Neither Here Nor There (And Both at Once)

June 5, 2026/20 Sivan 5786/Shabbat Beha'alotcha

Hevre/Friends,

As most of you know, travel lives at the heart of my mission — both physical and spiritual. Leaving one place to explore another, encountering new ideas, (re)connecting with different people, and returning transformed in our self-understanding: that's the essence of my own life's journey, and the ones I'm honoured to curate for others through Rabbi on the Road. But travel happens in so many different ways.

I’m reflecting on this from our cottage in Ivry Sur Le Lac, QC, where we’ve settled in for the season. Andi's and my life is defined, in large measure, by being "on the road": summers and winters here, falls and springs in New York City.

And yet, in both places, I sometimes wonder: Am I traveling now? Or am I home?

Many of us are blessed to feel "at home" in more than one place. But alongside that blessing often comes its paradoxical shadow: I am home, and yet I feel far away. From the people I love. The places that hold me. The stories that animate me.

I can be nestled in the lush Laurentians and long for who and what I left behind in New York. I can be buzzing with the city's energy and pine for the beauty and stillness of the country. I can be surrounded by community in Montreal or Manhattan and still ache for the belonging I feel most acutely running the promenade in Tel Aviv or hiking through the Negev.

Does that make one consigned to eternal dislocation — unable to find the ground on which to grow roots? Or does it make one capable of navigating, complicated as that sometimes is, the varied terrains that summon our bodies and souls as we journey through life?

This week's portion, Beha'alotecha, raises this tension in an evocative way. Again and again, the Torah describes how when the Mishkan — the desert sanctuary — settled in the camp, a cloud rested upon it by day and fire by night. When it was time to move on, the cloud would lift, the people would follow, and they would encamp again elsewhere.

The cloud embodied the Divine presence dwelling among the nation. But the Sages pressed deeper into its essence. In the Talmud they ask: Mai shamayim — what are "the heavens"? One rabbinic answer: shamayim holds within it both esh and mayim — fire and water — fused together in word and deed by the holy One at the moment of creation. Somehow, the water did not quench the fire. The fire did not consume the water. In the desert, the cloud's vapor presided by day and the fire by night. And through this daily transformation, Rabbi Emma Kippley-Ogman suggests, the people came to understand these opposite elements as one singular manifestation. When they disappeared, it was time to move on and seek them somewhere new.

It seems an apt metaphor for the continuous tension between centeredness and displacement that life invariably presents. The cloud's moisture slakes the thirst that drew you to a place; the fire illuminates not only what is present there, but what is absent. Together, they create the alchemy we call home.

In a fascinating Talmudic discussion about when to light Shabbat candles, Rav Yosef observes that the desert's transformations — cloud into fire, fire into cloud — required each element to overlap with the other before fully yielding, just as day eases into night at twilight and night softens into day at dawn. And so we light Shabbat candles eighteen minutes before sundown, invoking our "sanctuary in time," as Rabbi Heschel called it, by kindling fire while daylight still lingers.

Wherever our travels take us — around the world or around the corner — we may discover both familiarity and foreignness, anchoredness and anomaly. Far from diminishing the journey, that combination only deepens it, calling us to traverse our lives mindfully: grateful for all that embraces us, and open to all that keeps calling us forward.

As for me, the wheels of the Rabbi on the Road bus keep turning. This week we launched our January 2027 trip to Mexico City and San Miguel de Allende. And last Monday, Rabbi on the Road partnered with Kavod v'Nichum for FINAL STOPS — a curated journey through NYC's landscape of Jewish end-of-life care. In a few days I'll hit the road again, heading to Berlin, where I'll lead sessions at the Fraenkenlufer Synagogue engaging their community with two questions pressing on Jewish life today: how AI is reshaping religious observance, and how our tradition might think beyond binaries in an increasingly fluid world of identity and belonging.

From wherever you're reading this — whether home, away, or somewhere beautifully in between — may we each find within our Shabbat rest both the cloud and the fire — and the courage to keep moving.

Shabbat Shalom,

Dini

Photo by Ronen Avisror