Home Lands

By JILL SUZANNE JACOBS

THE JEWISH WAY
Living the Holidays
By Irving Greenberg.
464 pages.  Touchstone Books. $15.

MIRRORS IN TIME
A Psycho-Spiritual Journey Through the Jewish Year
By Joel Ziff.
360 pages. Jason Aronson. $40.

A PLACE CALLED HOME
Twenty Writing Women Remember
Edited by Mickey Pearlman.
257 pages. Palgrave Macmillan. $12.95.

I've always sensed that certain things are intrinsic to the Jewish soul. That my soul was indeed among the multitude of souls present at the foot of Sinai where, in a flash of thunder and lighting, God revealed the Teaching to the people Israel.

The holiday of Sukkot is the third of the pilgrimage holidays on the Jewish calendar. The first in this trio of holidays is Passover which commemorates the Exodus from Egypt. The second is Shavuot which celebrates the giving of the Torah at Mt. Sinai. Sukkot is distinct because it is a holiday of wandering, of impermanence and uncertainty, recalling how our ancestors dwelt interminably in the wilderness, waiting to come home.

We Jews bear this imprint of wandering on our souls—souls that know the endless feeling of transience, of the shifting sands beneath us. This wandering and exile, started with our days in the Sinai wilderness and then through our two exiles from Israel, after which we fanned out across the globe, always seeking a place called home.

For the ancient Hebrews dwelling in the Sinai wilderness, home was not Egypt, the place of their birth. Rather home was a place to which they had never been, a place lodged in their memories until their return.

I too bear this imprint of wandering and rootlessness—an imprint of my people's history, my family's history. I have made it my own, repeating the patterns again and again as I went from place to place.

My wandering began when I was thirteen. My parents divorced, experimented with three different custody arrangements until they reconciled, and then divorced again. From the time I was thirteen until I left for college, I lived in five different homes.

And then I continued the peripatetic pattern moving every a couple of years during these past twelve years. Across the Atlantic. Across the country. Switching countries. Switching coasts. Feeling the earth and time move swiftly beneath me.

A sense of displacement and distance from my surroundings has always haunted me. And I have moved several times in an attempt to shake this feeling. The last few years I finally came home to it, owning up to the fact that this is who I am.

Being at home with wandering and displacement, at peace with a heightened sense of vulnerability, is what the holiday of Sukkot is all about. The holiday commemorates the days when we dwelt in the wilderness of Sinai, carrying our belongings and our homes on our backs. Unique among the Jewish holidays, Sukkot celebrates not a particular event, but a particular passage in time, a particular way of existing.

Its traditional observance includes leaving the sturdy walls of our homes and dwelling in temporary huts (in Hebrew—Sukkot—hence the name of the holiday) for the holiday's duration. The walls of a sukkah may not be permanent, and its roof not complete enough to obscure the stars at night.

We are commanded to eat and sleep in our sukkot, unless of course it rains, and then we are commanded to return inside. For although Sukkot encourages us to commune with nature, to recognize the fragility and impermanence of life, we are not to do so if it impinges upon our joy. In other words, on Sukkot, despite the evidence that points to the lack of security in our lives, we are supposed rejoice, find contentment in our lot. In his book, The Jewish Way: Living the Holidays Rabbi Irving Greenberg teaches that by "moving into a Sukkah for a week, Jews demythologize solid walls and controllable security. It is not a renunciation of self-protection, but a recognition of its limits."

After September 11, Rabbi Greenberg's words have an ominous clarity to them.

We are vulnerable. The securities we create for ourselves are fallible. And it is the wise person who not only recognizes the limits of one's self-constructed security, but also deals constructively with that fact. For, in Rabbi Greenberg's words, "the very consciousness of fragility gives deeper joy to daily rooted existence."

Another book on the meanings inherent in the celebrations of the Jewish year Mirrors in Time: A Psycho-Spiritual Journey through the Jewish Year by Joel Ziff notes that Sukkot coming on the heals of Yom Kippur, celebrates the process of change. Ziff writes, "crisis in our lives motivate us to begin a process of self-reflection. We work to understand our situation, and how we cope with it." These words, eerily prescient, are all the more meaningful as we begin a new year, and a new chapter in American history.

I understand the story of Sukkot—and its layers of meaning—as the meta-story of the Jewish people, and also a paradigm for a universal human journey. It evokes the struggle to find one's place, to create a bit of security and certainty in the face of the opposite. It represents the struggle to find home.

While finding home is a very Jewish struggle, it also a very human one as well. In A Place Called Home: Twenty Writing Women Remember and edited by Mickey Pearlman, themes of loss, wandering and rebuilding resonate throughout the book. In this anthology, Mary Morris wisely writes that home comes from a place of memory, not geography. How true for Jews who have transported our stories and our way of life as we moved from place to place. Pearlman writes that home is about "people and the sometimes miraculous, psychological, spiritual, and often unexplainable connections that happen between them." Home then is about the present as well as the past.

Sukkot celebrates both. Its rituals encourage us to reenact our history, so that as with Passover and Shavuot, history becomes our memory, the experiences of our ancestors are also our own experiences. To that end, ushpizin—ancient mystical guests—are invited into our temporary homes, creating a commingling of past and present, history and myth, fact and fiction. And isn't that what coming home is all about?

For the women who appear in the book, coming home rarely meant returning to one's place of origin. In the biographies were learn that Marcie Hershman grew up in Cleveland, but struggled to buy the home where she now lives in Brookline, Massachusetts. Mary Morris comes from Illinois, but now calls Brooklyn, New York her home. And Mickey Perlman grew up in Florida, but now lives in New Jersey. Pearlman writes that although she was born in the south, she grew up feeling certain she was displaced, a "natural northerner and urbanite born by mistake among the lethargic palm trees, pastel-tinted hotels and alligator forms." Coming home was--for Pearlman and I believe for us all--a process of embracing the world and then finding a place in it.

Inherent in the journey home is the daily struggle of living in the present while connecting to the past. During Sukkot the fine line between history and memory is blurred while the very fragility of our lives comes into sharp focus. And like the sukkah it can sometimes be an uncomfortable place.

Interestingly enough, we do not have a holiday which commemorates that sublime moment when the Israelites crossed the river Jordan into the Promised Land. What we have in the end is a holiday which focuses on creeping ever closer to that often elusive place we call home.