On the Day of Atonement, as part of the elaborate rituals of the day, the High Priest would offer a prayer in which he pleaded on behalf of the residents of the Sharon area – “may their homes not turn into their graves.”

This year we have seen and heard of too many instances of natural disaster, as well as human destructiveness, in which people’s homes have turned into their graves. Here, in Montclair, we were more fortunate than others, but we also felt the raw might of winds and rains and flooding waters. We have worked to restore our homes, as I hope that we have extended aid to others to do the same.

I would like ot talk a bit about our notions of “home” – of what makes a place a home. And then I want to share some thoughts on that prayer of the High Priest, “may their homes not turn into their graves.”

So, what makes a home? Home is where we live – literally. It is the place where we live our lives, where our most personal selves live and breathe. It is the opposite of a grave.

There are some simple requirements to be met for a home to be a place to “live.” It needs to offer the basic services for our most primary needs of eating, sleeping and hygiene. It needs to be clean and safe and dry and comfortable enough. But if that were the whole deal, then a hotel room could serve just as well.

No. Beyond that, our home needs to be ours. I put aside the admittedly important issues of finances and ownership. I am thinking of issues of personal space. For instance, it needs to have some space for us to keep our stuff, the artifacts of our lives, the relics of our past. It hurts when we have to let go of any of that precious cargo, especially if it has been wrenched from our hands against our will, torn and damaged by forces beyond our control. We need to be able to mold the space that is our home in our own image, to choose décor, or to have a favorite spot in front of the TV.

That sense of personal space usually takes time to develop. Moving into a new home can be as exhilarating as it is stressful. But what really turns the new space into a home is time. It is having the sense of stability over time. This sense of stability is a major distinction between a hotel room and a home.

But it occurs to me that there is another difference that separates a hotel room from a home. I mentioned that we need our living spaces to be tolerably clean. But who is responsible to do the cleaning? One of the luxuries of a hotel room is that we are not responsible for cleaning up after ourselves. But a home is different. I would suggest, by the way, that this is a crucial underlying issue in the ongoing cleanup wars waged between parents and children. Parents want their kids to have a sense of ownership and partnership in their shared home. So, no matter who, in fact, physically does the cleaning, it is our ultimate responsibility to get it done. Thus, we periodically – grudgingly or manically – clean up our spaces. We clean up after ourselves and we clean up after our guests, especially if her name is Irene.

If this makes sense, then these key elements – the investment-of-self in time, and the responsibility to clean up one’s mess – turn out to be “home-defining” in a basic sense. What might this tell us about the meaning of our Day of Atonement? After all, these elements are actually fundamental to Yom Kippur.

Looked at from this vantage point, Yom Ha-Kippurim is a day meant to help us define our homes.

Yom Kippur is one day in a season of days that raises for us the question of stability and transience in time. Kol Nidre is a somber meditation on this theme. Different versions have us contemplate either the timespan from last year’s Yom Kippur to this year’s, or from this year’s Yom Kippur to next year’s. We wonder: In that year’s time, what can we hold on to and keep and what can we, must we, relinquish and release? Can we “keep our word” or is it better to acknowledge that we have, purposely or inadvertently, made a mess, a mess that we now should clean up? No less than at Passover tme, we are performing an annual clean-up. Indeed, one of the meanings of the word “kippur” is “clean up.” Yom Kippur means “clean up day.”

After Irene our house was a mess. Specifically, our basement was flooded with 2 1⁄2 feet of water. All in all, as I kept trying to remind myself, we were so much more fortunate than the many people across the Eastern seaboard who lost everything, including the walls and roof that they called their home. We were blessed to be hit not too hard, but just hard enough to make us really grapple with our sense of home. The sense of pollution and violation we experienced from the mud and mess were eventually washed away and cleaned up. Our losses of food and appliances were upsetting, but temporary. Those losses did not undermine our sense of stability, our self-investment of time that our home represents.

The real challenge involved stuff that the insurance could not cover. The personal stuff which we thought was safely stored but which was destroyed by the water and the slime. Passover song sheets left over from when my father, of blessed memory, used to conduct the family seder; Sukkah decorations created by Yonah when he was too young to know that he was not destined to be a graphic artist;

Going through our damaged belongings made us enact a kind-of extended Kol Nidre. We thought we could keep that diary, but the words are gone. We will never know what drawing was saved on this now blank piece of paper.

Yet, there was also a wonderful blessing that grew out of this blow. While these souvenirs were once vibrant and so important to us, when was the last time we had actually taken out and looked at Yonah’s third-grade essay on dinosaurs? Now, thanks to Zelda’s loving determination, page by soggy page, we began to review these forgotten memories, to return – the Hebrew word is “teshuvah” – to times and items to which we had once pledged our undying devotion, but which we had since forgotten or betrayed. During the “kippur” – the clean-up, it was sometimes puzzling, sometimes painful, and sometimes delightful, but it was always humbling to sift through our lives, to keep on asking ourselves how we have changed – what we have lost and what we have gained.

The famous saying about facing death, “You can’t take it with you,” would appear to make a distinction between one’s home and one’s grave. But now I have come to understand that “you can’t take it with you” applies to my home as well as to my grave. So what is the real difference between them? Is it only that you can’t take any of it to the grave, but you can take some of it home?

Let’s go back to our “home-defining” elements – investment-of-self in time, and responsibility to clean up. Judged by those criteria, it is possible to see the difference between a grave and a home. Actually, when you think about in this way, a grave is more like a hotel room. We stay there only a limited time before we make a mess and then disappear. The dead don’t have to clean up after themselves. The living do. Every year we are called to engage in a Yom Ha-Kippurim, a Day of Cleaning Up. If we hope to keep on living.

The difference between a home and a grave is as stark as the difference between life and death. But this difference also has more subtle ramifications.

If a grave is the place of our perfect rest, then our homes cannot be a place where we are simply content to rest perfectly. If a grave is where we come to our final rest, then our home must be where we come, finally, to life. And if a home is where we really come alive, then a home is not only a place to relax, but a place where we continue to grow. Home is not only where we stay, but where we take ownership for our dirt. The stuff we accumulate cannot only be the stuff of the past, mouldering in a box; it must also include the tools we need to move into the future. And we must make sure that those tools include a broom and a dustbin.

All of this applies to each of us. But it also applies to us as a congregation. Shomrei is our home in so many important ways. At Shomrei we seek warmth and shelter. It, too, requires constant maintenance and care. Shomrei is where we live as a Jewish community. If we want our Jewish community home at Shomrei to be a home and not a grave – what must we do?

As we enter our beautiful building with its mixture of rooms and spaces, for prayer and study, games and cooking, hanging out and working, do we feel at home, as with family, or are we guests? Is this the place where we are investing our very selves in time? And our stuff, precious, sacred stuff, that embodies our past and our identity – do we revisit that stuff or do we let it sit until it fades away, unreadable, unusable? Until we no longer remember why we kept it in the first place?

We – Shomrei members of all ages – dedicate time and space to exploring the depths and riches of our tradition, its avenues for self-expression, for celebration and joy, for remembrance and solemnity. We reach out toward each other and to the greater community to strengthen our connections to each other in times of blessing and in times of need. I am proud that we have a strong group committed to making a visit to Israel together. I am hopeful that tomorrow, on Yom Kippur Day, when we could just take a break from the heavy demands of the day, that we will have a good meeting to re-energize our Social Action efforts.

Yes, Shomrei is a warm and beautiful home. But that means that, as a true home, it is a space that continually calls us to growth and increasing life.

From this Yom Kippur to the next, let us we pray – for the sake of the future, for the sake of life itself – “O God, let our homes not become our graves.”

G’mar Hatimah Tovah! May we all be sealed for a good year!