#BlogElul Day 19: Ask

Why do we have to leave our home to find a home, and then leave again? I think this is a profoundly Jewish question, not just because we are wanderers, a people destined to live without a true home for close to two thousand years while somehow managing to hold on to our identity, but also because the Jewish sacred calendar—the sacred year—embodies the essential paradox of this homeward journey. Nowhere is this more evident than during the months surrounding the High Holidays, that quarter of the year that begins in midsummer with the observance of Tisha B’Av—the day when we mourn the destruction of the Temple—then moves through the High Holidays themselves, a period of intense self-revelation and purification, and ends with Sukkot, the time of our great rejoicing, when we erect a house that is not really a house, a home that is not really a home, a time when we seem to have come to the end of a journey only to begin it again.

 --Alan Lew, This Is Real And You Are Completely Unprepared