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Sukkot is a holiday of homecoming and homelessness
This story was originally published on My Jewish Learning.
(JTA) — What is home? The question sounds like it would best be answered by a children’s book on which each page proclaims a sweet tautology like, “Home is where you feel at home.” There would be a picture of the family nest, parents, grandparents, kids and a dog, a fire in the hearth and soup on the table. Home as Norman Rockwell painted it. Home as so many have sung it: “O say does that star-spangled banner yet wave / Oe’r the land of the free and the home of the brave.”
But pondering what home really is opens us to what is arguably the most troubling political and theological puzzle of our times. For we have entered an age of homelessness and Homeland Security, of mass migrations and refugees fleeing scarcity, tyranny, drought and famine, of rising oceans, poisoned air and water, ongoing wars that destroy homes while killing and displacing whole populations. We have entered the age of the loss of home.
It is especially important for Jews to reflect on the meaning of home today. Not only because that is precisely the philosophical task of this week’s Sukkot holiday, but because we live in the aftermath of a war in which we were almost erased from the earth. And because we live in the presence of a 75-year-old reborn Jewish state, where many Jews feel they have come home to a security unavailable elsewhere.
So what does it mean, for a person or a people or a species, to lose home or to come home? What exactly is lost when you lose home and what is gained when you recover it?
Historically, Jews know much more about exile than home, more about wandering the wilderness than inhabiting the land. On Sukkot, we are instructed to consider that home may not be fixed, stable and enduring but rather fragile, temporary and portable. How dissonant it can sound then to ears inured to exile when they hear Jerusalem, the object of millennial yearning, described as the “eternal undivided capital” of a state, a national possession, a city like any other.
Consider the reflections of a man born in rural Austria in 1912, the son of an assimilated Jewish father and a Catholic mother who, forced to recognize his Jewish ancestry in 1935 when the Nazis passed the Nuremberg Laws, finally fled to Belgium with his Jewish wife in 1938 after Hitler annexed his homeland. An adamant atheist, he was arrested by the Gestapo in Brussels, tortured and then bounced among various camps for two years until the war’s end. When he returned to Brussels anxious to reunite with his wife, he discovered she had died. Alone, unknown and penniless, he changed his German name to Jean Amery and became a journalist and essayist.
In one of his essays, he writes: “For there is, after all, something like a transportable home, or at least an ersatz for home. That can be religion, like the Jewish one. ‘Next year in Jerusalem,’ the Jews have promised themselves for generations during their Passover ritual, but it wasn’t at all a matter of really getting to the Holy Land; rather it sufficed to pronounce the formula together and to know that one was united in the magic domain of the tribal God Yahweh.” Amery could still think of home, but he could no longer taste it. In losing home, he had lost himself. And in 1978, he finally took his own life.
Now consider the thinking of a man who left his home in Warsaw voluntarily at the age of 17 to study and teach in Vilna and Berlin before eventually finding himself a refugee in the United States in 1940. In his short classic, “The Sabbath” (1951), Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel writes of finding spiritual home not in space, but in time: “The Bible is more concerned with time than with space. It sees the world in the dimension of time. It pays more attention to generations, to events, than to countries, to things; it is more concerned with history than with geography.”
Yet just weeks after the Six-Day War of 1967 and the Israeli army’s lightning conquest of Jerusalem, the West Bank, the Sinai peninsula and the Golan Heights, Heschel visited Israel. Smitten by what he experienced there, he wrote a book, “Israel: An Echo of Eternity,” which seemed to many readers a repudiation of his earlier thinking. He writes: “There are moments in history which are unique, moments which have tied the heart of our people to Jerusalem forever. These moments and the city of Jerusalem radiate the light of the spirit throughout the world. The light of the spirit is not a thing of space, imprisoned in a particular place. Yet for the spirit of Jerusalem to be everywhere, Jerusalem must first be somewhere.”
Was Heschel overcome by a moment that felt like homecoming? Or shall we say he lived and thought like a pilgrim who understood that while life is always about the quest, there are nevertheless times when a pilgrim needs, sometimes desperately, glimpses of home both in space and in time?
Amery could not abide homelessness. Heschel was able to take up the task of working for and with African Americans in their own struggle for home. When you feel at home you feel commanded to extend that feeling to others. Sukkot teaches that home is the place and the moment to offer shelter to strangers.
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The post Sukkot is a holiday of homecoming and homelessness appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Shouting Match Reported Between PM, Gallant over Hostage Talks
Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant speaks during a joint press conference with U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin at Israel’s Ministry of Defense in Tel Aviv, Israel Photo: December 18, 2023. REUTERS/Violeta Santos Moura/File Photo
i24 News – Israel’s Defense Minister Yoav Gallant reportedly stormed out of a government meeting on Friday following a shouting match with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over the hostage deal and ceasefire talks.
Gallant, witnesses told Hebrew media outlets, charged that Netanyahu effectively condemned the hostages to ending their lives in captivity, amid general rancor at the cabinet meeting.
Gallant, it is understood, made the case for moving forward toward a deal that would free the hostages as soon as possible, at the expense of giving up control of the strategic Philadelphi corridor on the Egypt-Gaza border.
The post Shouting Match Reported Between PM, Gallant over Hostage Talks first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Israeli Troops, Palestinian terrorists clash in West Bank After Incidents Near Settlements
Israeli military, Jenin area, West Bank, August 31, 2024. Photo: Israeli Army/Handout via REUTERS
Clashes broke out between Israeli troops and Palestinian terrorists in the West Bank on Saturday as Israel pushed ahead with a military operation in the flashpoint city of Jenin.
Israeli troops searched areas around Jewish settlements after two separate security incidents on Friday evening. In Jenin itself, drones and helicopters circled overhead while the sound of sporadic firing could be heard in the city.
Hundreds of Israeli troops have been carrying out raids since Wednesday in one of their largest actions in the West Bank in months.
The operation, which Israel says was mounted to block Iranian-backed terror groups from attacking its citizens, has drawn international calls for a halt.
At least 19 Palestinians, including terrorists and civilians, have now been killed since it began. The Israeli military said on Saturday a soldier had been killed during the fighting in the West Bank.
The Israeli forces were battling Palestinian fighters from armed factions that have long had a strong presence in Jenin and the adjoining refugee camp, a densely populated township housing families driven from their homes in the 1948 Middle East war around the creation of Israel.
The Palestinian Red Crescent said on Saturday a child had been taken to hospital in Jenin with a bullet wound to the head.
The escalation in hostilities in the West Bank takes place as fighting between Israeli forces and Hamas terrorists still rages in the coastal Gaza Strip nearly 11 months since it began, and hostilities with the Iranian-backed Hezbollah terrorists in the Israel-Lebanon border area have intensified.
Late on Friday, Israeli forces said two men were killed in separate incidents near Gush Etzion, a large West Bank settlement cluster located south of Jerusalem, that the military assessed were both attempted attacks on Israelis.
In the first, a car exploded at a petrol station in what the army said was an attempted car bombing attack. The military said a man was shot dead after he got out of the car and tried to attack soldiers.
In the second incident, a man was killed after the military said a car attempted to ram a security guard and infiltrate the Karmei Tzur settlement. The car was chased by security forces and crashed and an explosive device in it was detonated, the military said in a statement.
The two deaths were confirmed by Palestinian health authorities but they gave no details on how they died.
Troops combed the area following the two incidents. Security forces also carried out raids in the city of Hebron, where the two men came from.
Hamas praised what it called a “double heroic operation” in the West Bank. It said in a statement it was “a clear message that resistance will remain striking, prolonged and sustained as long as the brutal occupation’s aggression and targeting of our people and land continue”.
The group, however, did not claim direct responsibility for the attacks.
Israeli army chief General Herzi Halevi said on Saturday Israel would step up defensive measures as well as offensive actions like the Jenin operation.
Amid the gunfire, armored bulldozers searching for roadside bombs have ploughed up large stretches of paved roads and water pipes have been damaged, leading to flooding in some areas.
The post Israeli Troops, Palestinian terrorists clash in West Bank After Incidents Near Settlements first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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‘Serious and Pervasive’ Jew-Hatred at Columbia, Per Report from School’s Task Force
A student protester parades a Palestinian flag outside the entrance to Hamilton Hall on the campus of Columbia University, in New York, US, April 30, 2024. Photo: Mary Altaffer/Pool via REUTERS
JNS.org – Hundreds of Jewish and Israeli students at Columbia think that the Ivy League school “has not treated them with the standards of civility, respect and fairness it promises to all its students,” according to a report from Columbia’s task force on antisemitism released on Friday.
The 91-page report, which draws on interviews with almost 500 students, found that Jew-hatred on campus is “serious and pervasive.”
“These student stories are heartbreaking, and make clear that the university has an obligation to act,” the task force’s report states. (It wasn’t clear from the report how many of the 500 students were Jewish or Israeli.)
“Unfortunately, some members of the Columbia community have been unwilling to acknowledge the antisemitism many students have experienced—the way repeated violations of university policy and norms have affected them and the compliance issues this climate has created with respect to federal, state and local anti-discrimination law,” the report states.
“Many of the events reported in the testimonials took place well before the establishment of the encampments and the takeover of Hamilton Hall,” it adds. “The experiences reported during that period were even more extreme.”
Students, who often didn’t know how to report Jew-hatred to Columbia, found that “some faculty and staff responded with compassion and determination,” but “others minimized the concerns of these students, reacting sluggishly and ineffectively even to the most clear-cut violations,” the report states. “Even students who had successfully reported an incident spoke of a recurring lack of enforcement of existing university rules and policies.”
The task force suggested its own working definition of Jew-hatred for Columbia to use, and recommended “in-person workshops about antisemitism and Islamophobia, as well as a range of optional training and workshops for others in our community, including on implicit bias and stereotypes, bystander interventions and having difficult conversations.”
“Many Jewish students said they now avoid walking alone on campus,” the report states. It quotes a student who said that walking on campus with a visible Star of David or wearing a kippah “could start World War III.”
“The experiences of these students demonstrated that there is an urgent need to reshape everyday social norms across the campuses of Columbia University,” per the report. “We need to promote a richer ethic of pluralism, which would encourage greater tolerance of and respect for differences in religion, culture and national origin.”
“If we were really to succeed in promoting tolerance, students would come to understand and value these differences,” it added.
The post ‘Serious and Pervasive’ Jew-Hatred at Columbia, Per Report from School’s Task Force first appeared on Algemeiner.com.