking and overwhelming to watch images of the ruined homes of thousands of people in the wake of Hurricanes Harvey in Texas and Irma and now Maria in the Caribbean and in Florida, and the massive earthquakes In Mexico.

(And, no, this is not a segue into how these are possible signs of the apocalypse. Perhaps for another   time).

I’ve spent hours listening to and reading heartbreaking stories. Stories of people who fled Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and moved to Houston, only to have their homes in Houston destroyed by Harvey. The story of a guy who put irreplaceable family photos on the highest places in the house when they evacuated, now wishing that he had taken those pictures with him.

We see our homes as places of safety, of security, where we can go to be warm, dry, and taken care of. And these hurricanes and storms remind us how flimsy and tenuous these physical structures are in the face of nature’s raw power.

I haven’t just been obsessing about physical houses, but also the homes of our identity – communal homes, and national homes.

This extraordinary political year has left many of us wondering what is the nature of this country that we call “home”. Is this really our home? Whatever your political leanings, the results of last November 9 were a seismic shock wave to our sense of national identity. (Again, just a reminder -- this is not a talk about signs of the apocalypse)

Last fall, many of us felt the fragility of what it means to consider our nation our home. After the election of Donald Trump to become President of the United States, many were stunned. But for some, especially immigrants and Muslims who have been the targets of unwelcoming rhetoric and worse, it has meant a very real sense that the nation they considered home might not really be a safe harbor, after all.

But how do we make a fragile home into a safe harbor, anyway? First, we recognize that all homes are fragile.

Rabbi Alan Lew instructs us on how the process of teshuvah actually brings us to a deep recognition of this fragility. He says,

Our journey starts at Tisha B'Av, the day we remember the destruction of the Temple.

Months later, at the end of the journey, we're sitting in another broken house, the sukkah.

It’s stunning to me that the end of the journey, rather than bringing us to a home that is complete, instead places us in a home that is not really a home. As Lew notes,

“So it is that the sukkah, with its broken lines, its open roof, its walls that don’t quite surround us,

exposes the idea of a house as an illusion. The idea of a house is that it gives us security, shelter, haven from the storm. But no house can really offer us protection from the disorder that is always lurking all around us. No shell we put between us and the world can ever really keep us secure from it. And we know this. We never really believed in this illusion. That’s why we never felt truly secure in it…..

This is raw. It’s challenging. But Lew concludes…

…In the sukkah, a house that is open to the world, a house that freely acknowledges that it cannot be the basis of our security, we let go of this need. The illusion of protection falls away, and suddenly we are flush with our life, feeling our life, following our life.

But how to square this tension ? We recognize that a home is an illusion of protection, but we need that illusion. Even if it is a tentative security, we need that security.

It is not only the structure itself that makes a “home”. Home is also how safe and comfortable we feel, how much we feel that we belong there. We don’t want to ever feel too safe, because we know permanent safety is not realistic. But we want to feel a modicum of comfort, a modicum of safety, and a modicum of belonging.

We want to feel welcome. And in order to feel welcome, be welcome, we ourselves have to be welcoming. We have to be welcomers.

The first Jew, Abraham, understood this. We’re told in a midrash in Avot D'Rabbi Natan 7:17a

Let your house be open; let the poor be members of your household. Let a person’s house be open to the north and to the south and to the east and to the west, even as Abraham’s house was, for Abraham made four doors to his house, that the poor might not be troubled to go round the house, but that each would find they faced a door as they approached . . .

This is beautiful. And Abraham’s tent is a model of welcoming.

But on Rosh Hashanah, we see a glimpse of just how complicated being welcoming can be, even for Abraham.

We read in Genesis 21:

Sarah saw the son whom Hagar the Egyptian had borne to Abraham playing.

She said to Abraham, “Cast out that slave-woman and her son, for the son of that slave shall not share in the inheritance with my son Isaac.”

11

וַיֵּ֧רַע הַדָּבָ֛ר מְאֹ֖ד בְּעֵינֵ֣י אַבְרָהָ֑ם עַ֖ל אוֹדֹ֥ת בְּנֽוֹ׃

The matter was very evil in the eyes of Abraham, for it concerned a son of his.

The matter was very evil in the eyes of Abraham, for it concerned a son of his, Ishmael. And it also concerned the mother of that son, Hagar. It concerned two human beings who were in Abraham’s care, who he was about to cast out into the desert, driving them from the only home they have known.

Even Abraham, famous for his tent open in all four directions to the traveler who might journey his way, so aware of the needs of the nomad perhaps because he was a wanderer, fails here to provide the safety and security of home to those in his care.

Having a home that is a haven, a place of welcoming guests, the Talmud tells us, is not just a nice thing to do. It is a core human value. In Shabbat 127b, Rabbi Yehuda said in the name of Rav, "Welcoming guests is greater than receiving the face of the Shechina (the Divine presence)

The Maharal, Rabbi Yehuda Loew of Prague, tells us, ““Understand this the following way: One welcomes guests because one honors the human who was created in the image of God, and this is considered to be a great thing”

The guest is a human being created in the image of God. And often the guest is really a stranger who you do not yet know but who you welcome into your home.

In order to feel welcome, we have to be welcoming. In order to feel at home, we must help others to feel at home. We must remember the stranger, for we were strangers. And at any given moment we could be strangers again.

As we think about our homes, our communities, our nation, and our world on the cusp of this new year, let us ponder what kind of home we want to create for ourselves, for our classmates and friends, for our families, and for and with our fellow travelers on this planet.

And perhaps we’ll ponder these questions as we sit in the sukkah – perhaps the (shameless plug) Hillel sukkah – and rebuild our broken hearts with the hope that comes in the New year.

As we begin 5778 and this new year at Northwestern, Claire and I (and Jacob and Ethan) look forward to welcoming many of you students into our home just a few minutes from here on Church Street.

Hillel looks forward to welcoming you and to you helping us to welcome all into our vibrant and diverse community.

And I hope we will all strive toward creating communities  that feel like a home, and a nation that is welcoming, compassionate, and full of love.

I’ll leave the last word to those brilliant modern Talmudic scholars, Rav Simon and Rav Garfunkel, who so aptly put it:

Homeward bound

I wish I was

Homeward bound

Home where my thought’s escaping

Home where my music’s playing

Home where my love lies waiting

Silently for me.

Silently for me.

Shana tova u’metuka. May you have a sweet, happy, and welcoming New Year.

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