I made a pilgrimage this week. Not to Mecca, or even to Jerusalem, but to La Jolla, California.
La Lolla, if you don’t know, is an idyllic seaside village just north of San Diego, and it’s where I was born.
Despite not living there for more than a few months, it has been my home away from home for the last 40 years of my life—that is to say, all my days.
As many of you know, I had something of a peripatetic childhood. We migrated from coast to coast and back again, with a couple sojourns to Israel mixed in. I often liked to point out that by the time I was 14 I had lived in 14 different houses, with many more on the way.
And yet amidst all of that was La Jolla, California.
La Jolla is where my parents met, and fell in love. It’s where, before that, their parents met, and became friends. It was our vacation spot each and every summer. My dad needed a couple extra weeks to study during rabbinical school? Out flew my mother, my sisters, and me, to stay with my grandparents in La Jolla.
Need a little sun to get away from the dreary Oregon winters in my teens? Down we flew to La Jolla from Eugene.
My mother needing a little extra family support to get through a crisis? Down
we drove to La Jolla to stay with my grandparents.
All of my grandparents had lived in La Jolla. But, over time, grandparents do what they, and all of us, eventually do. They die. In 2009, it was my grandpa, Armon Kamesar, at the age of 82. In 2013, my grandma Sonia Dobson, at the age of 87. In 2021 it was my grandfather Peter Dorsey, at the age of 99. And this year, in the coming weeks it will be my last living grandparent, my paternal grandmother, Barbara Kamesar at the age of 94.
I’ll have a lot to say in certain settings about my grandmother, who is one of the most unique, classy, intelligent ladies you’ll ever encounter. But in this moment, I want to talk about a different touchstone Jewish tradition: place.
“Mah Norah Hamakom Hazeh,” Jacob says, when he wakes from a dream in which he witnesses messengers of God going up and down a sulam, a ladder, or a stairway, and in which Hashem reassures Jacob that Hashem will be with him going to and from this land. “Mah Norah Hamakom Hazeh,” Jacob says, How full of awe is this place. “Surely Hashem, God, is present in this place and I did not know.”
How full of awe is this place.
“This place,” is, in fact, not Jacob’s destination per se—Jacob is on the lam; in exile. He has just stolen the patriarchal blessing from his brother Esau and he is fleeing for his safety. And yet there, in that place, he finds God. In exile, in fear, a mere weigh-station on his journey, he finds God.
Little did Jacob know that that particular place, according to tradition, had resonance for his past, and for his future.
His past: this was the site where his father nearly met his maker. בַּיּ֣וֹם הַשְּׁלִישִׁ֗י וַיִּשָּׂ֨א אַבְרָהָ֧ם אֶת־עֵינָ֛יו וַיַּ֥רְא אֶת־הַמָּק֖וֹם מֵרָחֹֽק׃ Early one morning, Abraham saddled his donkey and took with him two of his servants and his son Isaac. He split the wood for the burnt offering, and he set out for hamakom, the place of which God had told him. On the third day Abraham looked up and saw hamakom, the place from afar. We know this is the place, the site, of the akedah, the binding of Isaac.
The ancient rabbis understand the same use of hamakom in each of these verses to signal that they are each referring to the same place. The place where Jacob has his dream, and where his father was nearly sacrificed.
So that’s the past. But the place had a resonance for the future—the rabbis understand this same place to be the site of the Temple of Solomon. The place to which Israelites would make pilgrimage three times a year, bringing the best of their crops and their flocks, as an offering to God, drawing near to experience the presence of God, to draw near to the divine.
Mah Norah Hamakom hazeh, how wondrous is this place, we say when we encounter a place in which we feel that presence of God.
Judaism has a paradoxical relationship when it comes to the holiness of place. On the one hand we have the verse from Isaiah which we chant multiple times each day—kadosh, kadosh, kadosh, hashem tzevaot me’lo khol ha’aretz k’vodo. “Holy, Holy Holy, Hashem of Hosts; the whole earth is filled with [Your] presence.” God’s presence fills the earth. Everywhere, every place you go, the capacity for holiness is present—from the wooded grove to the kitchen sink. Part of Judaism says every place has the capacity for holiness.
On the other hand, mah norah hamakom hazeh, there are certain places, because of our relationship to them, because of our journey, that help us to facilitate that relationship to holiness, to awe.
A small part of me hopes that for some of you, Society Hill Synagogue can serve as that place. That when you need to hold space for an orientation towards the Divine, that when you’re looking to consciously, in some small way, let holiness into your life, this sanctuary, the bustling social hall downstairs, facilitates that for you.
At the same time, of course, that capacity for holiness is present everywhere, along your journeys.
In some ways, this dual, paradoxical relationship to the holiness of place is central to the Jewish experience; for we have our own duality: Israel and exile.
Like Jacob, there is a special holiness to the land of Israel. Not necessarily because there is any magical quality to it; who is to say about that? But because of the way in which the central parts of our story were formed there: the experiences of our ancestors, forming themselves into a community, bound together by words of Torah—our sacred stories, our sacred traditions— took place there. It’s where Abraham, Sarah, and Isaac endured the test of faith; where Jacob dreamt; where the priests tended to the holy. Its rolling hills, its sea air, its ancient soil all can evoke that holiness for us.
At the same time, we Jews have experienced the holy in a far different relationship to place. In exile: also, like Jacob, on the journey from here to there. Crossing oceans; in shtetls and tenement houses; in sanctuaries just like Society Hill Synagogue’s. Holiness can, and is, found everywhere.
La Jolla evokes a special experience of holiness for me, serving, as it has for me, as a sanctuary from the ebbs and flows of the world, as the formative bedrock of my experiences. At the same time; I also find holiness in Philadelphia, my once and future home; and here in the community of SHS.
This is the dual relationship to the holiness of place in Judaism. May you find your many places of holiness.
