Leah’s Blog – The House of Hashem – Shabbat Chazon 2026
Leah’s Blog – The House of Hashem – Av – July 2026 – On our last trip to the USA three years ago, Suzi and I drove around Brooklyn to our old stomping ground. Coming down East 23rd Street towards Avenue W past the shul, past Pam’s house had us looking out the left side of the car window. Just as I began to wonder if the floor boards still creaked on the stairs going up to the second floor, a man opened the front door and walked out. I had to take a double take for a second – he seemed the spitting image of my father, flat hat and same build. But on a closer look he was Chinese. The house externally really hadn’t changed much and a rush of memories flooded me, sweet ones but fleeting. We were ready to move on to Suzi’s old building on Newkirk Avenue where the scent was even stronger, cannabis smoking somewhere. There in her old lobby that shone in the dim light of that late summer afternoon we relished in our memories, including the special time of our childhood together. Neither one of us needed more than a minute or two to savor. Av is the time we remember our home. Something always nagged at me sitting at my bedroom windowsill looking at the tree lined streets as a child, a yearning that was hard to put into words but it had me leaving the old world to the Axis Mundi ascending the place where heaven and earth meet. For me personally it meant turning the memory we carry in ourselves turned into restoration. Sacred are these clods of earth here where our fathers and mothers walked and lived even before we were slaves in Egypt. These are the places that time has preserved; the past is revealing itself now and I want to go home to it. It is not impossible to build His house! The power of gravity pulls down yet here there is a force that pulls you up. For those waiting for it to fall out of the sky- you have to revive it. The floorboards are being revealed now. We peel back the layers and build new ones. It was a mountain, it was a field, it was a house. Abraham climbed it, Yitchak prayed on it, David bought it, Shlomo built it. We miss our home. East and West clash now. The pendulum rocks. The earth turns and churns. Israel LIVES. We didn’t drain the swamps, till the fields, conquer the mountains, and rise like a lion for it to fall from the sky. We have to come close to it. We have to want to go inside. Time to go home we mourn now, we hope now, we do now. Eretz Yisrael waited two thousand years for this time.
Shabbat shalom dearest friends- Blessings and Besorot Tovot! Leah
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