Homecoming

Rabbi Melanie Aron

S'lichot - Saturday, September 16, 2006

Home may be where the heart is but as we saw in the movie tonight, “The Thing About My Folks”, that’s no guarantee that home is happy or without pain.

One of the most difficult things many of us deal with in our lives is the gap between the idealized vision we have of what family life should be like and what we actually experience at home. In that we are not ax murderers or money launderers for the mob, my guess is that most of the regrets we bring to this season of the year come from our reflection on our family relations, reflections on where we have missed the mark with those closest to us, and where we have brought pain to what we had hoped would be pleasurable closeness.

In American culture, home is a safe and accepting place. Even the word itself is warm, not just the more neutral - house. Think of the emotional overtones to the simple phrase, I’m going home. Yet magazine articles and newspaper headlines testify to the fact that the problem isn’t just at our house. Many people find home stressful and look to the work environment for escape. Getting home at the end of the day is rarely like it was on television when we were growing up, where the hardworking bread earner, comes in, takes off his shoes, and relaxes with the newspaper as his every need is attended to. Home is often intense, a place of confrontation, raised voices, disappointments and failures to connect. Home can be demanding in a way that other settings rarely are and often just at a time when we were secretly hoping to escape demands and revert to a more infantile cared for state.

The Torah interestingly doesn’t gloss over the challenges of home. If you think about it, as Rabbi Nina Beth Cardin points out in an article “From Journey to Home”, home is where a lot of dangerous things happen in the Bible. Temptation and danger from sibling rivalry happen at home, think of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel. Consider Sarah and Hagar, Jacob and Esau, Joseph and his brothers. King David never found the balance between giving his sons free rein and having to send his generals off to put down their rebellions. Even Moses’ home life is criticized, if obliquely, in the incident where Miriam takes a verbal shot at his wife. There is no perfectly happy home in the Torah. In every case the ideal of home and the reality of home collide.

I liked the movie that we saw tonight because it had no villains, and because it portrayed change. That change took place in people, who like ourselves, were set in their ways and limited in their emotional repertoire.

There is a peaceful sense of at-homeness for many of us here tonight. We are in our sanctuary, a place of calm and order, of soft voices and peace. For those who are members of the congregation and have come to these services before, the music and the service will be familiar and even for those who have never been to Shir Hadash before – the Hebrew words of prayer are Jewish universals that create a sense of Jewish at -homeness even in an unfamiliar place.

Jewish tradition calls the home a mikdash me’at, a small sanctuary. This is not only because some of the rituals of the ancient Temple were transferred to the home, but also because with conscious steps and intense attention to what we are doing, we can make our homes more peaceful sanctuaries.

The patriarchs and matriarchs as great as they were, had the disadvantage of living before the giving of the Torah. They were on their own without guidance. They also predated the Jewish people, so that they were on their own without community. We have the Torah and all the associated midrashim and commentaries that capture the wisdom of 3,000 years of Jewish living. We have a community in which we can find others who have walked the same difficult road that we may find ourselves on. Sometimes they can point to the obstacles ahead, more often they can let us know that we are not the only fool to get knocked off course by that particular bump.

Tonight we usher in the days of repentance and renewal. May we use them well, so that our lives and our homes may be truly blessed.