Thomas Wolfe famously titled his posthumously published 1940 novel, “You Can’t Go Home Again.” The protagonist in the book George Webber described this sentiment in the following way: “You can’t go back home to your family, back home to your childhood… back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time.”
The protagonist in this week’s Torah portion, “Vayetzei, realizes the same thing. Fleeing his brother Esau, who has murderous intentions for him, Jacob heads off alone to find family members he has never met, knowing it is unlikely to ever return to his childhood home. While separated from him by thousands years of time and culture, we somehow know exactly what he is experiencing.
We all must leave home, whether for education or profession, or simply life circumstance. By “leave home” I do not mean only to leave the physical location of your birth – because I know many in this community were born, raised, and continue to live in Western New York – I mean leave the constraints of our childhood and travel like Jacob to the great unknown.
I am spending this week in my actual childhood home, a place I left to attend college, returned to briefly during rabbinical school, and left fully when I came to Buffalo in 2008. In many ways it’s the same place, my parents maintaining many of the pictures and nicknacks that were present when I was growing up. But that home, along with the city, country and world, are different. I am different. To go back is to feel old patterns and memories emerge again, and to also feel a sense of remove from them.
Recently, I was with my 5-year-old Noam and thinking about how when I was his age I was living with my family in Germany, while my dad served as a dentist in the US Army. Was I really that small at that time? Our memories attempt to offer continuity, but as Jacob learns this week, our lives change in ways that are unpredictable. Yes, as George Warren suggests what “seemed everlasting” is, in fact, “changing all the time.” And, yet, God willing, the old memories endure, and the person we once were, will always be with us bounding joyfully, full of questions and curiosity, into the great unknown, whether we actually get to return home or not.