Each New Year, we come to the synagogue, brimming with hope. It’s a new year, a fresh start. Time to put the past behind us and move forward with renewed energy and commitment. My prayer for all of us is that we can make peace with the past year and step into the New Year with hope.

But this prayer does not come easily to my lips this year. As we enter 5766, I am finding it much harder to put 5765 behind me. So much of what happened this past year will hang over us in the year to come. And the image that I carry most strongly from this past year is one of people without homes: people losing their homes to wind and water in Indonesia and the Gulf Coast, Jews in Gaza being evicted from their homes, and homeless men, women and children on the streets of Boston and in shelters, many of them working people, unable to keep up with the high cost of housing. Finding homes, building homes, rebuilding cities is a long-term process. And in the meantime, we watch, sometimes in horror and sometimes in shock, and sometimes in indifference, from our spacious and comfortable homes, where we and our children are safe and warm and sheltered.

Let me share some images of the past year, as I watched homes being torn down and built up.

Who would have believed that in the 21^st century we would be talking about American refugees? And yet the numbers of displaced people following Hurricane Katrina are mind-boggling, approaching the record numbers of hundreds of thousands who migrated during the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression. How many homes have been lost? In the city of New Orleans alone, more than 200,000 houses are beyond repair. Many people lost everything they had in the floods following the storm:  their homes, all their possessions, all this on top of the loss of life of beloved friends, family, and pets. Whether rich or poor, losing a home is a grievous loss. What has been destroyed will not be easily or quickly rebuilt, and we and our children will be contributing to the rebuilding effort for longer than we can imagine.

Hurricane Katrina’s losses brought home to our own shores the destruction we had witnessed last winter, when the tsunami hit Indonesia and the ocean literally swept away villages from Aceh province in the east to Somalia in the west. How many homes were lost?  In Somalia, a distance of over 4,000 miles from the epicenter of the earthquake that caused the tsunami, at least 50,000 Somalis lost their homes. The tsunami displaced over half a million in Sri Lanka, and another half million in Aceh province, at the heart of the disaster.

The uncountable tragedies that have resulted from these disasters would truly be a human calamity, if it were not for the outpouring of help from people around the world, to provide money and assistance, to give people temporary shelter and offer them food and clothing, schools opening their doors and individuals everywhere opening their hearts. This demonstration of human compassion on an epic scale gives us some hope, and appreciation for the human capacity to build up what has been destroyed. I do not think that there can be a single person in this room who witnessed the devastation of these natural disasters and has not responded in some way.

I believe that this outpouring is not simply a surge of compassion for people in need. I think that we all recognize the fragility of our own existence, and the randomness of these events, and hope and expect that others would do the same for us if we were the victims of a tragedy.

But I also believe that the idea of losing one’s home is so deeply frightening, that after the numbers of the dead are counted, what truly moves us is the image of people without a home. Forces of nature are arbitrary and unpredictable. Any one of us could be on that list.

And it doesn’t take a natural disaster to sweep us from our homes. This summer we witnessed the vortex of another kind of displacement. The Israeli government, with the support of the majority of Israel’s population, decided to remove 9000 Jews from their homes in Gaza. This was no natural disaster, but the act of a democratically-elected government acting on what I, and most Israelis believe, was a morally justified desire to end the occupation of a million Palestinians. Their displacement was neither sudden nor complete. They were given ample notice and offered significant financial compensation, as well as new homes, and counselors to help them with their grief. We all witnessed the heart-rending images:  a reluctant Exodus, from Gaza to the State of Israel, into what they considered a kind of exile

Some might have found it challenging to sympathize with people living in comfortable beach-front homes, knowing that down the road, Palestinians are crammed into the most overcrowded and impoverished region in the world. And yet, I found myself moved and inspired by the reaction of the Israeli public to the trauma of the Gaza settlers. These settlers were people who were motivated by one ideology and eventually displaced by a different ideology. Believing that they were the new pioneers, halutzim, living the Zionist ideal that they had been taught all their lives, and supported, encouraged, and subsidized by several Israeli governments, their home was more than their possessions, more than the buildings, the greenhouses, even the synagogues. Their home was an ideological statement about religious Zionism, the hint of a promise of bringing mashiah in our time. And so the loss of their homes in Gaza not only meant giving up the land, but giving up a dream as well.

No matter what one’s opinion of Israeli politics, or even if you were in favor of the disengagement from Gaza, one would have to be very hard-hearted not to care about these families who were leaving their homes, and leaving their dreams behind.

I watched the footage of the disengagement over breakfast in the cafeteria at Memorial Hospital in Cumberland, Maryland. With a group of about 25 Jews from greater Boston, parents and their teenage children, including my husband and daughter, Aviva, and the Tabachnik-Stevens family from our own temple, we were glued to the images of Israeli soldiers performing one of the most delicate and painful missions in Israel’s history. We applauded the peaceful actions of soldiers and settlers, as we were horrified by the violent resistance of the few extremists. The displacement of the settlers and destruction of their homes was made all the more poignant by the work that had brought us all to Cumberland. As homes were about to be evacuated and destroyed on the other side of the world in Gaza, we had come to build.

Cumberland is a depressed town full of empty buildings, with a small and struggling downtown area. A hundred years ago, it was the second largest city in Maryland, a center of commerce and coal. But the trains and the canals don’t carry freight through Cumberland today, and the last deep mine closed in the 1990s.

Every week from March to August, groups from churches and colleges, many of them groups of teens, come and sleep on cots, take showers at the Y, eat breakfast and dinner at the hospital, and help out with whatever projects are needed that week. They work for the Interfaith Consortium of Greater Cumberland, which provides food and shelter and clothing to the urban and rural poor in Western Maryland and parts of West Virginia. They bring food to people who don’t live near a food bank, and help people create community gardens to become more self-sufficient.

We were the last group of the summer to work for the Interfaith Consortium’s Intervention Housing Program.  The Consortium buys up vacant properties and we helped rehabilitate them. We weren’t sure what to expect—maybe some painting, maybe finishing a building. In the end, we tore up the rotting porch on an old row house, and replaced it, and painted the peeling back wall. We took out an old water heater and some pocket doors to make another house livable. In a third, we prepared and tiled the floors in house that had been trashed by the last tenant, a house in a prime location with a spectacular view of the city.  In an area where fewer than half of the people live in homes of their own, where people simply can’t afford the upkeep of a house, the Consortium rents these properties for $200 a month. And the Consortium can’t even raise its funds from the local population—they depend on outsiders like us every summer, to provide for the basic needs of food and shelter. The people here are the poorest of the poor. But thanks to the Consortium, they still have a place to live, a shelter, a haven. Because they have nowhere else to go.

For the people of Cumberland, home is a roof and some walls, a few simple possessions. For the Jews of Gaza, home was the fulfillment of an ancient dream. For those who lost their homes in Louisiana or Aceh province, home was everything—shelter, community, culture, livelihood, all of them swept away. Is it any different for us?

I looked in vain for inspiring Jewish texts about the importance of a home. And then I realized that our tradition does not place much importance in the house we live in. We Jews, who have traveled from continent to continent, who come from a people of wanderers, who spent forty years in a wilderness before reaching the Land of Israel, only to be exiled time and again; we who have lived in Diaspora for most of our people’s history, have much to teach and to learn about the true nature of home. Losing one’s house, no matter how large and luxurious or how small and rundown, is a traumatic and frightening experience. But losing one’s house does not always mean losing a home.

Two images of a home in Jewish tradition are the huppah (wedding canopy) and the sukkah. The huppah is open on all sides. The sukkah is open to the sky. Neither is meant to offer permanent shelter. Even the strongest huppah covering cannot keep out the wind. Even the sturdiest sukkah walls cannot prevail against rain. 

These are not symbols of the shelter of home, but they reflect the wanderings of our people and portray our sense of the true purpose of home. The huppah is open on all sides to remind us to welcome guests. When we find a life partner, we should not shut off our homes or our hearts to friends and family and strangers in our midst.  The sukkah is open to the sky to lift our gaze to the stars above, and to remind us of our own impermanence.

In the liturgy for Rosh Hashanah, we have a framework for considering what home really means to us.  A place where people care about each other, a place of memory, yet a place that we cannot hold onto forever. Malchuyot, Zichronot, Shofarot, the 3 themes of the Rosh Hashanah musaf service, can help us construct an unshakable image of home.

Malchuyot, Zichronot, Shofarot

1.Malchuyot—the holiness of connection

More than the walls and the roof that make up our shelters, a home is a place where people care for you and you care for them. Children coming home from college may worry that their rooms have been rearranged, but what is most important is that the family has not been rearranged. When we come home, we want to be greeted by our children or our parents, by a spouse or partner or lover. Or we may come home to a roommate, or a much-loved cat or dog. Wherever we may land, knowing that we have someone there for us is the true haven that we seek. And if we are left without those closest to us, then we depend on friends, and on our community to hold onto us. Our home extends beyond the walls of our dwellings.

When we read the verses of Malchuyot, we speak of divine sovereignty, which is another way of recognizing our place in the universe. God is sovereign when we respect and reinforce the holy connections between us. If we want and expect to be taken care of, we must take care of others. If we want and expect stability and security, we must work to be trustworthy, responsible and reliable. If we want and expect our homes to be a haven, then we must give generously and without judgment to create that haven for those we love. More traumatic than the displacement from our houses is the displacement from human contact.

2.Zichronot--memories

When people are told to evacuate, what do they always take with them? The family photos. Wedding photos. Maybe a family heirloom or sentimental souvenir.  So much of the debris of our daily lives can be replaced. But when we take our photos, they represent more than something physical. They are irreplaceable, because they contain our memories. They represent something at once eternal and ephemeral, both fleeting and enduring. Wherever we go, we take our memories with us. The photos, the mementos are touchstones for memory, and they carry us from place to place, a haven of peace in the storms of displacement. Memory is one source of survival of our souls

Rosh Hashanah is called Yom Hazikaron, the day of remembering. We are called to remember our own past, and the story of our people’s journeys. In the Zichronot passages, we read a litany of covenantal moments. “Gather our dispersed and our homeless, as was promised:  ‘Even if you are dispersed in the remotest parts of the world, from there the Lord your God will gather and fetch you.’ Zichronot starts with a call to God to remember us, but also provides proof that we are not the first to experience dislocation, and those who have gone before us have succeeded in finding a home. On Rosh Hashanah we remember: If they could do it, so can we. We are reminded of the golden promise of the creation of humanity, and the potential for good in our own pure souls.  “Blessed is the person who does not forget You, who draws courage and strength from You.”

3.Shofarot—the wake-up call to look to the future

When we watch the storms toss cars about like sea shells cluttered on the beach, we stand in awe of a power that we cannot possibly resist. Hurricanes and other disasters are a wake up call to us to shake us out of our complacency, and to come to the aid of those in need. And when we see people reach out to those whose lives have been broken up and scattered, we are inspired by the power that brings people together in selfless giving. These events awaken us from our despair, reminding us that whatever trials we face, hope leads us forward.

The Shofar is also a call to the future, a call that shakes us from our complacency and awakens us from our despair. The shofarot verses provide an image of the future, a picture of redemption, of possibility, if we would only stop to listen. Whether we dwell comfortably in a house of many rooms and too many possessions, or whether we are on the brink of leaving our home for a new, untested place, the shrill and primal cry of the ram’s horn calls to a future of hope.

I visited many different kinds of homes this past year—from lavish mansions on endless estates to the ramshackle buildings of the least among us, to Rosie’s Place, providing shelter for a few for a night. I have often wished for a bigger house, a bigger yard. But when the year turns and I look back on what I have and what I lack, I am grateful for a roof over my head, and all the blessings that fill my home. And I remember that we Jews are wanderers. That’s why Jews play violins and not pianos. We become settled at our own risk. And with gratitude for what I have and hope for those who are not so blessed, I am now ready to enter the New Year, focused on what must be done.

Some use these catastrophes to play the game of “what would I take with me if I had to leave today.” However, I want you to reflect on, not what you would take, but what you bring to your home to make it a place of connection and a place of memory. What abides, from one home to the next. And as you hear the shofar blasts, listen for the call, the call of the future, the call of hope. Wake up.

On Yom Kippur, we are reminded of those who have no food, while our fast only lasts for one day. This Rosh Hashanah, I declare a day for remembering the homeless. Count how many rooms are in your house and think of those who have only one room. Think of all the renovation you have done recently, and consider how you can help those who live in shelters or on the street.  May the call of the shofar, the sound of redemption, truly herald a time when all people will come home.