Finding a Home beyond our Homelands
The language of belonging to place has been seized by nation-states, built on a culture of exclusion. What might belonging to a home look like if we left behind the fantasy of an exclusive homeland?
A basic foundation that was in existence and could have facilitated cooperation is the love for their homeland that the two people share.
- Martin Buber, Two Peoples in Palestine, in A Land of Two Peoples, 1947
I have already laid out my community philosophy: a philosophy through which the various meanings of community can be differentiated and brought into focus. Community can be found within the relationships which shape us in our daily lives, community can be seen bound up within institutions, imaginary unities, and symbolic ties; and community can be understood within the extensive web of relations which bind us all together. This philosophy differentiates three forms of communities: the personal, the exclusive, and the extensive. Together, these communities compose all of the relationships through which our identities, ecologies, and existence come into being.
Community (of all kinds) comes into being through lived relationships. They persist, upheld across time, forever remaining impressed upon the living beings and evolving ecosystems of our present. Within the three-faced framework of personal, exclusive, and extensive communities, the real meaning of community – in all its relational forms – can come into view. Real communities are built upon lived relationships – relationships rooted in knowledge, connection, and transformative potential that arises within the everyday transcendence of the narrow-mindedness commonly idealized in our culture of individualism. Whereas the personal community is rooted in personal relationships and and the extensive community is grounded in the recognition of common interconnectedness, the exclusive community cuts across these real relationships. Within exclusive communities, identity becomes bound up in the desires of the in-group; no matter where our neighbors fall – whether we perceive them as a part of our in-group or not – real relationships become hindered by norms in which conformity and exclusion limit who can and cannot feel as if they belong. In the modern day, the nation-state is the exclusive community at its most potent: whether or not individuals are born in the same “homeland” as ourselves defines whether many people recognize the intrinsic value of another. In this essay, I will reveal the contradictions which arise when this same framework – from the personal and the exclusive, to the extensive – is applied to our understanding of the home and the national homeland.
To consider the home as personal is to see the truth of all homes: home is always personal. The same cannot be said of ‘homelands.” To be personally rooted in a homeland is to fully assimilate one’s self into a sense of concretely belonging to a nation. This requires that we see the nation as an entity which is unwavering in time, eternal in its inviolable existence. And yet, to conceive ourselves as “belonging” to a nation is to extend and fuse a particular form of social identity onto one’s personal image of self. This sort of belonging can only exist when we grow up with a particular set of ideas regarding the permanence and necessity of nations, what it means to be a part of a nation, and what being a person in the modern day ought to look like. Thus, no homeland is entirely personal: it is always social, always historically contingent, and always rooted in the political ground of the family. A homeland is always, at least in part, inherited impersonally.
In our modern way of life, all personal homes have become exclusive. A home has become synonymous with private property – bound up with a particular legal framework – and thus no strangers have any right to claim it as their personal home. However, what makes a home distinct from a house is the living community, the familial ties, which gathers within. Since as long as there have been built landscapes, the home has been a shared space. Even today, houses are often the home of many, leading the idea of a “personal” home — and the “person” it centers upon — to blur the lines between self and family, while at the same time obscuring the divisions between private, personal and common property. Friends, family, romantic partners, and all others whom we love are joyously welcomed in our homes. Exclusivity is a concept that loses its meaning within common spaces and inter-personal relationships.
Within the Jewish tradition, we are constantly reminded of our obligation to “strangers” — for we too were once strangers... This radical openness permeates Jewish ways of relating to both home and community, as it requires that we reckon with our place in the world, realizing that our home is rightfully ours only if we can welcome others — include those whom are strangers to us — into our community. Only when we welcome the stranger into our home and work to bring about a space where we can all accept one another’s rightful place as our neighbors will we realize the deepest meaning of the extensive community. Only when we all feel secure in our safety and rightful belonging can we bring about a world where all beings have a personal home on the Earth.
But while our homes may be personal, no homeland truly is. In the modern day, the concept of a “personal” homeland has become essentially exclusive – it always requires certain people be excluded. Though this claim might not always be true, the political reality of our present – dominated by nation-states and border regimes – makes it unavoidable. A nation-state relies on being able to differentiate between who belongs and who doesn’t (or rather, who owes taxes and deserves rights, and who doesn’t). Likewise, all border regimes depend upon categorizing individuals as either citizens or aliens (and by extension, who is owed protection under the law and who is not). For a land to be the exclusive home for all individuals of a particular nation, all non-citizens who might be “at home” on the land must be legally considered to not belong. This is the ultimate contradiction between the personal and the exclusive framing of home. This exclusion reveals the fundamentally violent nature of the notion of an exclusive homeland. For a neighbor to be reclassified as an alien is for political violence to rip individuals from their personal communities, and for one group’s relationship to the land to be elevated over all others. Nationalism is an exclusive community rendered to its logical extreme; cultural, linguistic, and ecological diversity are flattened; all other possible ways of knowing the land are subsumed when a nation claims the exclusive right to belong to piece of land.
The language of belonging to place has become fraught with legal constructs, social division, and national exclusivity. What would it look like to root ourselves in our collective past and our shared future — what would change if we saw our home as intrinsically shared with strangers?
To move beyond an exclusive notion of home or homeland, we must consider the reality of human history: all people have moved. In a world roiled by exclusive communities, hatred and fear, diaspora is the common fate of all nations. Humanity has thrived not because we can build settlements that weather the test of time, but because we can disperse; we can build new relationships and new ways of living. We can find a new place, grounding ourselves in new communities. We can learn to call a new land our home.
There are limits to the places we might call home — limits not primarily imposed by social or legal force, but by our biology. Chief among these limits is our foundational relationship to our planet – a vital relationship we share with all other beings living in our extensive community: our distant ancestors, cousins, and kin made our collective endeavor possible. We all have a home here on the Earth. Collectively, the biosphere — the living totality here on the Earth within which we dwell — represents not just our extensive community, but our extensive home. All of us have relatives (some going back tens or even hundreds of millions of years) that have found homes in every habitat, every ecosystem on the Earth. While human history has continuously led diasporic communities to build new relationships to community — new places to call their “homeland” — ultimately our home will always be here, somewhere on the Earth. Each generation comes to know new landmarks, telling new stories about the origin of ourselves and our unique place in the cosmos. But connection to our particular place in the cosmos transcends these stories; wherever we find ourselves rooted, that is our home. Home remains deeply personal, but all of our homes are interconnected and interdependent, as are all of our futures.
If we want to declare any place as our sacred homeland; if we so desire to ground ourselves in a particular place in the cosmos worthy of our veneration not because of some myth but because it is the ultimate source of our being – we need to extend our notion of home. We need to expand our roots across our home-world. If we are to find a homeland where we can safely belong together, we need to recognize one essential truth: all of us deserve a place on our shared planet, a place where we all can belong together. Only when all people live in peace and mutual belonging — when our community connects us with love to all other living beings — will the human endeavor truly be a blessing for all on the Earth.