The Journey Home

This year marks the 150th anniversary of the birth of Sholom Aleichem. Russian-born, settling in America in 1914, Aleichem has been called the “natural genius of Yiddish Literature.” (Irving Howe, A Treasury of Yiddish Stories, p. 74) If you have ever read a Sholom Aleichem story, then you know that the appeal of his prodigious literary legacy is in his ability to package evocative and complex themes in seemingly innocent anecdotes and tales.

This evening, I want to share with you one of his most famous stories, called “On Account of a Hat.” It is based on a well-known joke. It is a tale about coming home for the holidays, a comedy of errors, sort of a Trains, Planes, and Automobiles meets shtetl life. The main action takes place in a train station. Sholem Shachnah, our schlemiel protagonist, clinches a real estate deal and is rushing to go home for the holidays. After days of travel, he arrives at the Zlodievke train station, exhausted, with one more train to go. Fearful that he will fall asleep and miss the train, he tips the porter to wake him up when it arrives. He sits down in the train station next to a slumbering Gentile official, perhaps an inspector or maybe even a provincial commander. The official’s high status is signaled by the military hat with a red band and a visor nestled over his sleeping head. The train arrives in the middle of the night. When the porter wakes Sholem up from his deep sleep, Sholem, in a daze, mistakenly grabs the sleeping official’s hat. He gets on the train, and finds himself treated with unusual deference and respect by the ticket agent, the conductor, and everyone else. He is advised not to sit in third class with the riffraff, nor in second, but “His Excellency” has a seat waiting in first class. Sholem is confused and frustrated, believing himself to be the object of mockery. He then glances at a mirror on the train to see the cause of all the fawning. Sitting atop Sholem’s head is the official’s hat with the visor and red band. What bad luck, he says to himself, I told the porter to wake me up, but what does he do, he wakes up the official instead, which means… that I must still be asleep on the bench. At which point, our hero scoops up his belongings and runs back to the bench in the station where he was sleeping. Thus, recounts our narrator, Sholem misses the train as it leaves

It is an odd tale, a bit comic, a bit enigmatic, a tad tragic. It has been analyzed time and again by literary theorists. A story about the vagaries of modern life, about Jewish-Gentile relations in the Pale of Settlement, a psychological parable about the identities society thrusts upon each of us.

This evening, I want to suggest to you that at its core, it is a tale about coming home – one Jew’s desire to go home for the holidays and his inability to do so, because, as the punch line of the story makes clear, he thought he was the wrong person. The thrust of the tale seems to be that “identity” and “homecoming” are interdependent. We can come home, but only insofar as we know who we are. Conversely, and by extension, the trains that we miss, physically and spiritually, we miss because we forget or reject who we really are.

This evening begins Rosh Hashanah, our annual homecoming. We see new and familiar faces, new members and returning ones, some who were not here since the last holidays, some who were here as recently as today’s morning minyan. All of us are returning, to the synagogue and to this sacred date on the Jewish calendar, Rosh Hashanah, our new year. The sounds, smells, tastes of yontif all beckon us. I welcome each of you and look forward to a holiday season and a year ahead filled with health, happiness, and prosperity for our families, for the Jewish people, and for all of humanity.

If there is one consistent thread and theme in our tradition, it is the idea of coming home. Think about it. Most of the Torah is a tale of how the Jewish people sought to return to the land first promised to Abraham. The trek to “The Promised Land” is a return home, not a journey to a new place. Thousands of years of Jewish history occurred in exile, filled with a longing for our home, as we sat by the rivers of Babylon, by rivers all around the world, longing to return. There is not a single Jewish service that does not contain within it an expressed desire to return. And it is not merely geography that is at stake, it is our fundamental posture of being as Jews, a desire to return. Long before Homer’s tale of Odysseus’ homeward voyage, in fact, ever since the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden, our tradition teaches that authentic religious feeling is situated on the impulse to reclaim, to return to our roots. Every day this past month, as we will later this evening, Jews have chanted Psalm 27, for the Days of Awe. Embedded within is one request, our highest hope and deepest desire, to return to God’s house. It is the supplication of a person seeking homecoming. Sholom Aleichem’s story is quintessentially Jewish because it is a story about one man’s attempts to arrive back home.

So tonight, let me turn the question to you by way of our Sholom Aleichem story. If “homecoming” and “identity” are intertwined, then for you, here this evening, where are you and to what are you returning? The very first recorded question of the Bible – “Where are you?” – is posed by God to Adam. God asks it, of course, for existential reasons, not geographical ones. It is the same question that is posed to us tonight. How far have you ventured from your roots in the past year? You may be here in this room, but how far from home do you remain? Each of us, I would like to think, possesses an internal compass, a sense of right and wrong, a list of priorities, a belief in who we are and what we aspire to be. But in the year that has passed, we have left our home far behind and find ourselves tourists to our own
identities. Our lives have taken us far afield and we have found ourselves in spiritual exile. You may be in shul this evening, but you still need to ask, are you recognizable to those around you, to yourself, to your God?

So many relationships – in the workplace, in our community, in our families – are derailed from where they should be. Our disputes and disagreements are painful because we know the potential of how things should be, perhaps how things once were. It is actually not that hard to be in dispute with someone with whom we presume we could never get along. The sadness wrought by our quarrels has to do with our awareness of just how far things are from where they should be. The holidays are our yardage marker signaling just how distant we are from those we love – a friend to whom we no longer speak, an intractable grudge between parent and child. How did we allow that one misdeed to eclipse the totality of a relationship? Our vanity, our egos, conceit, and pride prevent us from softening our stance, from issuing apologies, and from accepting them from those extending them to us with sincerity.

A Hasidic parable tells of a king who, in a fit of rage against his son, exiled him from his kingdom. The son wandered alone through the world. In time, the king’s heart softened, and he sent his ministers to find his son and ask him to return. They found the young prince, but he answered them saying he could not return to the kingdom, he had been too hurt and his heart still harbored bitterness. The ministers brought back the sad news to the king. The king told them to return to his son with the following message: “Return home as far as you can, and I will come the rest of the way.” Tonight, we begin to journey home. Tonight the possibility for dialogue begins and we open up the crack of hope towards reconciliation.

Harder than the journey towards each other, is the second journey, the journey within, to arrive home to our true selves. Hermann Hesse once wrote “Each person ha[s] only one genuine vocation – to find the way to himself…” This evening we begin to acknowledge all those wrong turns that have resulted in each of us becoming alienated from who we really are; when we, like Jonah, knew the direction we were supposed to go, but decided to go the opposite way. Jews, unlike Christians, don’t believe that our original condition is sinful. Our shortcomings, our failings, our sins – these are painful because they have resulted in us being separated from our potential. We engage in repentance, teshuvah, not out of fear of punishment or retaliation, we engage in teshuvah because each of us wants to return home, each of us yearns to be reconciled with the person we know we can be. Our homecoming, as Sholom Aleichem knew, is all about our ability to reconnect to our true selves.

Finally, our return, we know, is not merely to each other, or to ourselves, but to God. This is what the prophet of the holidays, Isaiah, meant when he wrote: “Your sins have separated you from your God.” (Isa. 59:2) Our tradition teaches that within the human being dwells the soul that is a spark of God. In returning, we seek to find that piece of the Divine that desperately wants to be found. The promise of these Days of Awe is that God will accept us in all our faults as long as we are honest about who we really are. Neither the quantity nor the quality of our sins precludes us from being received back by our Creator. Tradition teaches that God’s assurance to Israel is “Open unto me the door of repentance, be it even as narrow as the point of a needle, I will open it so wide that wagons and chariots can pass through.” (Pesikta de Rav Kahana, 163b) The promise of the holidays is that, if you are willing, God will, under all circumstances, accept you.

Three journeys home. Towards each other, towards ourselves, and towards God. Each journey is difficult. None is possible without coming to terms with who we really are, where we fell short, and who we believe we can be.

There is a legend about a group of angels who, having heard that God intended to create the human being in God’s own likeness, plotted to hide the Divine image. One angel proposed hiding it on the pinnacle of the highest mountain, but a wiser angel pointed out that the human is an ambitious climber and would ascend the highest peak. Another angel suggested that the Image be sunk beneath the deepest ocean. This angel too was dissuaded when another pointed out that the human is curious and would plumb the ocean depths and draw forth the hidden treasure. The shrewdest angel counseled that the Image should be hidden within the human being himself because it is the last place that he would be likely to look for it. Tonight, we embark on the most ambitious journey home of all: the attempt to re-discover our own soul, the Divine image, the key to unlocking the relationships that matter the most to us. Tonight, we begin our journey home.