Invoking the Yiddish word haimish (or heymish), which translates to “homey” (in the non-ghetto meaning of the word) David Brooks describes a phenomenon familiar to many of us: “Often, as we spend more on something, what we gain in privacy and elegance we lose in spontaneous sociability.” He terms this “crossing the haimish line.”
Brooks describes a family vacation to Africa, and contrasts his family’s stays in simpler settings with those in more luxurious accommodations: the simpler camps featured communal dinners, unplanned activities, and the stuff that makes life interesting. The luxury places, which catered more to individual and family tastes, lacked the color and memorable qualities of the more rustic environments.
Brooks generalizes this phenomenon, invoking–get ready, Jews–Hillel and Chabad to prove his point: “I once visited a university that had a large, lavishly financed Hillel House to serve as a Jewish center on campus. But the students told me they preferred the Chabad House nearby, which was run by the orthodox Lubavitchers. At the Chabad house, the sofas were tattered and the rooms cramped, but, the students said, it was more haimish.” Spot on, Brooks.
[Brooks slams Hillel a little too hard here, even though I don’t think he intends to. I think he would agree with Hillel President Wayne Firestone and board chair Tom Blumberg, who wrote in a response: “the real take away from Brooks’ article is that “haimishness” isn’t about a building; It’s about the warmth, openness and inclusiveness of the people who live, work, and play there. The most haimish – and effective – groups build meaningful relationships, and no organization has a monopoly on that.”]
Over the summer with the Bronfman Youth Fellows, I taught a course entitled “Where is home?” As regular blog readers will know, this is pretty much the biggest of the Big Questions, in my mind. All roads seem to lead to it. So we explored a variety of Jewish texts–Talmudic, legal, philosophical, meditative–as well as a poem or two, all of which offered perspective on the question of home. I hope to write a longer article based on this course, but Brooks’s column about heymishness prompts me to offer a couple of observations from the course this summer.
In his Mishneh Torah, Maimonides delimits those spaces which require a mezuzah (the words of Torah affixed to beitecha, ‘your houses,’ and sha’arecha, ‘your gates.’ The main factors in determining if a space needs a mezuzah are: a) whether it is permanent; and b) whether it is dignified. Thus a sukkah, which is not permanent, does not require a mezuzah; neither does a bathroom, which is not dignified.
The undignified part is intuitive. The permanent part, as the fellows and I repeatedly found, is harder to define (though the halakha adopts the standard of 30 days as the amount of time one has to affix a mezuzah; nevertheless, 30 days is a minimum standard, and does not necessarily connote long-term permanence). Particularly in our day and age, when we move so frequently, what defines permanence in a home?
Jean Amery, a mid-twentieth century thinker and survivor of Auschwitz, reflects on this in an essay entitled, “How much home does a person need?” Amery writes: “Perhaps I am not speaking only for my already declining generation of those around fifty when I say that we are accustomed to living with things that tell us stories. We need a house of which we know who lived in it before us, a piece of furniture in whose small irregularities we recognize the craftsman who worked on it.” For Amery, home is bound up with the phenomenon of recognition: we are at home where we can recognize and understand, and where we can be recognized and understood. It is a place of stories.
Achieving that kind of richness is not something that happens quickly. As Amery presciently observed, the mobility of modern society, its fixation on the self-authoring self unencumbered by tradition, runs counter to this kind of heymishness. But as Brooks points out, we deceive ourselves when we forget about our desire for memory: “When we’re shopping for a vacation we’re primarily thinking about Where. The travel companies offer brochures showing private beaches and phenomenal sights. But when you come back from vacation, you primarily treasure the memories of Who — the people you met from faraway places, and the lives you came in contact with.” That is, we remember stories, not things.
Maimonides concludes his Laws of Mezuzah by telling us that whenever a person takes note of the mezuzah on his doorpost as he enters and leaves home, he will “awake from his sleep and his obsession with the vanities of time, and recognize that there is nothing which lasts for eternity except the knowledge of the Creator of the world.” The mezuzah exists in a paradoxical relationship with itself: only a space that is permanent requires a mezuzah, and yet the point of the mezuzah is precisely to remind us that what we think of as permanent is not in fact so. Home, a mezuzah-demanding space, is a dynamic place: firm enough to give us a sense of permanence, but open and elastic enough to regularly be infused by new stories.
In this sense, home is not necessarily just one place. As Brooks observes, we can–and often do–encounter heymishness precisely when we are away from home: on vacation, on a college campus. As Natalie and I found during my years at Northwestern Hillel, the most profound experience we could offer our students was often the least exotic to us: welcoming them into our home, enabling them to share a meal, inviting them to play with our children. We frequently develop our own idea of home when we leave it, and we experience home most profoundly when we invite guests in.
One last thought: In his 2008 book The Home We Build Together, Jonathan Sacks contrasts the building of the Mishkan (Tabernacle) in the wilderness with the construction of the Temple in Jerusalem. Whereas the Mishkan was made from voluntary contributions, the Temple was built by conscripted labor and high taxes. One led to the development of a nation, the other was immediately followed by the rupture of Israel into two kingdoms. I have always viewed this as an obvious but nonetheless radical point by Sacks: the Mishkan, which becomes our metaphor for life, work and Shabbat, is in many ways a preferable model to the Temple. The Temple offers a sense of permanence, the security we seek in building institutions. But it comes at a price: the price of spontaneity, the price of feeling connected to community, the price of heymishness.
Home, the root of heymishness, is thus a paradoxical concept: providing just enough security and comfort to enable us to make ourselves vulnerable, to learn, to be renewed. That is what Brooks experienced on his safari. It is at the heart of Jewish life. And it something our world desperately needs to rediscover.
August 30, 2011 at 6:57 pm
[…] Invoking the Yiddish word haimish (or heymish), which translates to "homey" (in the non-ghetto meaning of the word) David Brooks describes a phenomenon familiar to many of us: "Often, as we spend more on something, what we gain in privacy and elegance we lose in spontaneous sociability." He terms this "crossing the haimish line." Brooks describes a family vacation to Africa, and contrasts his family's stays in simpler settings with those in more … Read More […]
August 31, 2011 at 12:31 am
Wonderful piece, and very big question. In light of the housing protests in Israel and the burst housing bubble in the US and our own own anticipated house purchase this year, I am pondering the role that ownership plays in making something a home. Literal ownership gives you more rights (and responsibilities) than renting. And it often implies an intent to make it permanent, or at least long-term. But we also come to “own” a place – we make a kinyan – by doing something that changes it. And there is something about hosting guests, that in turn makes you the “master of the house” even when you are a short-term renter. That makes me wonder about the difference in the home feeling for a guest made to feel “at home” and the host really is at home.
August 31, 2011 at 2:25 am
Thanks to my friend Jason Herman for pointing out this incredible parody of Brooks–which highlights the kavod/dignity aspect of the definition of home, while at the same time reminding us that it’s a luxury to be able to think this way:
http://community.nytimes.com/comments/www.nytimes.com/2011/08/30/opinion/brooks-the-haimish-line.html?permid=12#comment12
My family and I recently went on a safari of our own after our home was foreclosed upon. We were able to stay in several camps throughout the city, as my wife and I have been unemployed for more than the 99 week cut-off. Some of the “camps” were simple, with cots, communal baths, and a dining room. Some were relatively luxurious, with showers and separate sleeping rooms for a family.
The simple camps were warm, but it’s a little scary sleeping in a room full of strangers. It was at one of these simple camps that my wallet and our newly acquired EBT card was stolen. We got to know the other “guests” at big, communal dinner tables. At one camp we got to play dominoes with the staff on the dining tables after dinner while our son watched “American Idol” on the 30” communal TV.
At another camp, we had impromptu arguments with the kitchen staff regarding portions and cleanliness. Two of the camp guides led my young son and me on spontaneous hunt for locally donated foodstuffs — stalking our “prey” on foot through neighborhoods rife with crime and drug violence. I can tell you that this is the definition of adventure for a 12-year-old boy, and for someone who now suffers from the emotional maturity of one.
I know only one word to describe what the more luxurious camps had and the simpler camps lacked: dignity. It’s an English word that suggests a state or quality of being worthy of honor. Dignity is becoming harder to find in this world of cutbacks, scapegoating, and attacks on the middle class.
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I’m happy for you and your Republican friends that you only need to seek Haimish…rather than dignity.
September 7, 2011 at 4:28 pm
http://www.thejewishweek.com/news/short_takes/heymish_safari