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 stand before you humbly this Shabbat, knowing what everyone in this room has been through these past five days. Trying to make sense of the nonsensical.

The magnitude of the calamity that has struck our city, our neighbors, our community, is staggering.

In pastoral spaces, there is a discourse that roughly mirrors one begun by Ahad Ha’am in an essay called Priest and Prophet, written over a century ago. In the contemporary version of this debate, we, clergy, must decide if our fuel is a moral idea, a commitment to sometimes painful truth telling in the service of inspiring social change, or if we are compelled not primarily by the moral right or wrong, but by honoring the relationships at the heart of the communities we hold.

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Of course, a rabbi must be both. We must immerse deeply in the individual stories, including stories of heartache, and at the same time, we must cry out against injustices that perpetuate that heartache.

This is why thoughts and prayers not only ring hollow after a calamity, but constitute a moral offense. Because failing to address root causes of human suffering will only allow that suffering to endure.

I share this now because when I saw those fires Tuesday night, tearing over the hills I have hiked in with my family for twenty years, savaging the homes of my friends, our community members, I was filled not only with sadness and fear, but also with rage. Rage because I recognized the images on the screen from Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, and from the Ministry for the Future, from An Inconvenient Truth and power point presentations by climate scientists more than thirty years ago modeling out potential climate outcomes, warning that this is what today would look like, if we didn’t change course, immediately.

And we didn’t change course, of course. Instead, we witnessed the most powerful people in the world engage in a campaign of denial, obfuscation, and outright lies, threatening our future on this planet with no guardrails and near impunity.

And now our city burns. Yes, I felt rage. And I still do.

But, and… for reasons I will share with you momentarily, I immersed myself this week in the Warsaw Rabbi’s collection of sermons from 1939 to 1942. Listen to this Torah:

When we studied the prophetic and rabbinic accounts of the destruction of the Temple, we thought we had some conception of what those troubles meant. At times we would even weep. Now we see how great the difference is between hearing troubles and seeing or undergoing them directly. One has almost nothing in common with the other. (Esh Kodesh, 193)

Of course he’s right. While the devastation unfolding here and now is incomparable to the devastation of his time, the rabbi is right that when your vantage point is the very epicenter of loss, there is a different kind of sacred response and responsibility.

And so, despite its urgency, I will leave the talk of climate catastrophe and reckless, criminal disinformation campaigns to another week. This week, it is clear, our work is to hold one another. To try to grasp what we have lost, and what remains.

I want to talk today about HOME. What it means to have a home, and what it means to lose one. To get there, we turn to our parasha, the last one in the book of Genesis, a book—after all, whose trajectory takes us from Gan Eden to Mitzrayim, itself an exile that will be imprinted on our hearts, as a people, for eternity.

The time has come for Jacob to die. He has a wish. An aching, dying need. He calls his son Joseph. Not his eldest, Reuven, or Judah, but Joseph. The one son who will have the power to fulfill this dying wish.

וַיִּקְרְב֣וּ יְמֵֽי־יִשְׂרָאֵל֮ לָמוּת֒ וַיִּקְרָ֣א  אִם־נָ֨א מָצָ֤אתִי חֵן֙ בְּעֵינֶ֔יךָ שִֽׂים־נָ֥א יָדְךָ֖ תַּ֣חַת יְרֵכִ֑י וְעָשִׂ֤יתָ עִמָּדִי֙ חֶ֣סֶד וֶאֱמֶ֔ת אַל־נָ֥א תִקְבְּרֵ֖נִי בְּמִצְרָֽיִם׃

…Please—if I have found favor in your eyes, please place your hand under my thigh as a pledge of kindness and truth to me. Please—do not bury me in Egypt.” (Gen 47:29)

The Rabbis, endlessly creative, will offer all kinds of reasons that it’s so critical for Jacob to be buried in Canaan:

He prophesied that one day the plague of lice would strike Egypt, and he didn’t want his decomposing body to be eaten by lice. 

He did not want, when the resurrection comes, to have to roll beneath the earth all the way back to eretz Yisrael, the land of Israel.

…and other fantastical tales.

The problem is, these all miss the obvious point. Even though Jacob has been settled in Egypt now for 17 years, even though, as the Rabbis point out, this was a place of miracles and renewed life for him, the place where he reconnected with his beloved Joseph, even still, what Jacob really wants, at the end of his life, is to go home.

Please, please, please, son. Please: bring me home.

I understand the 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 place in LA, the house Eva and Sami were born in—just a few blocks away from where I live now—my heart leaps.

We can all relate, I think. This is the house you grew up in. The place where you began to build a life together. The place where you learned how to read, or taught your kid to read. The place where your father died. The place where you realized your marriage was over. The only place in the world where the way the sun strikes the kitchen window at 4pm is forever imprinted on your heart.

This is the corner that held that cluster of Judaica you got from the wedding that you never really liked but didn’t know what to do with. There’s the junk drawer, that you hope the guests don’t accidentally open. The giant windows with that view, the one you took in each morning as you arose.

Here’s the place where you stood when your mother called to say your grandfather had died. The bookshelves that held his tattered old siddur, the one from his days in the army. This is the room you were in the last time you saw your beloved, before the accident. The spot in the living room where you sat with a black coffee in hand and talked to your sister on the phone each morning.

These places matter.

And that’s true not only for places of blessing, but even for places of pain. The walls of Jacob’s tent held agony and anguish. The premature death of the one woman he loved. The years of inconsolable grief after the loss of his son. (The Torah says he died at 47 and 100—meaning 47 good years, 100 years of suffering). Even those places of sorrow, the heart’s connection to those places never breaks.

Jacob wanted to be home, because certain places are planted deeply within our hearts.

Even when we can’t go home, we never forget home. Talk to someone whose family fled Iran in ‘79. I’ve heard friends speak of the smells of Tehran. The sounds of the radio shows. There is a yearning that time and geography will not sever.

Think of it! The Jewish people literally prayed for a return home for 2000 years. And we’re not the only ones. I have friends who have lived in this country for twenty five years, who love it here… and yet they’re just about ready to risk it all to go back to Mexico for a week, just to be, for a moment, home again. There’s a reason that a symbol of Palestinian yearning is a key (an image you’ll see throughout refugee camps in the West Bank). Think of Odysseus’s fervent need to get home. Great literature and music and art center on the deep, irrepressible desire to return home.

In our story it’s not just Jacob. His son, Joseph, also yearns to go home.

As the parasha draws to a close, Joseph calls to his brothers, “I am about to die,” he says. One day, you’ll be redeemed from this place, and return to the land of that God promised to our family, to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. When that happens, please: “carry up my bones from this place.” Bring me home.

Joseph had only lived in Canaan for a few, short years. Home, for him, was a place of isolation, alienation, violence. He literally names his firstborn, Menashe:

כִּֽי־נַשַּׁ֤נִי אֱלֹהִים֙ אֶת־כׇּל־עֲמָלִ֔י וְאֵ֖ת כׇּל־בֵּ֥ית אָבִֽי׃

God has made me forget the hardship of my father’s home (Gen 41:51).

In Egypt, in contrast, Joseph served Pharaoh and the people. With his ingenuity, he saves the nation from famine. In Egypt he is respected and loved.

And even still, Egypt is not his home.

When Joseph dies, he is an old man. He is embalmed, and placed in a coffin that is dropped to the floor of the River Nile in Egypt (50:24-26). We’ll read in the coming weeks, about Moses’s recovery of that coffin during the days of redemption (Ex 14:19), and how the promise is fulfilled when Joseph does, ultimately, make it home. He is buried, so many years later, in Shekhem (Joshua 24:32)—the very place where his brothers betrayed him. But that place is home.

Our identity—individual and collective—is rooted in home.

The home is—or is intended to be—a place of privacy. Of safety. Of comfort from an often unforgiving world. It is the sanctity, the centrality of home that underlies our community’s commitment to addressing the housing crisis, to our dedication to building housing for formerly homeless people in our future communal home. Home matters.

And the ache for home never, ever disappears.

As Jews, we are a people who have so often lost our homes—navigating one exile to the next. And yet, we honor the home, the container, the sacred spaces that hold our joy and pain, our yearning and our grief, even as we recognize that they are imperfect, and impermanent.

Among the most formative experiences of our people is the destruction of our shared home, the most sacred home of all: the Temple, God’s home, in 70CE. And the rest of Jewish history 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 (in the beginning of Hilchot Beit HaBehirah) that there are three central functions in the Beit Hamikdash, the Temple in Jerusalem, the holiest of holy places:

(1) spiritual connection and elevation; (2) sacrifice; and (3) the marking of sacred time.

Now, all of that happens at the dinner table. The home becomes the place of spiritual connection and elevation. The place in which we practice accountability and forgiveness. In which we work on relationships that in the outside world, we might otherwise just sever. It is in the home that we mark sacred time.

Rashi teaches (Hagiga 27a)  that in a post-sacrificial world, we now affect atonement by bringing guests into our homes! Our homes, themselves, become as important, as central, as the Holy Temple!

As I say these words this morning, tens of thousands of acres of the most beautiful land in the country are burning all around us. And thousands of people 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. Even long after the building is gone, the sense of place persists. A congregant once came to see me, because he was shattered by the news that his childhood home, which he had not lived in for 30 years, had been sold. There is a physicality to the loss of a home. A sense of displacement. An ache that never goes away.

This is an ache that so many of our neighbors—including some right in this room, for many of our congregants are among them—are experiencing this shabbat. Our hearts break alongside yours. This loss is real.

Now here, again, our tradition—no stranger to loss—offers us some consolation. I ask us to hear these words not through cynical ears, not ears that are used to seeing soppy, saccharine, viral posts. But instead hear this as ancient wisdom from a sacred tradition held by a people that has experienced catastrophic loss again and again, generation after generation, and has been forced to ask hard questions about how one survives when the earth burns and the whole world trembles:

רַב נַחְמָן בַּר יִצְחָק אָמַר: נִיצּוֹל מִשִּׁעְבּוּד גָּלִיּוֹת

Rav Naḥman bar Yitzḥak said: One who delights in Shabbat is rescued from the oppression of exile. (Shabbat 118b)

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 huppah. 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 sun every Friday evening. And we remember that we can bring holiness 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, 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 Temple and Jewish Center for years, and now does exceptional work with unhoused people there, people who, by the way, know the ache of the loss of home better than any, people who, in these difficult days, will be in even greater need of our love, support, and care.

Joshua lost his home this week. Everything is gone—the appliances, the furniture. The paintings and the photos. Everything… but somehow, inexplicably, one book. (How does a book survive but kitchen countertops burn?) It was his copy of Sacred Fire, the Esh Kodesh, Torah from the Years of Fury 1939-1942, written by Rabbi Kalonymos Kalmish Shapira, known as the Warsaw Ghetto Rabbi.

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

It was January, 1940, Parshat Yitro, which we’ll read in just a few weeks. Rabbi Shapira was hiding from the Nazis. It is from his place in hiding that he observed the following:

“Israel’s acceptance of the Torah took place in the wilderness.” From this we learn that one should never say in this place it’s possible to experience awe and holiness, but in that place it’s impossible.

“Had Israel accepted the Torah in the land of Israel, they would have thought it only possible to fulfill [our sacred purpose] in their own place, in their own home, but not when they are in exile. Therefore, God gave them Torah in the desert. On the road. In transit. So that they would know that they [can access it] everywhere.”

This is a deep truth: holiness, joy, beauty, connection, love… can be found everywhere. Even in displacement. Even in the midst of the destruction.

These days are filled 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, in the days ahead, to lift one another from the ashes. Please, as we do, remember: a people who grieves our losses, and honors our absences, a people who turns toward one another in our pain and open our hearts and homes to each other, this is a people who—with or without our homes—will endure.

Watch Rabbi Brous’ sermon:

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