A Home Destroyed
Now among the delights of the days of old that went lost – one that very many people overlook – was the Jewish home. As much as we mourn for the Beis Hamikdash, for Yerushalayim, and for all the other delights that we had, one of the greatest of all losses was the Jewish home.
And in order to try and appreciate what it means a Jewish home, it’s best to look back to the beginning of our history, to the tents in the Midbar. Because those tents were the first homes of our nation and they were the prototype for all the homes that came afterward in our history.
And so we’ll turn to the words of the Chumash in our sedrah and listen to the words of Hakadosh Baruch Hu that He spoke through the mouth of Bilam, how he described the Jewish home. וישא בלעם את עיניו – Bilam lifted up his eyes, וירא את ישראל שוכן לשבטיו – and he saw Yisroel dwelling according to his tribes (Bamidbar 24:2). It means that he saw the Jewish tents, the homes of the Am Yisroel.
The Prophet’s X-Ray Eyes
And when he saw, he didn't see only the outside – he saw inside the tents; he was a navi after all. ותהי עליו רוח אלוקים – The spirit of Elokim came on him (ibid.) means he saw the dwellings of the Bnei Yisroel and he understood what was doing inside of them. And what he saw inspired him even more and he exclaimed, מה טובו אוהליך יעקב – “How beautiful are your tents Yaakov, משכנותיך ישראל – your dwellings O’ Yisroel” (ibid. 5).
This is in all the gentile bibles too! They can't erase it. It doesn't say ‘How beautiful are your tents O’ Ireland,’ or ‘How beautiful are your tents O’ Germany.’ Oh no! It’s “How beautiful are your tents Yaakov, your dwellings Yisroel!”
Now, there's a statement in Chazal (Sanhedrin 105b) that these words refer to the batei kenessios and batei medrashim; that’s why some people have a custom to say “mah tovu” when they come into the beis hakenesses. But don't think that's the only original meaning. No, that's the secondary meaning. In our sedrah when Bilam looked, he didn't see batei kenessios. He saw tents. He saw Yisrael shochen l’shevatav and he saw what was doing inside too; he saw how people were living in those tents!
Inner Beauty
Outside, the tents maybe were drab looking. What’s a tent after all? Some goat hair, animal hides; nothing too romantic looking. You know, the navi when he describes the Jewish abode he compares it to the beauty of ohalei keidar, like the tents of Keidar (Shir Hashirim 1:5). Keidar means the Arabs, the nomads who had tents made out of goat’s hair. They are so made that the hair is on the outside and the color is unprepossessing.
But when you entered the tent what you saw inside belied its outward appearance; inside, the walls were hung with silks, with precious tapestries of all colors. Travelers remarked about these plain tents that when you entered inside, they greeted you with a panorama of splendor and color of every kind.
Don’t Judge a Home By Its Cover
And therefore the navi states on the outside of the Jewish home – let’s say a gentile is riding on a bus through Williamsburg, in a car through Williamsburg and he sees drab little stores. He sees people dressed humbly. He doesn’t see any grand mansions. There’s nothing of the elegance that you can see even in a residential neighborhood like Flatbush. You don’t have trees and gardens; everywhere there’s plainness. And therefore, the superficial person gains the impression that these are very unimportant people.
But on entering a genuine Jewish home, the picture is entirely different. It doesn’t mean that you won’t find there chandeliers and carpets and paintings. Could be they have that too but inside that home they have an even more important beauty. They have the beauty of a Torah home!
Inside those homes, there’s nothing but chastity. There is no breath of scandal and it doesn’t even enter their minds that there is such a possibility. Whereas in gentile homes a tremendous amount of immorality goes on, even among married women.
Inside the gentile home, there is wife beating. There is always profanity, always fighting. Fistfights! Many homes are wrecked by divorce and in very many the children are in rebellion. But inside the genuine Jewish home, in these humble houses whose externality makes such a simple impression, they are draped with the tapestries of innocence and purity and Torah idealism.
Under Great Pedagogues
Now, that’s the Jewish home of today, taf shin lamed gimmel; but the tents that Bilam saw, the tents he looked inside of, were hundreds of times, thousands of times better than that.
After all, we understand immediately that under the tutelage of Moshe Rabbeinu the people of that generation reached the zenith of perfection. Moshe Rabbeinu was teaching the men, guiding them and Miriam was doing her own job; Miriam was teaching the women. And the products were perfect.
And therefore when Bilam saw a house in which there was a talmid of Moshe Rabbeinu as the father and a disciple of Miriam as the mother, and he saw how that house was conducted, b’kedushah and b’taharah and with middos tovos, so by the command of Hashem he raised his voice and he announced for all history; he declared for eternity that there's nothing like a Jewish home.
Most Modest Homes
Now what he saw, we can only imagine. We have to study Bilam’s words with all the mefarshim of the Shas and the Medrashim and all the Rishonim and Achronim; and we still won’t know what he saw. But a little bit we can scratch the surface.
One thing he saw was the tznius of Jewish homes. The Gemara (Bava Basra 60a) says that when Bilaam looked at Yisroel ‘dwelling according to their families’, ראה – he saw, אין פתחיהן מכוונים זו כנגד זו, that not a single doorway opened towards another doorway. The six hundred thousand tents were so positioned, so pitched, that never did one doorway of a tent face another doorway.
Even accidentally, if you opened up the flap of the doorway of your tent and your neighbor did so at the same time, you couldn’t look into his tent and he couldn’t look into yours. The Am Yisroel lived in decency, in complete purity.
Falling Down in Shock
Everything was done with the utmost precision and tznius because they were building something now of the utmost importance – a Jewish home! And when Bilaam saw that, he couldn’t believe his eyes. נופל וגלוי עינים – He fell down from what he saw! “Such excellence among an entire nation! מה טובו אהליך יעקב משכנתיך ישראל – How wonderful are these tents!” (Bamidbar 24:4,5).
Every tent was a little yeshivah where the father spoke words of Torah and idealism all the time. That’s what it means a Jewish home; a home of Torah. Not only fathers; mothers too. The home was a place where mothers made tzaddikim out of children.
I remember once there was a sefer I read; it was written about three hundred years ago and the mechaber was describing what his mother once told him. ‘I cannot forget my mother,’ he wrote there. ‘She stood before me and said – he said it in Yiddish but I'll say it in English: “My mother told me, ‘If I were a man I would never stop learning Torah. I wouldn’t stop learning Torah day and night.’
“My mother is standing before my eyes as if she was alive right now,” he wrote. “Her face is burning with enthusiasm and I hear her words right now in my ears.” And she said it with such a fire that it went into his blood. I saw that inscribed in an old sefer.
The Tents of Sinai
And that’s only three hundred years ago. In the Midbar it was a thousand times more because they were just fresh from Matan Torah. The flames that they saw at Matan Torah were still burning in the homes of each tent and the chief occupation of every mother and father was the teaching the Torah and Torah ideals to their children.
למען תספר באזני בנך – You should relate everything in the ears of your children. So they told them all the history, all the nissim that they had seen. They described Matan Torah to their children. In the tents they constantly spoke to their children about their great history and their great future and they inspired them; they inflamed them with idealism.
A Tent of Ruchniyus
They didn't have much gashmiyus in the Midbar. They didn't live in settled dwellings with conveniences. It was a tent, and the tent was made in a flimsy way so that you could take it apart one-two-three and put it on the back of your donkey and travel with it to the next place.
No fancy floors. No cupboards with sets of dishes. They didn't have any air conditioning. They didn't have refrigerators. No telephones. They didn't have any real stoves. They had nothing but they had everything because to them the accomplishments of the spirit was the only purpose for which they lived. The Jewish family in the Midbar grew up in the shadow of Har Sinai. They saw Moshe Rabbeinu’s face; they lived with the Torah idealism, with emunah and dedication and daas Hashem in their bones. It was in their blood.
A Sweet Smelling Nation
Not only did they teach them Torah but they taught them beautiful middos; the fragrance of good character and good qualities and proper behavior. 'כאהלים נטע ה – Like the aloes trees, כארזים עלי מים – and cedar trees. Did you ever pass a cedar forest and breathe in the fragrance of the pine forest? So sweet, so redolent. That’s what Bilam saw; a nation beautiful in knowledge of Torah and also in middos tovos and in character. A people perfumed with all good things.
And that's how it existed down until the end of the Bayis Rishon. Our forefathers in the Midbar were so great that the push they gave lasted for generations. Before the Churban the Jewish home was, to a certain extent, like the homes in the Midbar. And therefore absolutely the Jewish home was one of the delights we possessed in the days of old, one of the machmadeha that we mourn for even today.
