Rick Law (left) gets a helping hand from an LA County Firefighter as he digs throw rubble trying to recovery mementoes in the rubble of his Altadena home that burned to the ground Jan. 10, 2024. Photo by Barbara Davidson/The Washington Post via Getty Images

I immersed myself this week in the Warsaw Rabbi’s collection of sermons from 1939 to 1942.

And here is something that he wrote: “When we study the prophetic and rabbinic accounts of the destruction of the Temple, we thought we had some conception of what those troubles meant. Sometimes we would even weep as we read. Only now do we see how great is the difference between hearing troubles and seeing or undergoing them directly. One has almost nothing in common with the other.”

And of course he’s right. While the devastation unfolding here and now is incomparable to the devastation in which he was situated, the Warsaw Ghetto rabbi is right when he says that when your vantage point is the epicenter of the loss there’s a different kind of sacred response and responsibility.

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This week, it is clear that our work is to hold one another, to try to give voice to some of what we have lost and what remains. So I want to talk today about home, what it means to have a home, what it means to lose a home.

To get there we turn to our Torah portion, the last one in the book of Genesis, a book after all whose trajectory takes us from the Garden of Eden to Egypt, an exile that will be imprinted on our hearts as a people for eternity.

The time has come for Jacob to die and he has one wish, one aching dying need. He calls his son Joseph, the only one among them who will have the power to fulfill this dying wish, and says to his son, “Please if I have found favor in your eyes, please place your hand under my thigh as a pledge of kindness and truth, please do not bury me in Egypt.”

Now the rabbis in their endless creativity will offer all kinds of reasons that it’s absolutely critical for Jacob to be returned to Canaan, where he will be buried.

He prophesied that one day the plague of lice would come and he didn’t want his decomposing body to be eaten by the lice in the soil of Egypt. He didn’t want, when the resurrection comes, to roll beneath the earth all the way back to the land of Israel. And all kinds of other fantastical tales all of which are obviously missing the point.

Even though Jacob has been settled in Egypt now for nearly 20 years, even though, as the rabbis point out, this was the place of miracles and renewed life for him, the place where he reconnected with his beloved son Joseph, even still, all Jacob really wants at the end of his life is to go home. “Please, please, please my son, bring me home.”

I understand that yearning for home. On the rare occasion that I’m back in New Jersey, just driving into my old neighborhood makes me tear up. Every time I drive by our first home here in Los Angeles, the house where Eva and Sammy were born, just a few blocks away from where we live now, my heart leaps.

Many of us can relate to this feeling, I think. This is the house that you grew up in. The place where you began to build a life together. The place where you learned how to read or where you taught your kid to read. The place where your father died. The place where you realized that your marriage was over. The only place in the world where the way the sun strikes the kitchen window at 4 p.m. is forever imprinted on your heart. The corner that held that cluster of Judaica that you got for your wedding and you never liked, but you didn’t know what to do with. The junk drawer that you hoped the guests don’t accidentally open. The giant windows with that view, the one you took in each morning as you arose.

The place where you stood when your mother called to say that your grandfather died. The bookshelves that held his tattered siddur, the one from his days in the Army. The last place where you saw your loved one before he died. The spot in the living room where you sat with black coffee in your hand and talked to your sister on the phone each morning.

These places matter. And it’s true not only for places of blessing but also for places of great pain.

The walls of Jacob’s tent back in Canaan held agony and anguish. The premature death of the one woman in the world he loved. The years of inconsolable grief after the loss of his son. The Torah says he died at 47 and 100, meaning he had 47 good years and 100 years of pain.

Even those places of heartache, the heart’s connection to those places never breaks. Jacob wanted to go home because certain places are planted deeply in our hearts forever. And even when we can’t go home, we never forget home.

Talk to someone whose family fled Iran in 1979. I’ve heard friends talk about the smells of Tehran, about the sounds of the radio in Tehran. There’s a yearning that time and geography never severs. Think about it. The Jewish people literally prayed for a return to our home for 2,000 years, and we are not the only ones.

I’ve talked to friends here who are Mexican American, who are so close to risking absolutely everything to go back home to Mexico just for one day to see the place where they grew up. There’s a reason that the Palestinian yearning for home is the key, an image that you’ll see throughout refugee camps in the West Bank.

Think about Odysseus’ fervent need to get home. Great literature and music and art center on the deep irrepressible desire for home.

In our story it’s not just Jacob, it’s also his son Joseph, who ultimately yearns to return home too. As the Torah portion draws to a close he calls to his brothers and says, “I am about to die. One day you will be redeemed from this place. And you will return home. When that happens please carry my bones from this place and bring me home.”

Joseph had only lived in that home for a few short years. Home for him is a place of isolation, alienation, jealousy and violence. He names his firstborn son Menashe so that God will cause me to forget the suffering of my home. In Egypt, Joseph served the Pharaoh and the people with his ingenuity. In Egypt, Joseph is respected and loved. But even still, Egypt is never his home. When Joseph dies, he’s an old man, he is embalmed and placed in a coffin that is dropped to the floor of the river Nile in Egypt. We’ll read in the coming weeks of how Moses recovered that coffin during the days of redemption, how the promise was fulfilled when Joseph is ultimately brought home. He’s buried so many years later in Shechem. In fact he’s brought back to the exact place where his painful story began, where his brothers betrayed him, but that place is still home.

Our identity, our individual and collective identity is rooted in home. The home is, or is intended to be, one place in the world of privacy, of safety, of comfort from an often unforgiving world. It’s why addressing the homelessness crisis in this community has been such a priority for us. And why as we dream of building our own shared home, building homes for others has been an absolute priority.

And the ache for home never goes away. Even long after the building itself or the tent is gone, the sense of place persists. I once had in my office a grown man who was utterly shattered by the news that his childhood home across the country, which he had not lived in for 30 years, had been sold. The loss of a home is real.

As Jews, we’re people who have so often lost our home, navigating one exile to the next, and yet we hold an absolutely central place in our hearts for home. This means that we honor the container, the sacred spaces that hold our joy and our pain, our yearning and our grief even as we recognize that they’re imperfect, even as we recognize that they are impermanent.

Among the most formative moments for us as a people is the destruction of our shared home, the most sacred home of all, the Temple in Jerusalem, God’s home.

And the rest of Jewish history from 70 CE is defined by the tension between honoring the yearning to return home and the imperative to make a new home wherever we are and to bring holiness there too.

After the destruction of the Temple, the locus of holiness shifted from Jerusalem to the home. Rambam teaches that there are three central functions to that Temple in Jerusalem, the holiest of places: spiritual connection, sacrifice, and the marking of sacred time.

All three of those things now happen at the dinner table. The home becomes a place of spiritual connection and elevation, a place in which we practice accountability and forgiveness, in which we work on relationships that in the outside world we might otherwise sever. It is in the home that we mark sacred time.

I say all of this now as tens of thousands of acres of the most beautiful land in the country burn all around us. And thousands of people, thousands, have just lost their homes.

When we lose a home we lose a part of ourselves, a part of our story. Home is memory. Home is your history, wrote Toni Morrison. There is a physicality to the loss of home, a sense of displacement and ache that will never go away, and an ache that so many of us, including many in this room right now, are experiencing on this Shabbat.

Our hearts break alongside yours. This loss is real.

Our tradition, no stranger to loss, offers us some consolidation. And I want to ask you to hear these words not through cynical ears, not through ears that are used to soppy, saccharine viral posts. But instead to hear this as ancient wisdom from a sacred tradition held by a people who experienced catastrophic loss again and again, generation after generation, and was forced to ask hard questions about how we even survive when the earth burns and the whole world trembles.

Rabbi Nachman bar Yitzchak says in Masechet Shabbat: One who delights in Shabbat is rescued from the oppression of exile.

Here’s what he’s saying: when we lose our Temple, we turn to our homes. When we lose our homes, we turn time itself into our home. We honor the ache in our hearts, we break glass beneath the chuppah and we remember that alongside our longing, aching hearts will be the opportunity for beauty and blessing and bounty wherever we are, as we set our hearts to align with the setting of the sun every Friday night.

Can we bring holiness that way even into the strangest and most alien of places?

I started with a teaching from the Warsaw Ghetto rabbi. The reason I picked back up this particular volume this week, in the midst of this calamity, in the midst of our phone calls and strategizing, is because one of my friends, a dear colleague, lost his home and his shul in the Pasadena fires.

Some of you know Rabbi Joshua Levine Grater. He was the rabbi of Pasadena Jewish Temple & Center for many years and now he does exceptional work with unhoused people there — people who, by the way, know the ache of the loss of a home better than any. And people who, in these difficult days ahead, will be in ever greater need of our love and our care.

Joshua’s house burned down, everything is gone, the appliances, the furniture, the paintings, and the photos, everything. Except somehow, inexplicably, one book survived. How does a book survive when kitchen appliances burn? This book was his copy of Sacred Fire: Torah from the Years of Fury 1939-1942, written by Kalonymus Kalman Shapiro, known as the Warsaw Ghetto rabbi.

And so I close with one more teaching from this great rabbi, which I hope will be a guide and a reminder for us these difficult days of what matters most.

It was January 1940. Rabbi Shapiro was hiding from the Nazis. It is from his place in hiding that he wrote the following:

“Israel’s acceptance of the Torah took place in the wilderness. From this we learn that we should never say that in this place I can experience awe and holiness, but in that place it is impossible. Had Israel accepted the Torah in the land of Israel, they would have thought that it is only possible to fulfill our sacred purpose in one place, when we are home. But not when we are in exile. Therefore God gave us the Torah in the desert, on the road, in transit, in the wilderness so that we would know that we can access holiness and beauty and joy wherever we are.”

This is a deep and profound truth, holiness and beauty and joy and love can be found everywhere. Even in the displacement. Even in the midst of the destruction. And I have heard that precise message again and again from the people in our community who have lost the most this past week.

These days are filled for all of us with pain and uncertainty. It is going to take a lot to rebuild this beautiful city, a dreamscape of sunshine and promise, a place for artists and activists, a place where everything is possible, our shared home.

We will need to lift one another from the ashes in the days ahead, as we do. Please, amidst all of that sacred work, I hope that you will hear me. A people who can grieve our losses, who can honor the absence, a people who can turn toward one another in our pain, and open our hearts and our homes to each other, this is the people who will survive. This is a people who with or without our physical homes will continue to thrive.

With love in my heart for every one of you, I wish you: Shabbat shalom.

Watch Rabbi Brous’ sermon:

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