Eternal and Temporary Home
Our musical guest this evening, Kane Mathis
Dear friends,
On Tuesday we brought Adam’s mother, Barbara to burial. Barbara was an extraordinary woman who lived fully and richly for 95 years. Though she traveled the globe once she was retired, reaching all seven continents, her home was always New York City. She was lucky in that regard. She was born, lived and died in the same city that was very much her home.
Whenever I am at a Jewish funeral, one of the things I contemplate is when in the Jewish calendar this person passed. There often seems to be some cosmic resonance to it. My grandmother Riva z”l, for example, who told me that the most important moment in her life was when the Lubavitcher Rebbe looked into her eyes, died on his Yahrzeit.
So, as we drove out to the cemetery in Long Island, I was conscious of the resonance of this week’s parashah, called Chayei Sarah, The Life of Sarah. The parashah begins with Sarah’s death at the ripe age of 127 and takes us through the family’s mourning process.
Sarah’s husband, Abraham had led a very different life than Barbara z”l. He was born in one place, lived for a long period in a second, then moved countries, bopped around between Canaan and Egypt, and finally settled in Be’er Sheba in the south of Canaan. The first words that the Torah records coming out of his mouth after his wife’s death are:
“I am a foreigner, a temporary sojourner.”
גֵּר־וְתוֹשָׁ֥ב אָנֹכִ֖י
He speaks these words to the locals who have been living there their whole lives. It is his opening line in an exchange designed to turn him into a local through the act of purchasing a burial plot. The beginning of the end of moving around, of restlessness, of nomadic existence, is the purchase of a spot to bury his wife, which is large enough to later bury him too, and two generations further. This is the meaning of home.
Death, Heschel taught us, is homecoming. We return to the Kaddish, to the ancient rituals and languages, to the earth from which we came. יהוה נתן יהוה לקח יהי שם יהוה מבורך, we say as the casket is lowered into the earth, “YHVH gave and YHVH took back, blessed be the name of YHVH.” We move on from this temporary life to what we sometimes call our “eternal home,” a home about which we know very little other than the fact that it is, at least in a certain sense, eternal.
On Rosh Hashanah I asked the community Rabbi Bahya Ibn Paquda’s 1000 year old question to us: Have you accepted yet, your condition in this life as a Ger, a temporary sojourner? To Ibn Paquda, accepting this condition is not sad. It is, or can be the source of our happiness, of our empathy and therefore our connection with others, of our ability to enjoy our limited time. This condition is what drives people like Barbara z”l to travel the world and take in all that our incredible city has to offer.
That ability to soak up the beauty of life is part of what Ibn Paquda called “preparing for death.” In his view, this preparation is the single most important thing a person can do. In a way, preparing for death is the greatest thing to do with one’s life. It encompasses making the most of your time, doing as much good as you can and living as close to truth is possible. But one aspect of this work is more straightforward: giving some thought to where and how you’d like to be buried, or what you imagine home might mean for your body after you’ve passed. Where and near whom would you like the vessel you inhabit, your body to come home to?
On Tuesday, after the burial the family stayed by the gravesite for some time. They placed stones on the graves of other family members buried in that plot. They read the names on tombstones of other relatives they never met who were buried there. They stood in the gentle, fall sunshine together, talking, reminiscing. In that moment, by the ancestral family plot, in that cemetery that the Jews consecrated over a century ago, the shadow of death didn’t seem scary or ominous. It felt as natural as coming home.
This evening we’re going to come home to our community for Shabbat. This last period has brought up for many of us a sense of alienation and foreignness from where we live. But although we may be temporary sojourners on this earth, we are at home here in New York, and our community is as New Yorker as a New Yorker can be. I hope you join me, Daphna, Yonatan, and our wonderful guest musician, Kane Mathis this evening at 6:30 for a sweet coming home to Shabbat.
Shabbat shalom,
Rabbi Misha