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A poet and creative writing teacher.
Resides in Jerusalem. One of the three creators of the NLI’s Ararat Program – Resilience of Spirit.

My father in heaven, I cried out, how isolated I have become.
If I don’t return immediately I will be lost.
I looked here and there, until I came to know the spirits
I set my heart towards that house and there I went.(*)

‘There are houses in all your dreams,’ he says.

In the nights I search for a house.
I rent an apartment with roommates,
Leave, because it’s expensive or dirty.
Sell one apartment, buy another, and remodel.
I build walls and destroy,
Bathrooms and kitchens.
I especially like small houses
Twenty five square meters,
Miniatures.
A house on wheels,
to travel across America
or Japan.
To enter my newly rented room
and put down my suitcase in the closet with all the dresses and books.
I will buy myself a tiny apartment
Which has water, and a window and a wooden door,

And why does a fifty-eight year old woman dream of houses?
After all, she has one.

I seek a house in which I can sleep
Without Bondormin
Awake refreshed
After traversing the sky
In a flock of seagulls.

(*) Paraphrase of the peddlar’s words in S.Y. Agnon’s story, The Lady and the Peddlar.

Translation by Rena Bannet

Dr. Erica Brown is the Vice Provost for Values and Leadership at Yeshiva University and the Director of its Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks-Herenstein Center. Her latest book is Kohelet and the Search for Meaning (Maggid).

“A house is built with wisdom,” we read in Proverbs, “and with understanding, it is established; through knowledge its rooms are filled with rare and beautiful treasures” (Prov. 24:3-4). Those rare and beautiful treasures are the people we cherish in our homes who grace us with their presence. The home is a place where God lives with us in the most prosaic of obligations and in the intimate chambers of our joys and sorrows. 

All the central and defining buildings that shape religious consciousness in Jewish tradition begin with the Hebrew word bayit. We pray in a beit knesset, a “gathering house,” where, in community, we express our fervent hopes and longing.  We study in a beit midrash, a home for our intellectual and spiritual explorations. We mourn the destruction of the Holy Temple, our Beit Ha-Mikdash. This sanctuary of God’s presence that we yearn to rebuild is the seminal home of our holiness. For the Jew, the synagogue and study hall are extensions of our own homes. Human dwellings serve different functions, and, in other languages, they are distinguished by distinct names. But in Judaism, the home of the mind and heart are interconnected with the personal homes we build. We live in body and spirit in all of these houses. 

A home for us is never just a set of walls and floors covered by a roof. It is a place where our tables mirror the altar, our sources of light reflect the flame of the menorah, and the bread we share with strangers mimics the bread once baked by the ancient priests. We can travel the world, but the Jewish home is where we ultimately find ourselves. In loving homes, the space is our shelter, our refuge, our haven, and our emotional fortress because it is also where God lives: “Whoever dwells in the shelter of the Most High will rest in the shadow of the Almighty” (Ps. 91:1).  The weather inside our homes matters. God blesses, Proverbs tells us, “the home of the righteous” (Prov. 3:33).

“A home,” my teacher and mentor Rabbi Jonathan Sacks wrote, “is a haven in a heartless world. It’s where we belong and where, if we are lucky, we raise a family. Home is where we learn the poetry of everyday life, the choreography of chessed, the countless daily acts of reciprocity and kindness that constitute the language of love.”

This may explain why the photo of every burnt and desecrated house on October 7 hurts so much. These were spaces where families lived and created memories. Standing amidst the debris of a home in Kissufim, its remaining walls pockmarked by bullet holes, I felt that the most sacred of Jewish spaces had been violated. Even standing in that ruin months later to bear witness and to honor its residents felt like a desecration of private space. In the rubble, I searched for an image of the people now gone. Even God felt exiled from that space.

Tens of thousands in Israel have been displaced from their homes month after month. Parents and children have lived in small hotel rooms; many of them have no home to go back to. Some will decide not to return. They will make their homes elsewhere. We are a people who have, for centuries, moved from one land to another, from one house to another. Difficult as this was, we learned something powerful from the transitions. We can make a home everywhere and anywhere with enough faith in the future. We have learned to adapt and build better the next time. 

As we commemorate all that’s been lost since October 7, let us keep the prophet Isaiah’s blessing as an aspiration, “My people will live in peaceful dwelling places, in secure homes, in undisturbed places of rest” (Is. 32:18).

Dr. Chayuta Deutsch, a writer and editor, wife, mother and grandmother. She lives In Neve Daniel in Gush Etzion. Author of Nechama: The Life Story of Nechama Leibowitz, The Rabbi’s Wife, the Bishop’s Wife and more.

She lost her son-in-law, First Sergeant Refael Kauders Z’L, in the current ongoing war.

I wish to pray for the homes. A home is a metaphor that serves well in describing wholeness and protection, but also in describing dissolution and destruction. Images of loss and brokenness suit the metaphor, but so too do warmth and resilience, protection and security.

”Even rocks crack, I tell you,” Dalia Ravikovitch wrote, “and not on account of old age.” Homes break and so do people. Sometimes homes (and people) are destroyed from the outside, sometimes they are destroyed from the inside. “When rocks crack, it happens by surprise,” Ravikovitch wrote. Or not: One year ago, on the very eve of Simcḥat Torah, we felt with terrible intensity both of these types of threat – a sword came at us from within, and a sword came from without. “You burned a Sanctuary that was already burned” Nebuchadnezzar was told according to the Midrash, so that he would not delude himself that it was he who succeeded in destroying the Temple and city. A home is never only walls. But it is also walls, and walls are important. The walls of our national home shook this year terribly. They were shaken and breached. We all experienced the shaking and the fracture, some of us experienced it on a personal level. There are those whose home was invaded and their relatives murdered in it or kidnapped from it, there are those who were forced to flee from their bombarded homes, in the north and the south. And there are those whose beloved fell in the war, and when someone beloved is taken, the ground drops away, a wall cracks. A wound opens and the earth trembles, knowing not if it will ever heal.

Therefore, at the end of this year, and the beginning of the next, I wish to pray for the homes, for their stability and beauty, for their resilience – our resilience, for their ability to protect, and for their ability to rehabilitate when they are broken into. I ask for a blessing to repair the walls of homes destroyed and of hearts broken.

If only the power inherent in us – in our dream of living in this place and building different types of homes in it – if only that power will help us return to our beauty and our wholeness, and to the beauty and wholeness of our homes. To rise from dust and ashes.

Bacol Serlui, born in 1983, is a poet, lecturer and a literary critic. She teaches Torah at Midreshet Matat in Carmiel and poetry writing at the Hebrew University. Her latest poetry book won her the 2022 Yehuda Amichai Prize, and her new book is coming out this November.

She lives in Beit Shemesh.

 

 

Before daybreak the soul shudders like the windows from the echoing explosions

oh Lord oh God, oh Lord oh God.

Are you being, are you not being. Is there anything in the world that is not your being.

And there is none like your being, and there is none like your not being.

And the bellows-chest rises and falls without words

breaths that are all prayer.

 

My beloved sleeps, rams cleave to his white beard.

He hears horns of war in his sleep, runs in silence

does not speak of the battles, the gaze of death

we do not touch.

He who knew love, even for a moment, would let it

cascade between the bodies like a river of darkness

on which to suspend his silence, his prayers.

 

I am writing in the room of the son who is not mine. He is not my son yet I am

pleading for him as if I birthed him.

You are my Father, we are orphans. Every day I have begotten you.

Where are your sons, my merciful Father, and your mercy

in the face of the children’s weeping, the mothers’

and in my sleep dead children weep

I cannot save.

The soul, the body, the troubles and the captivity

from the night rise for the prayers, to remind you

that you were called in compassion.

 

At home we do not know where home is

if it will remain when we return

who we will be when it is destroyed.

We gaze at our children as hugging refugees

wear the shoes of our forefathers

gather prayers into a satchel, moments into the gaping chest.

 

And again night. The world follows its course.

 

Treasures of light and dark. I go out into the darkness, into the echoes

hushing the distance between us.

And you shall hear in heaven, and you shall hear

that there is no breath that is not an outcry. Above us the explosions

behind me a door slams

the raindrops caress.

 

Translation by Sheryl Abbey

Amir Tibon is a journalist and a member of Kibbutz Nahal Oz. He and his family survived the October 7 massacre and have since been living in temporary housing in north-central Israel. His book The Gates of Gaza was recently published by Little, Brown and Company. 

Home.

I haven’t been living in my home for almost a year now.

The place I call home is currently empty and abandoned, scarred by the impact of October 7.

The glass in the windows is still shattered, and the walls full of bullet marks. The refrigerator is empty, and the kitchen counter is covered in dust.

No one has been living here since late November, when a group of soldiers who had turned our house into their headquarters after the October 7 attack, moved elsewhere.

They left the place clean and organized, for which I thanked them when we spoke on the phone.

After they left, the place remained empty. It remains that way until now.

Miri, my wife, has visited three times since that terrible day. She came to collect toys and books, clothes and silverware, electrical devices and towels – things we needed at our temporary housing in Kibbutz Mishmar Ha-Emek, where our community has found shelter in the aftermath of the attack.

Our two young girls, who barricaded with us in total silence for ten hours, while terrorists fired into our house, haven’t yet returned.

We plan to bring them back to this place, which they still call home, even though they’ve been away from it for almost a third of their lives now.

But in order to do that, we first of all have to bring back our friends Omri and Tzachi, who were kidnapped from their homes, in front of the eyes of their families.

For us, returning home means raising our girls in a home that is ‘sandwiched’ between two other houses where neighbors were murdered on October 7. Ilan Fiorentino, the neighbor in front of us, died while fighting the terrorists with his gun; Shoshi Brosh, the neighbor on the other side, was murdered while trying to take shelter with her husband, who was badly wounded.

Can I raise my girls there?

Yes. It will be hard. It will be challenging. But I can do it.

But I can’t pass every day by the homes of Omri and Tzachi, knowing that we could have saved them, could have brought them back, but didn’t.

I believe we need a deal to bring them back alive. This is the first step in bringing our children back to Nahal Oz. To the home that was lost, and can still be found again.