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 father wasn’t an extravagant person. We always had whatever we needed growing up. But maybe because his parents had lived through the Great Depression, my dad always looked for the best deal on anything. Wherever we were driving, he would find the cheapest gas station. He would look through all the circulars in the Sunday newspaper to see where things were on sale. Long before the supermarket started doing it for you, he taught us to mentally calculate how much cereal cost per ounce—and to buy the less expensive option. (In retrospect, he may have been a little obsessed. Nu?)
He did allow himself one expensive toy, though. When I was in second grade, my Dad bought a motorhome—a tan-colored, 30-foot Pace Arrow with burnt orange and black trim. There was a bed above the driver’s seat, two bunk beds in the back, a hide-a-bed couch, and you could even make another bed by folding down the dining room table and moving the cushions around. It had a fridge, a stove, a microwave, a kitchen sink, a toilet and a shower. There were storage spaces all over the place, including a luggage carrier on the roof that you accessed by climbing the ladder attached to the back of the RV.
As a seven-year old kid, I thought it was the most amazing thing ever.
We took plenty of family trips in the motorhome over the years—as far south as Disney World, as far north as the Boundary Waters of northern Minnesota. When I moved into college, my dad drove the motorhome out east, which meant I could bring all my stuff—including my tuba. We had Shabbat dinners in the motorhome, played games, even watched the NBA Finals. And to this day, I can still remember how it smelled and felt.
So while it wasn’t necessarily the most comfortable place to sleep, after all those travels it really came to feel like a kind of portable home. And it’s that idea, of a portable home, that I want to talk about today, in the seventh episode in our miniseries on feeling at home.
We’ve talked already in this series about the notion that home isn’t so much a place as a state of mind. And one level, that’s certainly true. The whole point of this podcast overall is to help us feel deeply at home in the universe—wherever we find ourselves, even if we’re not physically in our house or apartment or hometown.
At the same time, we don’t live only in our minds. We have bodies. Because of that, most of us also experience home through our senses. Home comes to us in sounds and tastes and smells, in the familiar sounds of voices and languages and the familiar sights of people and landscapes. So while I do believe we can experience at-homeness anywhere through Jewish mindfulness practice, I also believe we often need the physical realities of home in order to feel at home too.
That’s a paradox—and frankly it’s one of the deepest paradoxes of Judaism. Our tradition is clear that we can experience deep at-homeness—the closeness of the Shekhina, or divine Presence—anywhere and everywhere, even when we’re in exile. But our tradition is equally clear that we have a particular place (the land of Israel), language (Hebrew), and way of life (Judaism) that’s our home as Jews. It’s both.
Think of a Star of David, a Jewish Star. I heard an interpretation of it once that has stuck with me. That six-pointed star is two triangles, one on top of another. One of the triangles points up, as if to say home is someplace else—in heaven, perhaps, or in our imaginations. The other triangle points down, which says, No, home is right here, right now, in this moment. In theological terms we might say the star is telling us that God, or home, is both transcendent—not here—and immanent—totally here.
After the Israelites leave Egypt and receive the Torah at Mount Sinai, the Book of Exodus spends 15 chapters—nearly 40 percent of the entire book—telling us about how they built the Mishkan, the portable home for the Divine. (For our purposes on this episode, we might call it God’s RV.) For millennia, rabbis and readers have debated why this was necessary. If God is everywhere and always available, why the need for any physical home?
The answer I find most compelling is that we’re human—with human bodies, fears, needs, and desires. So we need a physical home. But being human also means we have minds, imaginations, and the ability to metabolize all that physicality in a spiritual way. And that means we can experience at-homeness anywhere, anytime. Like a turtle, we can be our own motorhome. We carry home with us all the time.
So here’s a practice you can use to help access that feeling of at-homeness, even when you’re physically far away.
As usual, slow down. Allow your body to arrive. Allow your mind to settle. If it’s comfortable, close your eyes or turn your gaze inward. Take a few good deep breaths.
In your mind, try to bring up a sensory image of a place you feel deeply at home—safe, welcome, where you belong. Maybe you have sights or sounds you associate with it. Maybe there are smells or feelings of touch or taste. Allow yourself to experience those sensations. Notice how you feel as you do.
Now, see if you can set down that image and simply notice your breathing. As you breathe in, notice that you’re breathing in. As you breathe out, notice that you’re breathing out. No images or sensations, no smells or tastes, no memories—just being right here, right now, in this breath. Notice how that feels.
Both of these are experiences of home, and you carry both of them with you. Places and sensations from your history, but also the freshness of this breath right now, which has never been breathed before.
It doesn’t take a motorhome, and it doesn’t take a Tabernacle in the desert. We can experience being at home in this moment and in every moment. I hope this practice can help.
Blessings for the journey. Know that I’m on it with you.
ENDING
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.