“Home, when you reduce the meaning of the concept to its positive-psychological essence, is security.”

Thus wrote Jean Améry, an intellectual, a Jew against his will, who fled the Nazi terror and was imprisoned in concentration camps. The security Améry speaks of begins with the sense of comfort in being at home, people treading confidently in familiar surroundings without “walking unsteadily on moving ground.” People living at home do not experience estrangement, uprootedness, exile, or alienation. 

Buber described this experience as “being at home in the world.” The term “home” does not denote a protective physical structure. The experience of homeness is not necessarily realized in space but instead as in the certainty of an understandable sense of order, as a sense of familiarity and the absence of threat.

What does it mean to lose one’s home? 

It is important to distinguish people who have lost their physical home from those who have been uprooted from home. Those who lose their physical home may feel pain, but they will not necessarily lose the experience of homeness. Even one whose private home is lost and gone will still experience the homeness of the surroundings, a natural place where one feels comfortable. People know the language, the street names, and what places are important. They still have a sense of orientation in the world. They still know who to turn to and still feel confident their claims will be heard. They have remained in place among friends. They know how to behave and even how to find relief from the loss of their private homes.  

But those who are uprooted against their will from the safety of homeness will experience more than displacement. A deep rift is in their hearts because their homes, the familiar world where they feel comfortable, are lost. The essence of life is summed up in this uprooting.  

Uprooting from home differs from exile. Exiles may settle in their new surroundings, in such a way that exile becomes the foundation of their existence and identity. Henry Nathansen, a Danish Jewish writer and playwright, excelled at describing this experience of the Jewish people:  

“Inside, behind the protective walls—the walls of the ghetto or the walls of the house—was the homeland, the true land of the nation without a homeland. Here, it kept its treasures, which were passed down from one generation to another, its religious culture of life, its family life, and its narrow and limited community life. Here lived the people, the community members sharing faith and family; here, its life was free but hidden, and a unique and intimate life was sustained while preserving the unique ancient seal.”

Exiles can create a home space where they experience certainty and trust. But those who are uprooted from their homes lose this power, too. Their world collapses on them. The pain of the uprooting occupies the whole of existence. A crack opens up. As Wislava Szymborska wrote in “Autotomy”: “The abyss doesn’t divide us./ The abyss surrounds us.” 

This experience, causing indescribable suffering, is angst, which differs from fear. Fear is an appropriate response to an external threat, while angst is an existential experience that tears us apart from the inside. In his classic analysis of angst, Heidegger pointed out that the object causing it cannot be located “‘here’ or ‘there’”—“what threatens is nowhere and is nothing.” It is always “there.” And yet nowhere. It is so close that it is hard to breathe and, nevertheless, is nowhere. Angst negates the value of objects in the world or of our understanding of the world. All become simply irrelevant. Angst detaches humans from their world and throws them into the emptiness of their nullity and futility. The world loses meaning—nothing left to hold on to, no way of explaining, and nothing to grasp. In angst, we are exposed to our senseless uniqueness and absolute individuality, which tears us away from our attachments: who can understand the pain of one who is threatened? Who can offer comfort to those who have lost their world? Can words at all restore what has unraveled? The experience of angst is one of awesome loneliness. Heidegger argued that it is synonymous with unhomeness and uprootedness, leaving us alone inside ourselves and with ourselves, with all its pain and suffering.  

This suffering is not physical pain—pain focuses on body limbs and can be measured, while suffering attacks the whole human being, body and soul. The sufferer’s existence is a cry, even if unheard. The suffering we experience in angst is unlike that caused by the psychological phenomenon defined as anxiety. An anxiety attack can destroy a person. It is amenable to medical treatment because its focus is physical, even if its implications are existential. By contrast, angst is a life experience, not an illness or a symptom. It is an expression of a life that has lost meaning, of endless grief, sorrow, and longing for what is gone. Angst is an existential experience. 

These days, many of us experience appalling angst. The safe world where we lived has crashed. Our experience is woven both from our personal existential encounter with a disaster beyond comprehension and from the political circumstances. The state failed to live up to its basic promise to protect its citizens. The citizens of Israel were exposed to an evil unseen since the days of the Holocaust when people were murdered just because they were Jews. Now, they were murdered because they are Israelis. We experienced the “valley of the shadow of death” without a comforting hand promising protection from evil. We were left in our loneliness and our pain.  

We are experiencing the loss of homeness and the “destruction of home” in a real rather than a metaphysical sense: stone houses were destroyed, but so too was the inner experience of homeness. This destruction of homeness could give rise to a deep alienation, which Buber described so well: “Man finds himself standing in a world that he can no longer see and experience as his home, and is no longer sure of his stand in it.” Death and destruction have burst in without impediment. Man-made demonic evil thrashed the trust in our ordered lives, including faith in the human order. Those who grew up in Israel and saw it as their homeland and home found that the home provides neither certainty nor protection. No one is safe, whether toddlers or older people, children or adults who labored and founded their lives on a passionate belief in human goodness. 

The experience of angst can generate different and contradictory reactions. It can cause deep trauma and impair the ability to return to social life and to order. It can also be an opening for an ongoing indictment of the state, which did indeed fail in its key role, making people impervious to the suffering of others. This imperviousness is not necessarily a sign of the loss of moral judgment but an expression of the soul closing amidst suffering, which no longer leaves room for others. Expressions of angst should not be taken lightly. “This is the whole of man,” an entity wrapped in its finitude and in the ever-present possibility of physical and mental disappearance.  

However, now is not the time for theological, political, or philosophical explanations or political confrontations. The account book should now be closed because any explanation of this kind derides and hurts the sufferer’s soul. What is now required from all of us is to take a stand with attention, solidarity, and, above all, compassion. Attention is an invitation to speak. In despair and suffering, when the soul can find no rest, speech may be comforting. R. Soloveitchik, who felt the intensity of despair in his life, wrote in The Lonely Man of Faith: “All I want is to follow the advice given by Elihu the son of Berachel of old who said, ‘I will speak that I may find relief’ [Job 32:20] for there is a redemptive quality for an agitated mind in the spoken word.”  

Redemptive speech is non-judgmental. It implies participation in the suffering of the other and identifying with the sufferer. Redemptive speech is experienced only if the attentive other completely opens up to the sufferer and stands with him in his grief. Stefan Zweig clarified that, unlike pity, compassion is genuine participation [mit-leiden, in German] in the other’s sorrow in a partnership “determined to hold out, in patience and forbearance to the very limit of its strength and even beyond.” Compassionate attention is a recognition of the burden that the other’s suffering imposes on us, in the words of Samuel David Luzzato: “For the compassionate man identifies himself with the suffering person and does not rest until he helps him, and alleviates his pain.” Compassion is an expression of interpersonal fraternity. Leonard Cohen expressed this view when he wrote: “Every heart, every heart/ To love will come/ But like a refugee.” Because only an open, loving heart can lead, not any ideology.  

A personal existential commitment to support sufferers is anchored in the realistic hope that the shared struggle for a good, fair life is a worthy cause. Hope refuses to submit to evil and acknowledges that bringing about the good is part of a relentless Sisyphean struggle. 

In his famous poem “Anthem,” Leonard Cohen wrote: “Ring the bells that still can ring…/ There is a crack a crack in everything/ That’s how the light gets in.” The light that will get in is not divine. Those who are now walking through the valley of the shadow of death will not fear evil, but not necessarily because God is with us. If there is hope, it is anchored in humans, in the belief that it is within humans the power to act, struggle fearlessly, and make amends. The light is the human good that bubbles and surfaces, illuminating the darkness. 

We are now witnessing the rise of this light in our lives here, in deeds and pursuits highlighting the opening of homes and hearts. May this light drive away the darkness and angst that burst into our lives and enable us to protect our homes and rebuild the houses that were destroyed. Only yesterday, we were fighting one another for our political lives. But now, when evil is rampant, the springs of human goodness and strength are flowing anew in partnership and solidarity. Our language is gradually changing into a language of goodwill and compassion. Visible through the darkness is its rejection of evil, while it turns into a heroic struggle for human and social reform. 

Ernst Bloch noted that hope suggests that the world as it is does not exhaust the possibilities of existence and certainly does not exhaust the one demanding a better existence. He likened hope to “optimism draped in a mourning veil.” Hope is a recognition of imperfection and lack, but not despair in the face of the future. In the Psalmist’s words, “Hope in the Lord! Be strong! Let your heart take courage! Hope in the Lord!” Hope begets and strengthens hope—it becomes the building block for reconstructing the ruins of our lives. We will not let evil defeat us and determine our lives because we own our freedom. 

Translated from Hebrew by Batya Stein  – Read in Hebrew here.