Coming Home Again and Again

This week Sarah dies. Abraham must now buy a burial plot for his wife. Despite their advanced age, he did not plan for this moment. He has no place to bury Sarah even though they resided in the promised land for sixty-two years. (Here is the math. God instructed them to leave their native land for Canaan when Sarah was sixty-five. She dies at the age of one hundred and twenty-seven years.)

The Torah states, “Then Abraham rose from beside his dead and spoke to the Hittites, saying, ‘I am a resident alien among you; sell me a burial site among you.’” (Genesis 23) One could argue that he is just negotiating effectively. He therefore self-deprecates before the landowner Ephron from whom he wants to buy the Cave of Machpelah.

Then again, Abraham’s identity appears to be that of a wanderer. After spending nearly half of his life in what is now the land of Israel, he still considers himself a sojourner. He never feels at home.

I am beginning to wonder if this is representative of the Jewish condition.

The early Zionists believed never feeling at home was our crucial deficiency. They sought to cure this feeling. They believed that the root of our problem was never having a home. They argued that the Jewish psyche was plagued by feelings of homelessness and beleaguered by unwelcome signs throughout the many lands in which we resided.

Israel’s Declaration of Independence proclaims, “The catastrophe which recently befell the Jewish people—the massacre of millions of Jews in Europe—was another clear demonstration of the urgency of solving the problem of its homelessness by re-establishing in the land of Israel the Jewish State.” The state is the answer to our wandering. It is a cure to our inability to see ourselves at home. It is response to the nations of the world’s refusal to say, “This is your home.”

Today, thousands of Israelis are unable to return to their homes. Those who built lives for themselves and their families in the South along Gaza’s border and the North along Lebanon’s are living in hotels in Jerusalem or at kibbutzim in the Galilee. They are no longer at home.

This is why the war with Hamas is an existential struggle. It is a fight to return home. It is a battle to restore our sense of home.

I never imagined that curing Jewish homelessness is an eternal struggle.

Will the descendants of Abraham ever feel at home in any land? Will the nations ever allow the Jewish people to call even a morsel of territory home?

I pray for our strength in this struggle.

I continue to hold fast to our dream. “To be a free people in our own land!”