The Jewish perspective on the function of a home is revolutionary. The home is not an aside, it is the incubator for all meaningful contribution to the world.

Today, Chava Green shares her personal and professional experience with the idea of the "akeres habayis". Chava is a PhD student, writing her dissertation on chassidic feminism. She is also a woman navigating her own identity in a world that attributes little to the essential qualities of a woman.

What does it mean to celebrate my femininity within my Jewish home? What does it mean for the home to be the foundation of our society, and the Jewish home the center for Jewish life? And even if I am not a parent, how can I show up to nurture the home within myself?

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text from episode outro:

The home is the center of the world. 
When homes become destabilized, 
Society crumbles. 

There is a reason why we return to our homes each evening, after we have given the world our best. The way it holds us, allows us to simply be, so we can wake up the next morning and face the world anew. 

You can live in a house,  and not have a home.

And in a world that has reduced the home to the periphery, 
So many people today are homeless. 

The three mitzvos of a woman are 
Challah, candle lighting, taharas hamishpacha 

Challah — the bread of the home, 
The food that nourishes and sustains us. 
The comfort food. The couch we sink into after a long day. 
The morning routine. The bathroom that may not be perfect, but is ours. 

Candle lighting — the fire that lights up our homes internally. 
The way the emotional temperature of our childhood home creates the mirror that we hold up to ourselves all our lives. The way our internal voice illuminates or darkens our path. The way we absorb energy that builds the blueprints of our nervous systems, that soothes or aggravates us each time we return home. 

Taharas hamishpacha. 
A woman counts her days, goes to the mikvah, immerses in pure waters —

G-d’s sanctity is welcomed into the intimacy of creation, 
into the spaces where no one else can see. 

That unknowable, sacred aspect of a home. 
The way it allows you to access someplace deep inside you. 
The way you cannot articulate what it feels like to come home. 

A Jewish home is immersed in the intimacy of a private relationship with G-d.
The way no young child notices their mother slipping out in the evening, 
but whose home is nonetheless permeated with the purity of her tevilah. 

The way children are kindled by nothing more than the radiant energy 
of a mother so deeply at home with her own soul. 
And the way the world is kindled by nothing more than the radiant energy 
of human beings at home within their own soul.

A Jewish home is built on three things: 
Physical nourishment. 
Emotional warmth and wellbeing. 
And something sacred, untouchable, divine. 

Challah 
Candle lighting 
Taharas hamishpacha

Home within you. 
Home for the ones you love. 
Home for those you welcome into your private walls. 

Akeres habayis
Does not mean foundation of the home 
To the exclusion of all else. 

It means home as the birthing point, 
The incubator, the place to come back to and gather strength from. 

Home as the beginning 
Of all meaningful contribution to the world. 

Challah, sustenance. 
Candle lighting, internal warmth. 
Mikvah, the unknowable divinity in our lives. 

The Jewish home is the center of the Jewish nation. 
The home is the center of the world.