First, I have something to say to all the Hillel refugees who are with us tonight:

Welcome Home!

Those two words are the two most welcoming words in the English language. Home is one of the best concepts we have. We use it a lot. Like, home-town, home plate in baseball, home-style cooking, home away from home, ET phone home, homestead, homecoming, and the Yiddish equivalent, Haimish. We even use home as a verb, as in homing in. Home and haimish always refer to a place where we feel comfortable, where we feel natural, where we are understood without having to explain, where we feel unpretentious, where we belong, welcome, and, well, right at home.

Right, at home.

We feel right when we are home.

One of the weird things that happens somewhere around the time we've been gone at college is that our parents redecorate our rooms, so that when we come home we find that things have changed. Things are just not the same. That happens to most of what we believe in college. We go away and when we come home, if we come home, the things we find are different, the person we are is different, and the things we want are different.   

Still, if our experiences in our youth were at all good, we keep a shrine to them in our memories, and we measure things up against this idealized shrine. What happens in a Jewish sense is that college is the breakpoint for our sense of a Jewish home. We develop new ideas, new expectations, and new dislikes. We want to be different. But we still want to find or make a home. Not just a family home, but a place where we feel we belong. 

And, hopefully, Etz Chayim will be, for you, a home.   

Rosh haShanah is, interestingly enough, a most appropriate time to talk about a home. Does anyone remember the last major Jewish special day we commemorated? If you are thinking Passover, you're way off, and hopefully we have some new ways for you to find out what else there is to Jewish life besides matzah.   

No, it was the 9^th of Av, back in the beginning of August, which commemorates the destruction of both homes. Homes? Yes. The word for Temple in Hebrew is the same as the word for a House or a Home: Bayit. And on the 9^th of Av in 586 BCE the Bayit Rishon/the First Home was destroyed by the Babylonians. In 70 CE the Bayit Sheni/the Second Home was destroyed by the Romans, and we have not built a new one since. We have been homeless. Homeless as in without a Temple. And that is how we at Etz Chayim find ourselves as well. We are without a Temple, homeless.   

Now, just as the last major Jewish day before Rosh haShanah is the day of destroying our national home, the first Jewish day after the High Holy Days celebrates the simple life we had while wandering in the wilderness in our temporary homes, little leafy shelters called Sukkot. So you see, the High Holy Days are poised between the destruction of our home, and moving out of our homes into shelters.   

Unlike the 9^th of Av, Sukkot is a happy time of entertaining guests in the Sukkah. It is called, zman simchateinu, the time of our joy. Similarly, these last five formative years of Etz Chayim have been a wonderful time of wandering. Our community was small, and could be housed in small places. Our Shorashim school program used to be a one-room 13 student affair when I started, and the MiDor l'Dor elementary school was similarly one tidy group. Our office was one little room, with only one person working in it, but it was enough. We remember this time joyfully.   

But, just as the Israelites in the wilderness grew tired of all the Sukkah shlepping, of all the dust and sand and relentlessly boring meals of unadulterated manna, so we have grown weary of the extensive shlepping. Though we hold school at Jordan Middle School, for example, we can store nothing at all there, not even a book. Everything gets schlepped every time for every purpose.    We schlep from here to there for each service, for each event, for everything. We have grown to be ten times the size we were five years ago, so we have to schlep ten times as much stuff.   

Additionally, it has gotten too difficult to find appropriate spaces for the events and services we do have. In fact, all we find are semi-appropriate spaces, like schools where we can't store anything, and all of our spaces are miles apart from each other. The school and congregational office and library are on San Antonio Road. Our Sukkah will be here at the JCC where we are holding services until the First Presbyterian Synagogue is finished remodeling. But our schoolchildren will not get to use our Sukkah. We couldn't build one at Jordan Middle School even if we wanted to, for as soon as we would have built it we would have to take it down. Not a book can stay there, certainly not a Sukkah.   

All we do is schlep and set up and take down and schlep again. It is burning out the wonderful people that are literally carrying this shul in their cars and on their backs. There are so many more wonderful things they and we could be doing if we had a home.    And so I decided to let those of you who think that everything we have been doing is seamlessly easy know that it has not been easy at all, and we, the staff and the volunteers need to get ourselves a home.   

You may have noticed that I have not used the word building. Not because I believe that something else but an edifice will suddenly materialize. No. It is because we too often focus on the bricks and not on the feeling. What we need is a home. A home for all of us. A home where all of us will feel comfortable, proud to walk in, and at home when we do. That is what it means. A place you will be recognized and recognize others: in the words of Rabbi Ted Danson of Boston's Congregation Rodef Cheers, "a place where everybody knows your name."   

And that is one reason that we have given you name tags instead of tickets, and memberships instead of tickets. We want you to know each other, to begin to feel more at home. I realize the name-tags are goofy-looking. But they help me, and all of us, get to know you, to put a name to a face. Since you're doing your job of wearing these things, I am, too.    Now there is another reason I am not using the word "building," and that is to help you envision the space we would like to be in as a home, and not as a community building. Think of a home, and what the rooms are for, and that is what we ought to have.   

First, and foremost, we need a good kitchen. The real socializing happens in the kitchen. We need a kitchen with easy rules and a welcoming layout so we can kibitz while we get the oneg or the party together. I can't tell you how many friendships have been made in our congregation over trays of wine and plates of cookies.   

Next, we need a living room, family room. That's where everybody gets together once they've got their drink and their sandwich, or where the family meetings occur, where we can sing together and hang out together. That's also where we go when the weather's bad.    When the weather's good, we need a patio so we can entertain and enjoy ourselves outside. Services outside, picnics, concerts, a place for the Sukkah, a place for the kids to decompress. A garden, maybe of plants from our ancestral home. Palm, pomegranates, etrogs, figs, and flowers. A place to walk alone and meditate.   

Now it would not be a traditional Jewish home without bookshelves. We are, after all, the people of the Book, and we need a space to hold them until family members come take them to read them. And this would not be a modern Jewish home without computers, with all the modern Jewish software for family members and their friends to come and use for education and entertainment. We would also need places to display our menorah, our seder plate, all the little Judaica items we use that tell you that this is a Jewish home.   

And we need a place where kids can be kids. A kid's room. It would be a little messier, and the furniture would not be as nice but it would be three times as sturdy. The kids can put stuff up on the walls, and there would be a place for their snacks, and if a bagel got ground into the linoleum we tidy grown-ups would not care, or if we did care, we wouldn't yell too loud about it because it's always heartwarmingly haimish to see the kids happy at home.   

And of course, in this age of telecommuting, we would need a home office, and all the family members could come and use the equipment.   

And there would have to be closets, garages, attics, basements—some place to store all the stuff we only need every so often, and to keep the stuff we don't use now but want to remember.   

And we would decorate it nicely. Nothing too fancy. You know, haimish, like we are. Some real nice stuff, and a lot of good stuff. Not showy, just real. Maybe a bit funky. Stuff that would make us feel at home.   

Last, there would be a wall where we have pictures of us, like of all the kids in school and of the heads of the family, and of good times as a whole. And there would be a place for the names of those of us who have died and are no longer with us. We could always go there and remember them. We could turn on a light for them.   

I have tried to paint a word picture of a home, not of a facility,of a home, not of an agency office,of a home, not of a museum,of a home, not of a Taj Mahal or a Grand Central Synagogue.Just a home. A place where we would feel at home. I hope you already feel at home in this congregation, and if you do, realize that there are many who are new with us tonight, and they need to be brought into the family.   

Another talk will focus more on ways to bring us all together, but suffice it to say that we hope that the veteran members of our congregation will help make the newcomers feel right at home here. Think "home," and if you feel at home, then, in the great tradition of Jewish hospitality, reach out and help someone else feel at home. If you are new, reach out and help a veteran member help you to feel at home.   

To recap, when you envision this concept of a congregational home, use your sense of making it be a home, not of building or buying a building. Because for it to be what we want it to be, we need to reach down inside us and let ideas of home well up.    I previously mentioned that we are here on the High Holy Days, poised between the 9^th of Av's commemoration of the destruction of the 1^st and 2^nd National Homes known as Temples, and of the Festival of Camping Out in Huts called Sukkot. Well, do you know what comes after Sukkot? It is Chanukah. Chanukah is the Festival of the Chanukat haBayit—the Maccabees' Rededication of the National Home, when the lights we light those eight nights remind us of how important the home fires are, the house lights, the menorah. It is a time of fixing up the homestead, of homecoming.   

G0d willing we will, one day, make Chanukah into a day for our congregation to have a homecoming. We could use it as a day to put up a Ner Tamid, an Eternal Light. We have none at present because there is no place to keep one! There is so much we do not have. But one day, G0d willing, and our congregants doing their share, we will have a home.

So that, in the words of Rabbi Tom Bodett, "We'll leave the Eternal Light on for you."

And so, to all the Hillel refugees who are with us tonight:

Welcome Home!