2019 Second Day of Rosh Hashanah
We have a tradition at Agudas Achim that congregants offer words of wisdom on the second day of Rosh Hashanah in place of a the rabbi's sermon. Rabbi Leora asked three congregants to share their thoughts about home. Here are teachings from three of our congregants.
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Return to 2019 High Holiday Speeches.
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What is home? A neighborhood? A city? A community? A physical structure?
To me it is all of the above Home is described in many ways through many idioms. Home is where the heart is : Brooklyn in my birthplace and will always be home. My family still resides there. It is where my most formative years were spent. (First love, first heartbreak) A place where friendships developed that exist to this day, albeit, long distance. A place unlike any other place. A wonderful place in which to grow up, an amazing city that promotes culture and diversity. Throughout college and graduate school, Brooklyn remained my home although I was living in Boston. Life takes it turns. I fall in love, and Massachusetts becomes my home. A House is not a Home: Growing up in the city, an apartment was my home. I always wanted to open my front door, step out in my nightgown and be outside, not looking into a hallway. I always wanted a yard. When we built our house, it became a labor of love. Family and friends helped where ever they could. My parents tiled and planted. My in-laws painted. My nephew poured concrete. Each room holds a memory of them. It was important to us that our home became a no negativity zone. A place of unconditional love, warmth, tolerance and safety. My house became my sanctuary. After dealing with people all day long at work, it was nice to come back to the peacefulness of my house. Empty nest can be a good thing. After a long day at work, I came to love the sound of the lock turning in the door as I take off my shoes, (and bra!!) A safe place, where I have comfort, security, and peace. The obligations of keeping a home were so much more agreeable than the obligations of work. Here I can be myself warts and all. I can be fragile and in need. I don’t need to be a leader. Throughout our marriage we tried to make our house a home for my step sons, A place where they could grow and become themselves. And, of course my grandchildren. We wanted our home to be a place of joy for them. (The smell of warm cookies and the sound of big kisses) A refuge from the demands of life. Their visits lit up the house with life. And now for my great grandchild, we wish the same. There’s no place like home… As an educator, home meant a place where learning continued, where my students felt secure enough to share the lessons I taught them Where they could practice the life skills I tried to impart. As public health administrator, working with pregnant women, infants and children, the importance of developing a loving stable home life was something that was always promoted. How to interact with your child. How to make them feel safe and secure. How to say I love you without words. Although we concentrated on Physical health, it is never enough. A child’s emotional and social development is so dependent on what is experienced at home. Charity begins at home When my troubled grandchildren moved in, my home became their sanctuary from the madness of their world. They came for stability, security, and safety to heal their wounds. Something they couldn’t get at home. When those troubles became too much for my grandson, he took his life. My home became a place for all of us to grieve without judgement. But it also became a bittersweet place, full of memories and what ifs. A Home away from home. Home to me is also this congregation. A group of people, who just three short years ago were total strangers, welcomed me with open arms. This community took me under its wing when I was at my lowest. I was lost, defeated and broken. Without ever knowing it, this community lifted me up and gave me the strength to go on. Yes, home is also this congregation Home Sweet Home: Now I have a four generation home with four cats!! One for each generation. It is lively and chaotic at times. The house is joyous again. Laughter can be heard ringing throughout the rooms. The same rooms that hold all those memories. Memories we will share with this new generation. There is hope on the horizon. We are all relearning life’s gifts. It is a place where unconditional love, kindness, respect, and individuality is fostered. |
What is home to a Jew? It is a provocative question, isn’t it? Why should a Jew have any special claim to the idea of home? Doesn’t everyone come from a place called home? Doesn’t everyone live a life that is centered on home? What makes a Jew different in respect to home?
I admit to some anxiety about even asking the question because I know that in even asking it I conjure up the centuries-old doubts as to where Jews call home and to what place they declare allegiance. After all, do we not say at the end of the seder each Passover, “Next Year in Jerusalem”? What does that mean? Are Jews everywhere simply aspiring to visit Israel, as some kind of “roots” excursion? Or do we see it as our true, spiritual and perhaps even bodily home? Are Jews everywhere supposed to dream of making “aliyah”? If so, what draws us? Is it the feeling of being part of a majority? I know that in my life I have had that feeling only twice: when I studied at Brandeis and when I traveled to Israel. In both cases, I felt as if a huge burden had been lifted from my shoulders. Is that what “home” feels like? Is that the true meaning of the beloved psalm “Hinei Mah Tov U’ma Na-im/Shevet achim gam ya-chad”? “How good and how pleasant it is that brothers dwell together.” I know that my mother, as a young woman, had dreamed of making aliyah before the Second World War. Israel had not yet existed as a state but she dreamed of being a pioneer in the creation of Israel. In fact, the way she told the story, she was all packed and ready to go (do I remember that she had literally boarded a train?) but decided that she could not leave her family, nearly all of whom would eventually perish in the war. I believe that, for my mother, family and home were synonymous and both were indispensable. Raised on a farm or shetl in what is now Ukraine and limited by that world, she was, I guess you could say, a “homebody.” Late in life, years after my father had died, she took special pride in recalling how she kept our family together, managing to buy a comfortable home where she spent the remainder of her days. My father, who was born in a suburb of Krakow, was also defined by his home: a city fellow, my mother would say, who liked to dance, to wear fine suits, and enjoy a smoke routinely, and a glass of beer and schnaps every now and then. I don’t have a lot of memories of my father, who died when I was eleven, but tasting beer for the first time from my father’s glass is one of them. These two souls, so intimately connected to home, would, at the outbreak of the war, become homeless orphans--refugees, fleeing for their very lives. Spending the war on the run, trying to evade Russians, Poles (both of whom were trying to draft my father) and, of course, Germans. I imagine that they were so consumed with sustaining their lives that thinking about the loss of home hardly mattered. They must have been immensely lonely so far from home but they must surely have been focused on their own survival. But then, after the war’s end, they must have felt the heartbreaking sting of losing home and loved ones. Primo Levy, the famed Holocaust survivor and writer, once observed that suicides were rare in the lager or camps: people were too busy trying to meet basic human needs for water and food. It is only after liberation that suicides took place for those who had been in camps: finally, they had time and space to reflect on what they had lost. The pain of reflection would be too great to bear. Despite their awareness of loss, my parents carried on without a home, becoming, officially, “displaced persons,” and living for a few years post war in a DP camp in Germany. It may seem especially harsh to be defined as a person by the status of “displaced.” But if home does indeed define us then the absence of a place called home might very well capture the essence of my parents at that time. Moreover, my two brothers were born in the DP camp. Imagine that: born into a place defined for its residents as placeless. New York City, Toledo, Ohio; Portland, Oregon; Los Angeles--that was the route that my parents took after immigrating to the US as war refugees. I’ve written somewhere that my parents’ having eventually settled in Hollywood, California seems, well, made for the movies, a place for new beginnings. Around the time we moved there, the Dodgers came to town as did Mickey Mouse and Disneyland. No one at the time seemed to have been from there. Everyone had come from somewhere else to enjoy the temperate climate, swaying palm trees, and majestic, ocean views. And, of course, LA was the sort of place that invited people to construct a “new” past and to imagine a golden future. I hope and pray that in that sunny space my parents were afforded the chance, however briefly, and finally, to be “at home.” Shana Tova. May the coming year be one in which you find the joy of “being home.” |
When I think of home it brings up all sorts of thoughts, my own home where I live, my temple community, my home where I grew up, Nature and Earth.
Home to me are Connections: to family To friends To community To nature It’s easy to say home is my family and we need to love and nurture one another. A little less so but still easy to say home is my community and I need to love and nurture it. Harder still to say home is everything here on earth and I need to love and nurture it. And hardest of all is to say home is everyone and I need to love and nurture them. This means the people protesting against things you believe in, the people with whom you have nothing in common, the people who think you are dirt. Personally, home to me has meant several things. Growing up in my family home. My initial family home with my parents and sisters. That home has changed forever and now I have my home. And that’s changing to with Leah off to college. It’s like a novel. My friends and community are home to me. When I come here I feel at home with such caring and wonderful people. Lastly, I also feel at home in Nature to which I feel a strong connection. I love being in nature. It Keeps me grounded. From hiking to mountain biking to x-country skiing to just sitting in the woods. On many levels this is home. Earth is home. The majesty of the mountains viewed from a high peak showing the splendor of all we are connected with - we all come from the same place. With Home comes obligations. Home with your family of course, and your community and for me - nature. To care for it and more. This includes simple things: staying on paths, carry in carry out for example. And it includes more complex- how to balance population and nature. Some of my favorite places in nature are not far: Blue Hills. I go there quite often with my cousin. It’s not just hiking but exploring there. Our goal is to explore every step of every trail. We don’t rush. We look at the flaura and fauna, the rocks and the hills. One amazing thing we frequently think and talk about is how native Americans walked many of these same paths 8,000 years ago. We talk about what they did, why locations were good for them. We find the rocks they chipped from to make their tools. And that was home for them many years ago. Thank you. |
