Welcome to Soulful Jewish Living: Mindful Practices for Every Day with me, Josh Feigelson.
I’m grateful you’re here, and I hope you benefit from our time together.
My Dad used to say there were two vistas on the road that, when he saw them, he felt like he was coming home. One of them was on US-23 heading south towards our hometown of Ann Arbor, Michigan. There’s a spot where you come over a hill and look down at the Huron River and the city rising on the other side. Whenever we were coming home from a camping trip or even just to visit relatives in suburban Detroit, we would come over that hill, and my Dad would feel like he was home.
The second vista he described was coming up the hill on Highway 1 towards Jerusalem from Tel Aviv. My parents lived in Jerusalem for six months before I was born, and in his many trips back, my Dad might be riding in a car or a bus and coming up that hill. If you’ve been there, you might imagine it too. For him, that was another moment of homecoming.
I can’t say that there are particular vistas that quite do it for me. But there are definitely smells. I can still remember the smell of my childhood home, which was a combination of my Dad’s pipe and my mom cooking a stew or her roasted potatoes for Shabbat dinner. And I think of the smell of my own house now, which has taken on some hints of dog in recent years. Walking past the mezuzah and through the threshold, I don’t just sense that I’m physically entering home—I feel at-home.
I’ve been thinking about this whole idea of home for a long time, and for our coming chunk of episodes I want to devote some time to exploring it with you. What does it mean to feel at home? Is home a place—or more a state of mind? When we don’t feel at home—when we might feel like we don’t belong, or we might even feel a kind of exile—what’s going on there? And, of course, what does Judaism have to say about all of this, and how might our Jewish spiritual practices help us to feel it and explore it? Those are some of the questions I want to take up over the coming weeks.
Where should we start? Baseball, of course.
Regular listeners will know that I’m a baseball lover. One of my favorite writers about baseball is the late Major League commissioner Bart Giamatti—who was an English Literature professor at Yale before making a pretty amazing career change. Giamatti brought a literary eye to the game, and here’s something he said about home: “No translation ,” he said, “catches the associations, the mixture of memory and longing, the sense of security and autonomy, the accessibility, the aroma of inclusiveness, the freedom from wariness, that cling to the word home.”
And then he pointed out something so obvious that we might miss it if we didn’t pause to pay attention. “Baseball is entirely about going home… It’s the only game you ever heard of where you want to get back to where you started. All the other games are territorial; you want to get someone else’s territory; not baseball. Baseball simply wants to get you from here back around to here.” Like I said, so obvious that you might miss it if he hadn’t pointed it out. Baseball is all about leaving home and coming back.
Of course, this is a very Jewish idea. Adam and Eve, Abraham and Sarah, Jacob and his family, Joseph and his brothers, heck the entire Israelite people coming out of Egypt and traveling to the Promised Land: the stories of so many of our ancestors are about leaving home in order to make a new home, or to return home but in a new way. And then, even when we’re physically at home, we can ask: Are we actually present? Are we mentally, psychologically, spiritually there?
Bart Giamatti says that “Home is a concept, not a place. Home is a state of mind.” Let’s think about that for a minute. As Jews, we have some pretty physical ideas about home =: the homes we live in, the land of Israel, Jerusalem, and Har Habayit, often translated as the Temple Mount but more literally translated as “The Mountain of the House.” But we also have the idea that the Divine is with us all the time, in every place–which means we can also experience feeling deeply at home even when we’re not physically at home.
We’ll explore all of this in the coming weeks. But for today, I want to invite you into a meditation practice to try to help you feel a little more at home in your mind and body right now.
See if you can assume a meditation posture: Not rigid, but awake and alert. If you’re sitting, you might try to find the S-curve in your back. Imagine your spine as Jacob’s ladder, which the Torah tells us extended from the ground where the Temple would later stand up into heaven. Your spine is a conduit for spiritual energy moving up and down.
Now take a few deep breaths. If it’s comfortable for you, close your eyes or turn your gaze inward. With each exhalation, see if you can bring a little more relaxation to your body, and allow your mind to settle.
See if you can allow yourself to feel the support of the chair, of the earth beneath you. Notice the sensations of the air entering your nostrils, traveling up into your head and then down into your lungs and diaphragm. Notice the top of the inhale, and then see if you can follow the exhale out through your windpipe, through your mouth, and back out to the plant world where it came from. Notice the cycle beginning again.
Now see if you can let go a little more. Notice if there’s anything you’re clinging to—not just physically, but in your mind or heart. Giamatti says that home is a space—I would call it a spiritual space—in which we can feel safe and free from wariness. As you sit here with your breath, just being aware of it, of the gift of this breath and this moment, notice if you feel that just a bit.
This is one way it might feel to be babayit, at home—not necessarily in a particular place, but in our present moment awareness. If we can be here now, actually present to ourselves and our experience, we might be more at home than anywhere else on earth.
Blessings for the journey. Know that I’m on it with you.
Thank you for joining us for Soulful Jewish Living: Mindful Practices for Every Day, a production of Unpacked, a brand of OpenDor Media, and the Institute for Jewish Spirituality. This episode is sponsored by Jonathan and Kori Kalafer and the Somerset Patriots: The Bridgewater, NJ-based AA Affiliate of the New York Yankees. If you like this show, subscribe, share this episode with a friend, give us five stars on Apple Podcasts. Check out our website, unpacked.media for everything Unpacked-related, and subscribe to our other podcasts, and check out the Institute for Jewish Spirituality. Most importantly, be in touch–about what you heard today, what you’d like to hear more about, or to dedicate an episode. Write to me at josh@unpacked.media.
This episode was hosted by me, Rabbi Josh Feigelson. Audio was edited by Rob Pera and we’re produced by Rivky Stern. Thanks for joining us.