Going Home |
I went home last week. Or at least, I went to the place that used to be home.
Newcastle in early light. Streets that remember me more clearly than I remember them. A turn taken without thinking, a corner that arrives a second before the memory does.
This time, I returned not as I once was — a child moving between house, school and synagogue — but as an author, launching a book that carries parts of that earlier life within it.
There is something quietly disorienting about bringing your present self into your past geography.
The two do not quite align.
I went to Jesmond. The synagogue is no longer there — at least, not as it once was.
The building remains. The frontage is still recognisable. There is a plaque marking what it was.
But it is now flats. Windows where there were once prayers. Private spaces where there was once a community.
And yet — not entirely erased. A trace remains. A marker. A quiet insistence that something happened here. I stood there longer than I expected to.
Not because I thought I would recognise it —but because I almost did.
I remember a visit to our cheder in Newcastle. It must have been 1979.
Lord Jakobovits came to see us — the Chief Rabbi, in a small northern classroom. I don’t remember everything he said. I don’t think I understood most of it at the time.
But I remember the feeling of it. That something important had come to us.That Jewish life — our Jewish life — was not small, or peripheral, or separate from the wider story. It was connected. Seen. Part of something larger than the room we were sitting in.
We were just children. But for that moment, it didn’t feel like a small community at all.
It strikes me now that the book I returned to launch — although its subject matter sits far from that small Newcastle classroom — carries more of that world than I perhaps realised at the time of writing it.
Not in content. But in instinct.
In the way it holds complexity without rushing to resolve it.In the assumption that difficult questions are worth asking.In the quiet confidence that Jewish life — even in a small place — is connected to something larger.
We do not always recognise what we carry forward. But we carry it nonetheless.
We use the language of “going home” as if it were stable. But it rarely is.
Home is layered. It is the place that formed us, the place we left, the place we built afterwards, and sometimes the place that no longer exists except in memory.
In Newcastle, I could feel the outline of a Jewish life that shaped me before I knew it was shaping me. The quiet certainty of it. The way it sat, unannounced, within the rhythm of everything else.
And yet, parts of that life have changed.
Not dramatically. Not violently. Just… gradually.
Which raises a question that feels particularly alive right now:
Where is home, for a Jew?
For some, the answer is clear.
They make aliyah — not simply a move, but an ascent. A declaration that home is not only where we are comfortable, but where we are rooted in something older, deeper, collective.
I think about friends who have gone, or are considering going.
Sometimes out of conviction.Sometimes out of fear.Often out of both.
In a world where Jewish life can feel exposed, the idea of “coming home” to Israel carries a particular pull.
And yet, even there, home is not uncomplicated.
Home can include sirens.Home can include uncertainty.Home can include a vigilance that never quite lifts.
The Torah is not naïve about this.
Avraham is told to leave his home in order to find it.
Yaakov flees, returns, and leaves again.
The Israelites are taken out of Egypt only to spend forty years in the wilderness — not yet home, but no longer where they were.
And Yosef — perhaps the most complicated of all — builds a life in Egypt that is real and powerful, while carrying a memory that never dissolves.
Jewish home has never been singular.
It is, at its core, something we carry.
And in this week’s parsha, Emor, something else becomes clear.
Home is not only place — it is also structure, and it is time.
The Torah sets out the festivals, the rhythms that follow us wherever we go. Wherever Jews have found themselves — Newcastle, London, Jerusalem — we return to the same calendar, the same words, the same patterns of gathering.
We do not need a building to know where we are in the story.
Sometimes, it is enough to arrive at the right moment.
Standing outside what used to be Jesmond synagogue, I realised something else.
If home were only a building, we would lose it far more often than we do — or mistake what remains for what once was.
If home were only geography, it would not survive history.
In London, I light candles.
In London, I host Shabbat dinners that blend tradition with whatever modernity we are currently negotiating. I say Kiddush, break challah, and watch different generations — different geographies — sit around the same table.
It is not Newcastle.It is not Jerusalem.
There is a line in Tehillim:
“If I forget you, Jerusalem, let my right hand forget its skill.” (Psalm 137:5)
It is often read as longing.
But it is also orientation.
Wherever we are, we are not unanchored.We carry direction with us.
I left Newcastle with something unexpected.
Not loss — though there was some of that.
Home is not something I can return to unchanged.
But it is something I am responsible for creating.
And perhaps that is the tension we are all holding now.
Between safety and belonging.Between diaspora and Israel.Between what we inherit and what we build.
We do not simply go home. We carry it. We question it. We rebuild it.
And sometimes, we stand outside a building that has become something else entirely…and realise that what mattered most inside ithas not gone anywhere at all.
Home is not what remains standing. It is what remains lived.