This Ritual Life Archive

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Here you will find out about ways to enhance your holiday experience, to celebrate or mark a meaningful life cycle event, and to deepen your experience of the everyday.

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Keeping A Sense Of Home When You Are On The Road

How do you make a "home" when you are staying in a hotel or a vacation spot?

Our tradition teaches that if we are sleeping in one place for a month, we should place a mezuzah on the door. But how do we create a sense of home when we are staying for just a week? Or just a night? For a people that has spent generations wandering, we have learnt how to make home on the road. The Talmud teaches that "…in all the places that Samuel visited, his home was with him" (Babylonian Talmud: Brachot 10b). How was it possible that wherever Samuel traveled, he always felt at home? Rashi explains that Samuel was able to be at home wherever he went because he traveled with his tent and cooking utensils.

 

Meditation:

Mah Tovu Ohalecha Yaacov

How good are your dwellings, Israel!

 

Ritual:

When you are packing for a trip, bring small things that symbolically represent home to you. This might be photographs, artwork, a book, a stone from your garden.

 

Blessing:

Barukh shenatan shalom b’chaylaych

Blessed is the One who creates peace within these walls.

 

Teaching:

Today the world is God’s hotel, in the world to come it will be God’s home.

(adapted from Moed Katan 9a)

 

May there be peace within your walls, serenity within your dwelling places.

(Psalm 122)

 

Yehi shalom b’chaylaych

May there be peace within your walls

 

(CLAL Faculty)

     



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