Parashat Matot-Masei 5784
In preparation for this week, the parshiot where the word וַיִּסְעוּ֙ comes up 42 times, illustrating the Israelites’ 42 wanderings in the desert, I counted up the number of places I’ve lived in my 37 years of life. Without including short stints working at camps or living in tents, I counted 26 different homes that I had created and lived in. Some highlights include: the room in the Old City of Jerusalem, with the windows that looked out to stone buildings, where the call to prayer poured in five times a day. The tiny, windowless coffin-eque room on St. Marks Place in the East Village, a fourth floor walk up that was between an “adult” shop and a frozen yogurt place. My roommates there included two best friends, one of them an aspiring actress whose job was dressing up like different characters in Times Square, as well as impressively large roaches and some similarly sized mice. The room of a soferet–female scribe–that I sublet in Washington Heights, full of dusty Torahs and the smell of animal skin. Countless roommates throughout the years–roommates I thought for sure I’d love and ended up deeply frustrated by, and others I assumed I would hate but ended up loving and continuing to stay close to for years to come. My home in the heart of Collegetown Ithaca–my first “house” as an adult, the outside of the house had a sloped asymmetrical roof, like a cute queer haircut. It had a wind chime in the shape of a sun on the front that was rusty from Ithaca winters and springs. The backyard where I would grow my garden and enjoy (way too much) solitude during COVID. And now, my sun filled (and tuna can size) studio in Park Slope.
The thread connecting all of these very different places is that I–like the Israelites–made a home there. In each of these temporary dwellings, stops on my journey–whether I lived there for a month or three years–I set up shop. Put things on the walls. Made it a space that I would come back to and my breath would deepen and I would feel in my bones that I was home.
These three weeks in our calendar are referred to as בֵּ֥ין הַמְּצָרִֽים, between the narrows, when we commemorate the destruction of the Temple and tend to the grief inside of us and the world. It is no mistake that these weeks–and in a sense our High Holiday cycle–according to Rabbi Alan Lew, begins with a home and ends with a home. He explains that we begin with the Temple, which is called a bayit, that is burning, sieged. A home that–whether or not we relate to it with longing or with disgust–was our home, was the center of Judaism for as long as our ancestors could remember. Lew writes, “We live in a fearful state of siege, trying to prop up an identity that keeps crumbling, that we secretly intuit to be empty. Then Tisha B'Av comes and the walls begin to crumble, and then the entire city collapses. But something persists -- something fundamentally nameless and empty, something that remains when all else has fallen away.”
We end our holiday cycle with a home as well, our Sukkah. This home, similar to the Temple, is falling apart, but joyfully so. This time we created it that way, it was our desire to make it such. Lew explains, “...We sit flush with the world, in a ‘house’ that calls attention to the fact that it gives us no shelter. It is not really a house. It is the interrupted idea of a house, a parody of a house…And it exposes the idea of a house as an illusion. The idea of a house is that it gives us security, shelter, haven from the storm. But no house can really offer us this. No building of wood and stone can ever afford us protection from the disorder that is always lurking all around us. No shell we put between us and the world can ever really keep us secure from it. And we know this. We never really believed this illusion. That’s why we never felt truly secure in it [...]”
It is so beautiful–and so Jewish–that within this flimsiness, within this dissolution of any illusion of safety and security in the physical world, we find the deepest and most expansive sense of joy. It is precisely in the setting up of a home that we know we'll take apart that we find the most joy.
This time in our calendar points us to the fact that every home, Temple, apartment, sun filled tin can studio, tiny room with no windows, that we live in will be taken down. And, just like the Israelites who wandered in the desert to 42 different journeyings, we get to make home anyway. We get to put up the paintings that we will eventually take down. In the acknowledgement of the temporal nature of everything is precisely where the joy is. Lew says that once the illusion of security has fallen away, “Suddenly we are flush with our life, feeling our life, following our life, doing its dance, one step after another.”
The Bnei Yisaschar explains that the parshiot we read during the Three Weeks, including ours this week, come to strengthen and awaken us in a time of despair. Because, in moments of great transition, recalling times in the past where we’ve survived and even thrived during transition can be incredibly strengthening, helping us to awaken to this moment and rise to the challenge.
May we be blessed to remember that all of our journeyings on this planet, and all of the homes we create at each stop on the journey, are temporary. In that remembering, may we find joy and liberation instead of despair. May we be blessed to connect with and cling to that “something fundamentally nameless and empty, [that] something that remains when all else has fallen away.”
Shabbat Shalom
