The Yom Kippur prayers talk a lot about asking God to take us back, to let us do teshuvah, which in the liturgy means repentance but literally means to turn, to turn around and in essence to go back home again.

One of the traditional names for God is HaMakom. It literally means the Place. And since we do not understand God as a physical place, then God must be a spiritual place, a place without physicality, but a very real place nevertheless. A safe place. Like home.

So much of who we are is tied up in how we understand the word “home.”  Is it the house in the Berkshires?  Or the condo in Sarasota?  Or the place we grew up? In that case, the old saying “you can’t go home again” comes into play.

If we can’t go home again, if you can’t go back, then what can we return to?  We may have strayed during the past year, we may have stopped being the person who we most want to be. And this is our opportunity to turn back, to go back home to our true selves.

Because of course we’ve come up short, sometimes failed, sometimes disappointed ourselves. That’s the human condition.

But the spiritual condition is one that can turn, perhaps not in a circle, but in a spiral always moving higher, always moving closer to being that person who we aspire to be.

I was in a sports bar recently, surrounded by TVs with every kind of sport, and was reminded that the game of baseball is a perfect metaphor for the human condition.

A baseball player starts at home plate, hits the ball, runs around the bases, and if lucky, comes back to home plate.

The fascinating thing about home plate is that it is transformed, from the moment when the batter is facing the pitcher, to the moment he approaches the plate from third base.  In the beginning, it’s the place he longs to leave. In the end, it’s the place he longs to reach.

In truth, it’s the player who’s changed. Home is the same as before.

The player at bat is even called something else as soon as he hits the ball. Everyone else’s title stays the same – pitcher, catcher, fielder — but this person is transformed, goes from being one thing to another, from being a batter to a runner.

Home is the starting point, and after the person has been transformed, it is the destination.

There are stops along the way, people who try to make it difficult for him. There are times he’ll run forward and then have to retrace his steps. Sometimes he gets home, sometimes he has to give up and wait his turn to try again. But he’s not alone. His teammates are urging him on, and one by one they are trying to join him on the journey around the bases.

And when he reaches home? There is often high drama, and the most dramatic moment is when the umpire spreads his arms wide and shouts “safe!” He made it home, he’s safe.

Another transformation takes place every half inning. The same people who were defending the bases now wish to traverse them. Unlike football, which has different teams for offense and defense, for the most part the players in the game remain static.

The catcher, who a moment ago was crouching behind home plate wearing protective gear, is now standing above it, brandishing a club.

This goes on and on…. sometimes for a really long time. Like life itself, a baseball game can feel like it’s dragging on, but sometimes it can feel like it’s flying by. And there are many, many moments when it seems that nothing is happening. Just like life itself.

The baseball metaphor falls apart when we remember that in truth, home is never the same place it once was. The Torah tells us that God said lech l’cha, get yourself up and go, to Abraham when he was 75 years old.

He follows instructions, but he doesn’t leave alone. Abraham took with him Sarah, his nephew Lot, and others, and only then left home to find home.  Like so many of us, they didn’t know where they would end up. They took a leap of faith, and entered into the journey that is life.

The returning that we talk about at Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur isn’t about going back. We can’t go back. But we can go forward, holding onto what we hold most dear, taking with us the ones we love, and we can return to our spiritual homes.

One of the traditional names for God is HaMakom. It literally means the Place. And since we do not understand God as a physical place, then God must be a spiritual place, a place without physicality, but a very real place nevertheless. A safe place. Like home.

Dorothy said “there’s no place like home” and she wasn’t talking about Kansas. She was talking about love and connections, about relationships and community.

That’s where we find home. We find home here in our spiritual communities, places where people support each other, care about each other, and become family.

Where together we pray to the Divine and ask God to listen to our voices, hear our prayers, and help us find our way home, to our better, higher selves.

May we each be blessed in the coming year to continue to make and hold strong connections, enriching our lives and our communal homes.

 

This is an abbreviated version of the sermon I gave on Yom Kippur morning.