Space and Place in Jewish Studies

5 Bayit

5 Bayit But over and beyond our memories, the house we were born in is physically inscribed in us. . . . We are the diagram of the functions of inhabiting that particular house, and all the other houses are but variations on a fundamental theme. —Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space What makes a house a home? And if there is such a thing as a “Jewish home,” how might we go about determining its defining attributes? How is this space produced and maintained, both for those who live there and call it home, as well as in relation to people outside? And what is the relation between these conceptions of home and the memory of it,1 and larger configurations such as community, neighborhood, and nation? This chapter considers the various and diverse meanings of house and home across a spectrum of texts, with special attention to the ways in which space is consecrated as Jewish. The term “consecrated” is used to indicate a particular category of Jewish homeownership, one produced in relation to categories of religious practice and belief. Some of these practices—such as the mishkan [tabernacle] or the sukkah [harvest festival booth]—follow on those phenomena discussed in chapters 3 and 4, examples of how rabbinic Judaism sought to replace or accommodate the absence of the Temple and the condition of exile from the Land. Others— such as the eruv or the synagogue—emerged in dialectical relation to other spaces produced within the context of Jewish life in ethnically and religiously mixed settings. Indeed, the spatial contours of home, in a physical , even architectural sense, often constitute a way of describing relations with other people and are thus one indication of how difference is negotiated in the public sphere. So, for example, the experience of home is often bound up with the house’s physical attributes, its interior structures as well as its relation to the street and other surrounding homes. This burden placed upon the language of home can be seen as Jewish culture began to form and flourish in the Babylonian and Persian diasporas; as Jews and Jewish culture spread geographically, some notions of home 81 persisted, while others evolved or withered. The idea of home has signi- fied in broader, often paradoxical ways, as Jewish communities found themselves “at home” in diverse and far-flung locations. At the end of this chapter we begin to consider ways of thinking about home and homeland that are less bound to collective, religious beliefs, and more grounded in the “articulate objects” of the contemporary Jewish home,2 as a way of introducing the manifold sense of home discussed in the following chapters , “The City” and “Diasporas.” Starter Homes in the Desert: Mishkan and Sukkah The Hebrew word bayit means both house and home, exemplifying a tension between place and space: the fraught and delicate relation between actual, material space—abodes, domiciles, and the physical existence of communities across time and geography—and the symbolic, often metaphorical domain of being “at home.”3 The relation between bayit as a physical structure and the more abstract notion of belonging or rootedness may itself be construed in different, even oppositional, ways. For example, we can consider home as a site that has been transformed into “one’s own,” in Tuan’s terms—as space made into place. As Tuan notes, “A house is a relatively simply building. It is a place, however, for many reasons . It provides shelter; its hierarchy of spaces answers social needs; it is a field of care, a repository of memories and dreams.”4 “Home” indicates a unique and imbued place of belonging, as opposed to the empty, affectless space of the house, itself merely an architectural shell waiting to be filled with the signs of actual and/or metaphorical belonging. On the other hand, home may equally be understood as a more abstract, symbolic category , something malleable, adaptable, even portable, a feeling or a sensation that may be created, and either magnified or decreased, by the effects of human agency, as opposed to “house,” which is the physical, material object, calling to mind the tangible specifics of kitchen, basement, roof. Historically, within Judaism, the physical landscape most associated with some idea of a collective home has been the biblical topography of the ancient land of Israel and especially, as we have seen, Jerusalem and its Temple. The landscape of the desert, however, serves as an important counterpoint to the agrarian autonomy of...