Home Sweet Home

By Doni Joszef, LMSW

You can hear the chants from a mile away: “Repent ye sinners! Repent or suffer in thou fiery flames of eternal consequence!”

A cross-eyed & painless homeless man wanders throughout New York’s Grand Central Station, distributing flyers that proclaim: “The end is near! Return to thou lord or perish in doom!” Despite many such attempts at arousing the masses toward spiritual revival, these interventions have yet to incite even the mildest societal shift away from the material in favor of the spiritual. Whether or not the one doing the threatening has seen a shower in the past decade, fear-tactics and daunting threats have proven relatively ineffective in generating any meaningful, long-term improvements in human behavior. We don’t say no to drugs because Nancy Reagan shows us a picture of scrambled eggs in a frying pan and tells us: “this is your brain on drugs.” We say no to drugs because we cherish life too much to tamper with it. Those who feel they have nothing to cherish, will not hesitate scrambling that nothingness like eggs in a pan. In the words of Bob Dylan: if you ain’t got nothing, you got nothing to lose.

Having something to lose means you have something to love. It means you have a passion. Pick a passion. Any passion. For all I care, you’re passion could revolve around the preservation of endangered South African geese. In the end, it’s not the ‘what’ in life, but having a ‘why’ for which to live. Humans have always thrived most vibrantly when their consciousness entirely absorbs itself in a vision they can’t quite describe in words but can vividly experience on a deeper level of their psyche. A life devoid of ideals will rapidly extinguish any flames of fervor that might have once enlivened a child who dreamed of bigger things than traffic updates and intermittent caffeine fixes. Aspiration gives vigor to life. Love fuels all aspiration. A ‘like’ may cut it for Facebook. But only a ‘love’ will cut it for life.

Love is irrational. In Talmudic terms: Love bends the straight line. The Baal Shem Tov once quipped that all dancers are crazy in the eyes of he who can’t hear the music. Each life marches to the subliminal beat of its own drummer. In the words of Carl Jung: every individual is an exception to the rule. We live in an ultra-rational world. Over the past decade, humanity has undergone a massive conversion from the manual and interpersonal to the automatic and digital. We are profiled. Tagged. Followed. Un-followed. Poked. Liked. Linked. Suggested. Transferred. Synced. Described in less than 140 characters: I am just one drop in an endless sea of billions of cyber-bits. But this is just an outfit I wear. It’s not who I actually am. Who I truly am cannot be encapsulated by the confines of words or profile pictures. It can only be experienced through the reflection of that which I choose to love. Being rational and realistic may be very efficient. But it isn’t very loving. A ladder that’s grounded in the earth is only as good as the heights its head is willing to reach. Jews have always been dreamers. Why stop now? Oliver Wendell Holmes once wrote: Where we love is home, home that our feet may leave, but not our hearts.

Tshuva is returning to this home. The home where we can love and dream and irrationally dabble in that small part of us which retains its pure naiveté – that our feet may have left, but never our hearts.

Home, sweet home.

As an addendum to Reb Mordechai Yehoshua Shlita, we may note that the pasuk says about Shmuel ותשובתו הרמתה כי שם ביתו which literally means that he returned to Ramah because that was his home, but can also mean he did Teshuva to Ramah because that was home. Teshuva is returning home [this was noted by Rav Kook, Rav Soloveitchik and many others].