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.
For the last seven episodes, we’ve been talking about home: Home as a place, home as a state of mind, home as a practice.
But today I’m going to talk about something more difficult, which is, what happens when it feels like you’ve lost home?
I want to say at the outset that this can be a really sensitive topic. While I’m going to talk more in general than specifics, painful stuff can get triggered when we wade into this part of the pool. So if at any point you find that now isn’t the right time to listen, I want to encourage you to press pause and come back later. I will try to guide us gently.
There are moments in life when it can feel like the bottom just falls out—that the stable structure of home that we thought we knew collapses. Receiving a diagnosis, the end of a relationship, the loss of a loved one. Or, more literally, when folks lose a home to disaster or violence. Everything somebody thought they knew—that home they thought they could depend on—crumbles, and they can be left standing or sitting there feeling alone and adrift.
If feeling at home is all these positive and supportive things that we’ve talked about, then feeling like you’ve lost home is the inverse: it’s terrible. Where there used to be a feeling of safety, now there’s a feeling of insecurity. Where there used to be a feeling of support, now there’s a feeling of loneliness. Where there used to be feelings of joy, now there’s sadness and grief.
In the Torah, there’s a word for this kind of homelessness: Galut, exile. The whole thrust of the Torah’s story is that the Israelites will get back to their homeland. But more than once, the Torah predicts that they may come to lose their home and experience galut. Historically, of course, that was true: The ancient Israelites were conquered and exiled out of the land in 586 BCE by the Babylonians, and again in 70 CE by the Romans. Our ancestors experienced the destruction of their literal homes and of their spiritual home—the home for God known as the Beit Hamikdash, the Temple in Jerusalem. If there’s one thing Jews know about, it’s exile.
And the experience is profoundly painful. The Book of Lamentations, which we read every summer as we commemorate the destruction of the Temple on the 9th of Av, contains profoundly painful images of loss, grief, and heartache. That’s because our ancestors, just like us, were people—just like us. Losing the places and people and way of life that constitutes home is terrible for any human being. That’s as true today as it was 2,500 years ago.
I’m not a big Jewish chauvinist. Yes, I think we have a lot of special things, but I also think a lot of peoples and cultures have special things to teach the world. Yet there is something really astounding to me about the fact that the Jewish people figured out how to survive 2,000 years of galut. We didn’t survive it unscathed—we suffered oppression and persecution, and we lost a third of our global population in the Holocaust.
But even in the wake of all that loss, all that displacement, all that galut, that exile—we came up with ways to experience being spiritually at home. How did we do that?
One way was through Shabbat. The great cultural Zionist thinker Asher Ginsburg, known as Ahad Ha-am, wrote, “More than the people of Israel has kept Shabbat, Shabbat has kept the people of Israel.” That’s the famous part of his quote. But here’s what he wrote next: “Were it not for Shabbat, which restored their souls and renewed their spiritual life every week, the tribulations of the week would have dragged them down to the lowest level of materialism, moral degradation, and spiritual poverty.”
The Talmud talks about Shabbat as a time of being in a “mikdash me’at,” a mini-Temple. Just like the ancient Temple had bread and wine and light, we have challah and wine and Shabbat candles as part of our ritual. But on an even deeper spiritual level, Shabbat is about experiencing feeling spiritually at home—what Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel described as a palace, or a temple, in time. Here’s what he writes in his book, The Sabbath, about how Shabbat helped our ancestors survive the profound loss of physical and spiritual home: “When history dissolved the majesty of Jerusalem and burned the Temple, the Jews discovered that… the Sabbath was their indestructible sanctuary. It could not be taken away by enemy armies; its walls could not be breached.”
In other words, Shabbat can help us to come home—even when home has crumbled.
I talk regularly on this podcast about how Shabbat isn’t only something to experience every seven days. Shabbat consciousness is something we can experience every seven moments. And when we touch that state of being, we’re touching the experience of being at home—where there is some basic sense of safety and support, some basic feeling of familiarity, some basic antidote to exile.
So how do we access that “indestructible sanctuary” when our outer world feels unstable? How do we step into a mikdash me’at—a mini-temple, an oasis of spiritual home—not just on Friday night, but right now?
Here’s a brief practice I hope can help. You don’t need candles, challah, or a prayerbook for this. All you need is the next couple of minutes.
If it feels safe and comfortable for you, place both feet flat on the floor. If you’re lying down or walking, just bring your awareness to the points where your body is being supported by the earth.
When the bottom falls out in life, one instinct can be to look down into the void, bracing for impact. Right now, I want you to do the opposite: feel the ground that is already holding you. You are supported, right now.
Take a slow, deep breath in… and let it go.
Now, imagine drawing a circle around this moment.
For the breath you take—just one breath— what would it be like to imagine that nothing outside this circle can touch you? The past stays outside the circle. The future stays outside the circle too.
In this breath, right here, you are standing inside a temple in time.
Inhale slowly, silently saying to yourself: I enter this moment.
Exhale completely, silently saying: This moment is my home.
Inhale: I enter this moment.
Exhale: This moment is my home.
One more time:
I enter this moment.
This moment is my home.
This breath, this moment, can be your own mikdash me’at—a portable sanctuary you carry inside your own heart. In this space, in this moment, in this breath, you can touch the feeling of being at home. And while that’s not a replacement for home in a larger sense, it’s the essence of home in the deepest sense. I hope it 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.