Chapter 40The Dwelling
Home
A palace displays majesty. A home reveals the one who lives there.
The difference between a place built to be seen and a place built to be lived in — and why the tradition chose the second word.
The Chassidic formulation could have used any number of words. Palace, temple, throne, sanctuary — each carries dignity and each was available. The word used is dirah, a dwelling. An apartment. Where someone lives.
נִתְאַוָּה הַקָּדוֹשׁ בָּרוּךְ הוּא לִהְיוֹת לוֹ יִתְבָּרֵךְ דִּירָה בַּתַּחְתּוֹנִיםThe Holy One, blessed be He, desired a dwelling in the lower realms.
Desired — not needed. The whole project belongs to the category of will rather than necessity.
The Holy One, blessed be He, desired a dwelling in the lower realms.
Desired — not needed. The whole project belongs to the category of will rather than necessity.
What a home is
A palace is organised around being seen. Its scale, its sightlines and its ceremony all exist to communicate something to someone who is not the occupant. The occupant of a palace is, in an important sense, always at work.
A home is organised around being. There is no audience. Its rooms are shaped by what actually happens in them rather than by what they convey. And the specific thing a home reveals is not the occupant’s greatness but the occupant — the difference between knowing what someone is capable of and knowing what they are like.
In a palace you learn what he can do. In a home you learn who he is.
Where someone is unguarded
This is the boldest thing in the entire Chassidic vocabulary and it is worth pausing on rather than passing over. The purpose of creation, in this formulation, is not that Hashem be glorified — glory is available without a world. It is that there be somewhere He is at home.
Every word of that has to be handled carefully; none of it implies anything lacking, and the previous chapter is the guard against reading it that way. But the choice of word stands, and the tradition made it deliberately.
וְעָשׂוּ לִי מִקְדָּשׁ וְשָׁכַנְתִּי בְּתוֹכָםThey shall make Me a sanctuary, and I will dwell among them.
Among them, not in it. The building is a mechanism; the dwelling happens in the people.
They shall make Me a sanctuary, and I will dwell among them.
Among them, not in it. The building is a mechanism; the dwelling happens in the people.
Mikdash me’at
The Talmud calls the synagogue and the house of study a mikdash me’at, a small sanctuary — and the phrase is applied by extension to the Jewish home, which is treated in the sources as a site of holiness in its own right rather than as a place one leaves in order to reach holiness.
The direction of the analogy is worth noticing. The home is not being flattered by comparison with the Mikdash. Given dirah betachtonim, the Mikdash is the public instance of what the home is privately: the ordinary case, and the whole point.