In this piece, I’ll explore the concept of home, from the physical, spiritual and psychological point of reference.

            In the Chinese language, the character for family and home is written as a roof encompassing a pig, connoting the primacy of sustenance and protection from the elements.  A home is where one can provide for one’s creature comforts.

            In the Jewish culture, the physical home is not as important as the ancestral home.  Psalm 137 exhorts Jews to remember Israel: “Let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth, if I remember thee not; if I set not Jerusalem above my chiefest joy.” [Soncino  Books of the Bible].  The Passover story, as recounted in the ritual text, the Haggadah, is one of destiny and redemption.  The Jews were exiled and they were rescued by God (working through the personages of Moses and Pharoah) to return to the land of Israel.  The Hagadah cites a quote from Genesis 47:4: They (the sons of Jacob) said to Pharoah: “We have come to sojourn in this land…” [The Artscroll Family Haggadah]  The temporary residence of a Jew in the Diaspora (outside of the homeland of Israel) is permitted for matters of study, seeking a mate or livelihood (parnassa in Hebrew).

            In America, this country of immigrants: where is home?  In an excellent review of the Bengali-American writer Jhumpa Lahiri’s new collection of short stories, Unaccustomed Earth, Liesl Schillinger writes: …the place to which you feel the strongest attachment isn’t necessarily the country you’re tied to by blood or birth: it’s the place that allows you to become yourself.  This place, she [the author] quietly indicates, may not lie on any map.”  [The New York Times Book Review, 4/6/08]   Lahiri cites a passage from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Custom House, which “suggests that transplanting people into new soil makes them hardier and more flourishing.”  If immigration brings forth only the most motivated of people, does then a successful integration in America occur to the most adaptable?