RSS
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.
—
The post Sukkot is a holiday of homecoming and homelessness appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
RSS
Former Columbia University President Appointed as UK Economic Adviser
Columbia University administrators and faculty, led by President Minouche Shafik, testified before the US House Committee on Education and the Workforce on April 17, 2024. Photo: Jack Gruber/Reuters Connect
i24 News – British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has named Minouche Shafik, former president of Columbia University, as his chief economic adviser at Downing Street, a move aimed at stabilizing the country’s fragile economy and averting a potential budget crisis.
Shafik, an economist of Egyptian origin with dual British and American nationality, has held senior roles at the Bank of England, the IMF, and the World Bank.
She later led the London School of Economics and was elevated to the House of Lords in 2020.
Her tenure in the United States was more turbulent. Shafik stepped down as president of Columbia University in 2024 after just a year in office, amid fierce criticism over her handling of pro-Palestinian protests following the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023, and the subsequent war in Gaza.
US officials accused her of failing to confront antisemitism on campus, while students and faculty condemned her decision to call in police to dismantle protest encampments.
Since returning to Britain, Shafik has played an active role in policy and cultural institutions. She advised Foreign Secretary David Lammy on international aid reform, has chaired the Victoria & Albert Museum since January, and led the “Economy 2030” inquiry for the Resolution Foundation, where she argued for reforms to the UK’s system of wealth taxation.
RSS
Israel Mulls West Bank Annexation in Response to Moves to Recognize Palestine
The Jordan Valley. Photo: Юкатан via Wikimedia Commons.
Israel is considering annexation in the West Bank as a possible response to France and other countries recognizing a Palestinian state, according to three Israeli officials and the idea will be discussed further on Sunday, another official said.
Extension of Israeli sovereignty to the West Bank – de facto annexation of land captured in the 1967 Middle East war – was on the agenda for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s security cabinet meeting late on Sunday that is expected to focus on the Gaza war, a member of the small circle of ministers said.
It is unclear where precisely any such measure would be applied and when, whether only in Israeli settlements or some of them, or in specific areas of the West Bank like the Jordan Valley and whether any concrete steps, which would likely entail a lengthy legislative process, would follow discussions.
Any step toward annexation in the West Bank would likely draw widespread condemnation from the Palestinians, who seek the territory for a future state, as well as Arab and Western countries. It is unclear where US President Donald Trump stands on the matter. The White House and State Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
A spokesperson for Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar did not respond to a request for comment on whether Saar had discussed the move with his US counterpart Marco Rubio during his visit to Washington last week.
Netanyahu’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment on whether the prime minister supports annexation and if so, where.
A past pledge by Netanyahu to annex Jewish settlements and the Jordan Valley was scrapped in 2020 in favor of normalizing ties with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain in the Abraham Accords brokered by Trump in his first term in office.
The office of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The United States said on Friday it would not allow Abbas to travel to New York for the United Nations gathering of world leaders, where several US allies are set to recognize Palestine as a state.
RSS
Israel Pounds Gaza City Suburbs, Netanyahu to Convene Security Cabinet
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks to the press on Capitol Hill, Washington, DC, July 8, 2025. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein
Israeli forces pounded the suburbs of Gaza City overnight from the air and ground, destroying homes and driving more families out of the area as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s security cabinet was set on Sunday to discuss a plan to seize the city.
Residents of Sheikh Radwan, one of the largest neighborhoods of Gaza City, said the territory had been under Israeli tank shelling and airstrikes throughout Saturday and on Sunday, forcing families to seek shelter in the western parts of the city.
The Israeli military has gradually escalated its operations around Gaza City over the past three weeks, and on Friday it ended temporary pauses in the area that had allowed for aid deliveries, designating it a “dangerous combat zone.”
“They are crawling into the heart of the city where hundreds of thousands are sheltering, from the east, north, and south, while bombing those areas from the air and ground to scare people to leave,” said Rezik Salah, a father of two, from Sheikh Radwan.
An Israeli official said Netanyahu’s security cabinet will convene on Sunday evening to discuss the next stages of the planned offensive to seize Gaza City, which he has described as Hamas’ last bastion.
A full-scale offensive is not expected to start for weeks. Israel says it wants to evacuate the civilian population before moving more ground forces in.
HAMAS SPOKESPERSON TARGETED
Netanyahu confirmed on Sunday that Israeli forces had targeted Abu Ubaida, the spokesperson of Hamas’ armed wing. Defense Minister Israel Katz said that Abu Ubaida was killed. Two Hamas officials contacted by Reuters did not respond to requests for comment.
Gaza health authorities said 15 people, including five children, were killed in the attack on a residential building in the heart of Gaza City.
Abu Ubaida, also known as Hozayfa Al-Khalout, is a well-known figure to Palestinians and Israelis alike, close to Hamas’ top military leaders and in charge of delivering the group’s messages, often via video, for around two decades, delivering statements while wearing a red keffiyeh that concealed his face.
The US targeted him with sanctions in April 2024, accusing him of leading the “cyber influence department” of al-Qassam Brigades.
In his last statement on Friday, he warned that the planned Israeli offensive on Gaza City would endanger the hostages.
On Saturday, Red Cross head Mirjana Spoljaric said an evacuation from the city would provoke a massive population displacement that no other area in the enclave is equipped to absorb, with shortages of food, shelter and medical supplies.
“People who have relatives in the south left to stay with them. Others, including myself, didn’t find a space as Deir Al-Balah and Mawasi are overcrowded,” said Ghada, a mother of five from the city’s Sabra neighborhood.
Around half of the enclave’s more than 2 million people are presently in Gaza City. Several thousand were estimated to have left the city for central and southern areas of the enclave.
Israel’s military has warned its political leaders that the offensive is endangering hostages still being held by Hamas in Gaza. Protests in Israel calling for an end to the war and the release of the hostages have intensified in the past few weeks.