Making a Home
One of my fondest childhood memories is listening to my mother play piano on summer nights against the backdrop of crickets chirping outside. I sat on the couch listening to her nimble fingers inject the keys with quiet but self-assured expression. Often chaos unraveled around us, one brother in particular shelling insults and roaring in slight. As if to respond in dignified protest, my mother stilled herself in moored breathing and played Chopin’s Nocturne No. 20 in C-sharp minor, a so-called ‘mood piece of the evening,’ as I shut my eyes to absorb the full body of the melody, her pinky and ring fingers hitting the high-pitched trills before the gushing torrent abated into a calm stream over broken chords. Today when I listen to it I am transported back to these moments with watery eyes as swirling mayhem distilled into creative materialization of the precarious human condition.
Given the tension, one might have expected Chopin to provide the release of a climactic finale at the nocturne’s conclusion in divine-like mercy for the talented pianist who, to his credit, surrenders himself to its melancholy. But the descending trills never reach a full fort. Instead, Chopin obliges the artist to operate with restraint, however unbearable, in keeping the left hand steady while the right plays scale figures dragging up and down the keys, in a kind of testimony to the glissando of life, affirming that over long enough of a time horizon one who thought himself buried will find himself planted, with brighter days ahead. Sometimes my mother played for us, sometimes for guests—in which cases I became radiant, vicariously proud of her talents—but mostly she played for herself, in the understated way that is the opposite of selfish.
It was winter in February when my parents told us we were moving out, and by May when the crocuses sprouted the house was listed for sale: two stories, brick walls, a wooden patio and tiled walkway. 6 bed, 4 bath said the official listing. WOW! WHAT A LOT OF HOUSE! Located on a lovely residential street…oversized windows throughout. Reading a foreigner’s crude advertisement of our childhood home made my stomach turn. I don’t even remember meeting a real estate agent. He must have come when I was away at college. The appealing king size master suite, Evil Real Estate Overlord continued. It has a cathedral ceiling and private bath.
The fridge was empty, our last night: no sprouts or half-eaten bananas on the shelf, no vegan mayo in the door—not even eggs or Almond milk. The rest of the house was empty too. Our couches were gone, beds and bookshelves. I don’t know where they went, but I remember they were not there. Like clues at a crime scene, only remnants remained: black scratches on the hardwood floor, pencil ticks with feet and inches on the doorframe to the basement, nails sticking out of the wall. You would think a house appears larger when you remove all the stuff inside, but Linden Avenue seemed tiny that day, like an elderly hunchback a mere vestige of his upright glory. There was nothing left, save for our cold bodies, and when nightfall came, we slept on mattresses side-by-side on the floor under the ceiling fan.
By August the house was sold: a quick process of three months advanced by a discount in price. Three months and the space of love and laughter, loneliness and lemon meringue pie became a place to which we could return only in our imagination. The anchor had been heaved aboard.
I imagine everyone reading this essay has moved out of their childhood home, if they were lucky enough to have one. Whether natural or premature, planned or unexpected, moving out of the only home you have ever known is an unsettling experience, one not often discussed.
For 18 (or however many) years, you are like a fish in water without any awareness of the existence of water. Then you’re yanked out, gasping for air. The place and source of your nourishment, which you have always taken for granted with complete certainty, is gone. You realize tragically that real estate is not portable; and the embracive world of pillow forts and snowball fights must stay behind as you chart forward.
One day two years later I was overcome by such furtive curiosity about the house’s new residents that I embarked to discover who they were. I drove to the house and stopped the car across the street to avoid detection like a private investigator. When I looked inside the double-hung windows, I saw a fat man sitting on our golden couch watching TV, balding with no neck. He seemed foreign and strange. Plopped beside him were two boys, slurping milk, their feet on the coffee table. Their facial structure struck me as un-American. In my heart I didn’t wish any harm upon them except that they should not make this house a home, for homes seemed like exclusionary goods—to the degree it waxed as theirs, it waned as ours; if it shone for them, it couldn’t shine for us, too. I vacated the clandestine mission failed, without closure, humiliated at the sight of the home’s dual loyalty, like it was cheating on us with somebody else.
In the Bible, Satan famously petitions God to permit him to make Job, a righteous man, suffer: to destroy his family and material possessions, so that he will blaspheme God. Confident in Job’s righteousness, God accedes to Job’s sordid test, but prohibits Satan from doing one thing: “laying a hand on him”—striking his person and causing bodily harm. Why? One answer could be that as long as Job’s suffering was one degree away, he could attribute the evil to his lack of understanding of God’s ways. For example, when Satan kills his children, Job might think to himself, ‘perhaps they sinned.’ Therefore even in mourning upon discovery of their death, Job affirms “the Lord has given, and the Lord has taken; blessed be the name of the Lord.” But if Satan were to strike Job’s person, then Job—knowing he did not sin—would be baffled. Barring the presence of sin, physical or spiritual harm to Job’s body would not make sense, representing a break in the natural order of the universe. In other words, God prohibits Satan from shifting the metaphysical and epistemological ground on which Job stands because disruption to the fundamental reality and knowledge which a person deems certain is a particularly abrasive form of trauma, one beyond the limits of the possible tests God is willing to subject on His people.
Leaving one’s childhood home, one experiences what God shielded from Job: chaos. The uprooted child is like the wife who discovers her husband is leading a double life. The Truth she accepted—her husband’s loyalty—is nullified in cruelty. Not only does she suffer betrayal, a localized illness, but metaphysical and epistemological doubt about the workings of the universe. Questions of betrayal sow distrust in one’s memory of the past and disillusion about the future: Did he really love me? How do I know if I can trust him again? But questions of metaphysical and epistemological doubt are far more pernicious. They interrogate the meaning of things and the existential worthiness of the payoff of risk more generally: What is marriage? Is entering a relationship with someone new worth the potential pain?
When we left my childhood home, I was confronted by both sets of questions. Of the category of betrayal, relating to the past and future: Was that house really our home? Will I ever be able to find/build a new one again? And in the category of metaphysical and epistemological doubt, about meaning, risk and the workings of the universe: What is home? Is trying to create a new one worth accepting the chance that it will be taken away from me, and the ensuing loss of faith that building a home in this world is even possible?
What happens when you move out of your childhood home? Is one meant to strive to recreate a semblance of home in the varied environments of their 20s, setting down roots afresh with new people and experiences?
I heard once from Rabbi Peretz Chein that adults always try to relive or outrun their childhoods. I’m 26 now, eight years since we moved out of my childhood home, and have moved again every year since: eight apartments in eight years. In some I put pictures on the wall and in some I didn’t, and sometimes I wonder if this inconsistency is the manifestation of an internal battle between these two forces: one trying to recreate home and one trying to avoid thinking about it.
During my first two years in Tel Aviv (ages 23-24), my bedroom walls remained bare. I had good excuses: working a new job (analyst), in a new industry (investment banking), language (Hebrew), country (Israel) and culture. It was a lot of newness, and from the outside it would not be unreasonable to assume I was overwhelmed just getting my life in order. Putting pictures on the wall seemed like a luxury I couldn’t afford, not only financially (which was true), but also mentally and emotionally, returning home at 8 or 9pm after long days at the offices arranging PowerPoint slides and editing spreadsheets.
These excuses are true, but they do not tell the full story. Growing up, my bedroom walls were completely covered: in adolescence, with athletes and covers of Sports Illustrated and, when I turned 16 and repainted my room gold in some teenage aim to become ‘cool’ or ‘cultured’ (probably both), a gangster black-and-white profile of Tupac and suggestive shot of Marylin Monroe in grayscale with provocative red lips. Only then against the backdrop of my beliefs learned from the abrupt departure of my childhood home do I understand why I didn’t put up pictures those two years: namely, that building a home was probably impossible, and even if possible, pointless.
It was the depth of feeling and experience in my childhood home that led me to believe in the impossibility of its reconstruction. That day of my furtive investigation, I saw not only the house’s brick foundation, but the snow we shoveled hundreds of times, rosy cheeks and reddened noses, angel-shapes and snowmen. I saw Mom and Dad bundling us with hats and gloves, thick socks and boots; squinting for pictures in the bright sun, frozen fingers and toes and breathing we could see with our own eyes.
I saw the pavement of the driveway, malleable in the summer heat; bikes and helmets, baseballs and metal bats, long green hose we could never coil right. Through the sprinklers I saw us hooligans dashing barefoot on the grass; our slick bellies gliding on the slip-n-slide. I heard the key turning in the lock: Dad was home, stethoscope around neck, and we scurried to the door for his cosmic hugs. I saw the sleepovers and capture-the-flag and so much more…
I mean, how could any place compete with the bastion of safety, security, joy, and trust in which I was incubated and nurtured with my two brothers? And even if it were possible, what would be the point battling in futility for order against chaos, permanence against transience? Another year would bring another move: more wrapping paper, more moving boxes, and another dissembling of my wooden desk and undrilling of screws to turn my bed frame into nondescript planks of wood. Why unpack only to repack a year later? It’s not only tiring physically—I began to afford movers even—but exhausting emotionally, to tell yourself here, I am home now, only to leave a little while after. It plays tricks on your psyche and psychological stability. Why plant seeds when you know they will be uprooted?
All too often the open heart, which becomes a broken heart, ends in a closed heart. If you’ve grown up, then you’ve likely experienced some measure of disillusionment akin to the process I am describing: faith in X, broken faith in X because you are burned, and then rejection of X altogether. Often the third stage feels inevitable. It’s the feeling that love cannot again be found. It’s more than the common adult illness of jadedness and cynicism, it’s the feeling of betrayal and shaken belief in the universe, what God protected Job from experiencing despite his dire trials and travails. Moving out of my childhood home, I lost some amount of faith in the institution of home writ large, like the disillusioned wife who comes to believe she will never again find love.
But on New Year's Day 2022 I was walking with a friend on Dizengoff Street speaking of new year's resolutions when I resolved to put pictures on my bedroom wall. Not ‘get a gym membership’ or ‘get a new job’ or ‘get married.’ Put pictures on the wall.
Seven months later, when I moved into my third Tel Aviv apartment, I bought pictures and framed each one. Mostly I purchased early Zionist photographs—Ben Gurion proclaiming the State, pioneers farming the land, a schoolteacher teaching the Hebrew alphabet—plus some modern café depictions and, my favorite, an abstract oil-on-canvas of fervent worshippers at the Kotel melding together in shared prayer as distinct individuals. That one took six weeks to frame, a gold speckled frame, lofty but deliberately imperfect. As sustenance for the spirit, it lent a sense of sublime beauty to the apartment, a regular glimpse into the Garden of Eden.
After years of bare walls, what inspired me to put up pictures?
It was the thing a person has when, their heart broken, they give it another shot. It’s the thing that encourages the victim of betrayal to try again. It’s the thing that leads a person to jump off a cliff into ocean water, climb mountains and ski into valleys. It’s the thing that leads people to quit their jobs to start businesses and get married and have families and do just about anything worth doing in this world.
Courage. Courage is why I put pictures on the wall, knowing, at some point, they would come down.
As Hoizer sings:
And all things end
All that we intend is scrawled in sand
Or slips right through our hands
And just knowing
That everything will end
Should not change our plans
When we begin again
Eventually we all move out of our home, and the home—planet Earth. We pack up the books, take down the pictures, and suddenly the walls are bare. It’s a frightening experience, not for the faint of heart. You have nothing real, the white walls scream, the moving boxes. This place was as temporary as your next. But, in a fundamental sense, who cares? Life is lived in the meantime. All things end, yes. The sun sets. And if we’re lucky, we’ll peer down from the heavens after 120 years and say wow, I made a home there.