Jan Morris once wrote, “It’s okay to stay at home.” “Travel is not compulsory. Great minds have been fostered entirely by staying close to home. Moses never got further than the Promised Land. Da Vinci and Beethoven never left Europe. Shakespeare hardly went anywhere at all-certainly not to Elsinore or the coast of Bohemia…. Travel, which was once either a necessity or an adventure, has become very largely a commodity, and from all sides we are persuaded into thinking that it is a social requirement, too … not just a way of having a good time, but something that every self-respecting citizen ought to undertake, like a high-fiber diet, say, or a deodorant.” But Jan Morris did her traveling inside her own gender as well as in the world, and she/he wasn’t Jewish, so didn’t know about Sukkot and the wandering spirit. We, for example, will be spending every night in a different Sukka until we get to the airport on Wednesday. Sukkot is part of the lesson of flexibility and temporariness in the life of the Jew, the need not to be dependent on a specific place. We have a home, but who knows who will come in somewhere and drag us out into the street by our hair.
In this spirit we have decided to heed the advice of Leonard Cohen and, having taken Manhattan, we’ll be going off to see about taking Berlin.
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