Thoughts on Undedicating a Home
by Rabbi Shoshana Kaminsky
When I was in third grade, my Hebrew school teacher at Temple Sinai in Washington, DC, was Miriam Penn. Mrs. Penn was the first Holocaust survivor I ever knew, and for many years she was the only one. Of course, she never spoke of her experiences with us, but she displayed her Auschwitz tattoo unselfconsciously, and even as a girl I could tell that having numbers on one’s arm was not a normal thing.
I can’t honestly tell you I remember much from her class, other than she was warm and her passion for Judaism seeped into all of her students as well. However, I’m guessing that she would be proud that, fifty years later, I can still hear her say, “If you remember only one thing in my class, it should be that the word Hanukkah means dedication.” And I remembered!
Hanukkah takes its name from the re-dedication of the ancient Temple, which the Hasmoneans under Judah Maccabee purified and consecrated over an eight-day period starting on the 25th of Kislev in the year 165 BCE. The holiday was consciously modeled on Sukkot, which is when King Solomon dedicated the first Temple many centuries earlier. You will note that the Hebrew song Ma’oz Tzur speaks of hanukkat hamizbe’ach—the dedication of the altar. The word hanukkah is used elsewhere in Jewish life: when we move into a new home and affix mezuzot to the doorposts, that ceremony is called hanukkat habayit—the dedication of a home.
This morning I returned from Washington, DC, where I spent a very special week. My sister and brother-in-law are moving to Germany for work at the end of January, and they hosted a gathering of their son and daughter, the daughter’s new boyfriend, plus me. We all came together at 6903 Oakridge Avenue in Chevy Chase—the home that my parents purchased on their second wedding anniversary in 1964. The house has now been sold, and when Kate and Joe fly out of Washington in a month, that will be the end of sixty continuous years that someone from our family has lived there. I flew back to South Bend with a very heavy carry-on bag packed with papers and family photos, plus a few odds and ends in my checked bag: the coffee grinder my father used each and every morning at 7:00 am sharp, plus the magnificent dessert plates that were among my parents’ pride and joy. A family will move into the house sometime early next year, but as soon as the requisite permits and permissions are in place, the house will be knocked down, no doubt to be replaced by something at least twice its size.
It occurred to me to wonder if Judaism has a ritual for un-dedicating a home. The answer is no, which surprised me. There is a prayer for putting up a mezuzah, but none for taking it down. Traditionally, we are supposed to leave the mezuzot in the house for the next resident, even though in our current era it’s highly unlikely that those people will be Jewish. This practice bangs up against an uncomfortable reality: there have been far too many times in our history when we’ve been pushed out of our homes with the full knowledge that the new occupants would be the very people who had displaced us. How would they treat the mezuzot and the precious scrolls within? For many generations, people died in the same home in which they were born. But in Israel, as elsewhere in the world, homes are regularly vacated, torn down, and replaced with new houses or apartment buildings. Assuming the mezuzot are removed before demolition, I guess they’re taken down without fanfare and either disposed of appropriately or placed on somebody else’s doorpost.
I’m very excited that Rabbi Laura Geller will be coming to South Bend as our scholar-in-residence in early April. In anticipation of her visit, I’ve started reading her book Getting Good at Getting Older. The book includes the encouragement to all of us to create our own rituals for marking the significant moments in our lives that traditional Judaism hasn’t recognized. High among those moments is leaving the family home. As my family enjoyed a lavish holiday dinner yesterday, complete with turkey and pumpkin pie served on my parents’ china, my sister and I recalled some of the memories that unfolded in that dining room. At Hanukkah, my mother would pull out her collection of holiday hymns, and we’d gather around the piano to sing Ma’oz Tzur—in English only!--among other songs. On Friday nights, my mother would light the candles, using the blessing she had learned from her own mother: “May the Lord bless with Sabbath joy, may the Lord bless us with Sabbath holiness, may the Lord bless us with Sabbath peace.” And then my father would recite the one-line prayer over the wine, with the kiddush cup close enough to his lips that he could gulp the wine the instant he finished the brachah.
After dinner, as Kate and Joe were walking the dogs and the kids were back on their devices, I walked through the house on my own. I pictured my parents sitting in their armchairs reading the newspaper and drinking their coffee each and every morning. I saw my father in the kitchen grinding coffee and my mother rolling out dough for a pie. I saw myself sitting on the third step, usually with a dog next to me. I looked back to the first time I visited that home with my own baby son. And a thousand other memories that I’m sure will percolate up in the coming weeks.
The only constant in life is change, but that doesn’t mean that it comes easily. Literally closing the door on a chapter in our lives can be difficult and even painful. If that is something you are contemplating, I urge you to take the time to feel the enormity of that transition, to give thanks for all that your house has given you, and hopefully to welcome the possibilities for joy and a sense of home that still lie ahead. Wishing us all a Shabbat shalom and a light-filled Hanukkah!