Sukkot and Shemini Atzeret are all about building homes. One is the temporary place that reminds us of the shelter in the Wilderness. The other is the permanent sanctuary in Jerusalem.
The haftarah of the second day of Sukkot and the haftarah of Shemini Atzeret are two parts of the same chapter of the Book of Kings that tell of Solomon's dedication of the bayit, the Temple: “בנה בניתי בית זבל לך מכון לשבתך עולמים, I have surely built You an exalted house, a place for You to dwell in forever... When Solomon finished offering to the Eternal all this prayer and supplication, he rose from where he had been kneeling, in front of the altar of the Eternal, his hands spread out toward heaven. He stood, and in a loud voice spoke before the entire community of Israel: ברוך ה אשר נתן מנוחה לעמו ישראל. Blessed be the Eternal, who has given a resting place for the people Israel, according to all that God promised”.
Sukkot is when we leave our usual homes. We experience impermanence. As individuals and as Jews, on Sukkot and through the passage of history, we have lived the words of the song that made Bob Dylan famous: “How does it feel/ To be without a home/ Like a complete unknown/ Like a rolling stone?”
But Shemini Atzeret is a day when we think of returning home. In the Bible, people are preparing to conclude Sukkot celebration and pilgrimage, about to head home from Jerusalem. A well-known midrash imagines God saying, “Please stay with me a bit more. I don’t want you to leave” 2
We do depart. But we also return. Leaving and homecoming, exile and return, are recurrent themes in Jewish liturgy, history and life. It was and remains a powerful paradigm for our people and serves as a metaphor for all of life.
We tell the stories of departing from Eden and returning to Gan Eden, of Avraham leaving Haran and coming to Canaan, of Moshe going forth from Egypt and going to the Land of Promise, of Exile to Babylonia and return to Land of Israel, of Roman expulsion and Jewish survival, of Spanish exile and return to Zion, of galut and moledet, Holocaust and rebirth, homelessness and homecoming.
A verse from Ezekiel became a paradigm for spiritual life: “And the living creatures ran and returned appearing like a flash of lightning”.
וְהַחַיּוֹת רָצֹוא וָשׁוֹב כְּמַרְאֵה הַבָּזָק.3Ratzoh ve’shov. The flowing back and forth becomes a metaphor for our personal lives: closer to the Holy One and then more distant.
Ratzoh ve’shov. We experience a spiritual swaying- a shukkel –during the holidays, an emotional shuttle when we mourn, an oscillation of attachment and disengagement. At Yizkor time, when we reflect on the lives of those we remember and love, our hearts still experience the systole and diastole of love.
In A Pigeon and A Boy, a remarkably tender novel, the Israeli author Meir Shalev tells a double love story that provides a narrative about the importance of finding our way home. In Hebrew, yonah refers to a dove or to a homing pigeon, a white dove. Drawing upon Biblical imagery that imagines the Jewish people as a pigeon/dove, the poet Hayyim Nahman Bialik, in "Behind the Gate," imagines a the bird leading him from Exile to Homeland.
After traveling a long distance in time and space, the pigeon/dove does not know how to open the gate: “’Alas!’ cry the waves/And the fish of the deep waters/How will I enter my gate, the special land, when my key is broken/And the door locked? No voice is heard, nobody answers/And a pigeon and a boy (yonah v’na’ar) still knock at the gate.”
Meir Shalev begins his novel Yonah v’Na’ar with an old Palmah fighter telling of something he saw during the battle around the San Simon monastery of Jerusalem during the 1948 War of Independence. This was a time when homing pigeons were still used to deliver battlefield messages.
And suddenly," said the elderly American man in the white shirt, "suddenly, a pigeon flew overhead, above that hell."… The man…pointed to the turret of the monastery. Many years had passed, but there were a few things he still remembered… "But what about the pigeon? What kind of a pigeon was it?"
"… a homing pigeon, a Palmah carrier pigeon. We'd been fighting all night, and in the morning, two or three hours after sunrise, we saw it suddenly lifting off."…A pigeon handler was assigned to us, a pigeon expert with a little dovecote—that's what it was called—on his back. Maybe he managed to dispatch the bird before he was killed, or maybe the dovecote busted… and the bird flew away."… "Amazing, isn't it?" he said, chuckling. "We went to battle with homing pigeons, like in ancient Greece."
Not just into battle. A boy and girl, never named in the novel, were trained to care for the homing pigeons which would be used by the Palmah. They fell in love and courted by sending private messages via the pigeons and continued to communicate by homing pigeon during the war.
Their teacher, Dr. Laufer, the primary pigeon trainer for the Palmah, gives a moving speech when he visits the kibbutz where the boy lives and where a secret pigeon loft is established. He quotes the poem by Bialik as well as the prophet Isaiah who said that after the Exile, the Jewish people will come back to the Land of Israel like pigeon-doves return home. "Who are these?" 4 Dr. Laufer concludes with the following rhetorical question: “Who but the Jewish people returning to their homeland can better appreciate the tremendous yearning of the pigeon for her home and homeland…” (page 66).
The old man recalls the battle that raged on the monastery’s hill in Jerusalem. He describes the last act of the boy. Mortally wounded, the boy dispatches the pigeon from battlefield to home. It carries an extraordinary message to the girl, a pigeon handler based in the Tel Aviv zoo.
I won’t disclose the unwritten message, but it is linked to another tale, the contemporary life of Yair Mendelsohn, a middle-aged tour guide who works with birders. Frustrated in his work and marriage, Yair is given a gift by his dying mother: some money and some advice: “Take this, Yair. Go find yourself a home. A place to rest the soles of your feet. A place of your very own (p 18).” She instructs him, Lekh lekha, go forth (Genesis 12:1). Go forth to find the two things you really need, a story and a place of your own.
Yair is helped by his childhood girlfriend, Tirtzah. Their love rekindles and she helps Yair to build a new home, a living place that responds to his soul. "I went to find a house that would encircle me, that would be somewhat of a shelter." He enters the home and a life he thought no longer possible.Thanks to Tirzah and his mother’s legacy, Yair discerns what the Jewish people rediscovered: “I built and was built, I loved and was loved, my soul grew a new skin, a roof, a floor, a wall.”
The gift of the boy and the gift of the mother. Each changes a life by repairing a breach. Yair’s father once told his future wife, “…if you ask me what the most important thing I learned in medical school was, I will tell you this: that things can be fixed. Not only bodies. Souls, too. They can be fixed and mended.” (p 250). As we think about family and friends, we might also consider what we want to repair in our lives andwhat might lead others toward a sense of wholeness.
In Les Miz, when Valjean begs God to save Marius and return Marius to Cosette, he sings “Bring him home”. At its best, home is more than a house. It is a state of mind, a place of communion, of love and of peace. A Pigeon and A Boy is takes us back to what a home is, and why we, like pigeons trained to fly in one direction only, seek to return to it. In Yair’s new home, he dreams of his mother. “Clearly I understood that you were dead…but the knowledge and surprise did not keep me from filling with joy….and then the dream dissolved and it was as if it had never happened…. I turned on a light and saw a pigeon-dove. Two dark stripes like those of a tallit adorning the wings and tail.”
The various types of sorrow and sadness described in the book remind us that grief is an ongoing burden that is not relinquished. Perhaps, with time, the burden can become a little lighter. Despite pain and loss, we are like the dove who seeks rest and renewal. As in the novel, we also engage in renovation and restoration, hoping to build or find a home for our soul. We leave our homes on Sukkot and return on Shemini Atzeret. Our loved ones leave us, but …
And suddenly, above that hell, the fighters saw a pigeon-dove. Born from bulbs of smoke, delivered from shrouds of dust, the pigeon rose, she soared. … above the exploding grenades and the barking rifles and the pounding cannons….
A pigeon-dove like a thousand others, like any other pigeon. Only an expert's ears could pick up on the power of those beating wings … Only the heart of a pigeon fancier could grasp and contain the longing that has collected inside such a bird and determined its course and forged its strength. But already the Boy’s eyes had grown dim, his ears had fallen deaf, his heart had emptied and was still. Only she remained—the pigeon-dove—her yearning for home, the Boy’s final wish.
Up. First and foremost, up. Above the blood, above the fire and the columns of smoke. Above the wounded … above those who have died and who, with the passing of many days, will die once again with the deaths of those who remembered them.
Up. Aloft and distant, to where … the living will take their leave of them, each man to his destiny, For a single moment every eye and every finger was following that bird as the dove-pigeon did what we all wanted to do: make her way home."
11 Kings 8: 13, 55-6.
2Bemidbar Rabbah 21.24. משל למלך שעשה סעודה שבעת ימים וזימן כל בני אדם שבמדינה בשבעת ימי המשתה כיון שעברו שבעת ימי המשתה אמר לאוהבו כבר יצאנו ידינו מכל בני המדינה נגלגל אני ואתה במה שתמצא ליטרא בשר או של דג או ירק כך אמר הקדוש ברוך הוא לישראל (במדבר כט) ביום השמיני עצרת תהיה לכם גלגלו במה שאתם מוצאים בפר אחד ואיל אחד. This may be compared to the case of a king who made a banquet for seven days and invited all the people in the province during the seven days of the feast. When the seven days of the feast were over he said to his friend: 'We have already done our duty to all the people of the province; let us now make shift, you and I, with whatever you can find - a pound of meat, or of fish, or vegetables.' In like manner the Holy One, blessed be He, said to Israel: ‘On the eighth day you shall have an Atzeret' (Bemidbar 29:35); make shift with whatever you can find; with "one bullock, one ram"!
Rashi, Bamidbar 29:35: עצרת עצרו מלצאת, מלמד שטעון לינה. ומדרשו באגדה לפי שכל ימות הרגל הקריבו כנגד שבעים אומות וכשבאין ללכת, אמר להם המקום בבקשה מכם עשו לי סעודה קטנה כדי שאהנה מכם
This is language of affection, like children departing from their father. He says, “Your departure is difficult for me. Delay it one more day.”
3 Ezekiel 1.14
4 Isaiah 60.8.
See also: Haaretz: Portion of the Week/'And a dove and a youth still knock'
