Tommer Shani ’05

Posted on February 11, 2024

“When he returned, he found his home was locked.”

This is the first sentence of the short story “Fernheim” by S.Y. Agnon — a focused and powerful sentence.

I think this is also the biggest fear of anyone who goes away to army reserve service or on any long mission at times of upheaval like these. The fear that I will return and discover that the things that I invested in building and maintaining, that I invested in physically and emotionally, have perished and were forgotten. The fear of returning to locked doors. Of discovering that my business collapsed, my garden (or field) died, my project was shut down (or given to someone else), the building that was planned will not be built, my social group fell apart…

This sentence has been in my thoughts since around the second week of my army reserve service, along with a number of other sentences that I learned in high school. I was not really worried about a “locked home” in particular, but about this sad, fundamental idea of loss at a time of crisis and absence.

I was called up to the army on Thursday in the first week of the war, and I was released this week, after three and a half months. I serve in a support unit, one that takes care of logistics for army forces in the south. I may still return to my unit this year.

During most of this time, my conditions were relatively comfortable – a base on the home front, a regular bed and a roof over my head, and leave to go home every week almost from the beginning of my service. Still, I was uprooted from my routine; I lost control over my time; and my missions prevented me from sleeping through the night. I was in an environment that was all-encompassing and demanded my commitment.

I am a high school teacher, so substitute teachers took over my “standard” classes. These teachers gave extra hours (sometimes receiving full compensation, but often less). For the classes where I teach in a special program, I had to provide guidance from a distance to teachers who work with me and are familiar with the general outline of the program, so that they could substitute for me. An initiative that I started with some friends during the COVID-19 pandemic suffered from the sudden absence of most of its staff and volunteers (while others joined or increased their responsibility), and the initiative almost collapsed more than once.

Truthfully, Fernheim of Agnon did not make up the fear of returning to a locked home. The motif of delayed return – to a home that is different than the one we left – is an ancient element in the hero’s journey. Yet returning to a locked home is a more powerful image than returning to a home full of suitors and a loyal wife (Homer), or to upsetting self-declared heirs and a region that was burnt and despoiled (Tolkien). Perhaps the power of this image comes from the fact that it is expressed in Agnon’s Hebrew. Or perhaps from the fact that in the real world, we do not really need to battle rivals when we return.

“When he returned, he found his home was locked” – a similar but different fear is returning to a totally different reality… not that the project or garden or family totally shut down, but that in three months they changed until they were totally unrecognizable.

In Fernheim, one of the characters describes this as “something changed in the world.” The truth is that when the world turns upside down, we need to make changes in order to survive. Close relationships need to be rebuilt so that they can hold within them more loneliness and independence. An initiative based on volunteers must become more focused and compact and change its priorities. Parts of the business get mortgaged to secure a loan, with or without interest. The class progresses in learning the material, but according to the pedagogical approach of another teacher
(and this is an opportunity to stop and say thank you to my amazing colleagues at the agricultural high school in Ein Kerem!)

The world never freezes in place. A bird who doesn’t go up and up, falls down. And according to cold calculation, it is clear to us all that it is better to take off than to crash.

Change – however difficult and alienating it is – must happen, in fact, so that the home will not be “found locked” when we return… Still, what we knew and invested in is gone. When we return, the home is not the same home.

It is important to say that these changes and ways of coping are almost always rooted in difficulties and rough patches that were there in reality beforehand. We don’t need a twisted love story like Inge and Fernheim’s to understand this.

Of course, the reservists who left for such a long time will certainly return different than they were before. I am not talking about Combat Stress Reaction (shell shock), which is a separate, lengthy discussion, but rather about how everything that we took for granted was deeply shaken up.

Three months of a different reality gives us an opportunity to take a new perspective on life, to ask questions about paths that we have chosen (or not chosen), and to rechoose things that were once part of our routine.

One of the symbolic expressions of Fernheim’s transformation in Agnon’s story is his understanding that his old shoes, “footwear that he said was comfortable,” were “not comfortable” for him anymore.

And so, many of us will probably replace our shoes in this period. Others will make a new choice to wear the same old shoes, and they will be happy in those shoes… Each person will make his own choices, at his own pace.

I must admit, now that I am almost back to routine, that I am worried about a lot fewer “locked homes” greeting me (and maybe I am even actually grateful for a few of them). But I feel the need to raise awareness of this fear, this deep phenomenon that is a fundamental part of reality. All around us, there are so many people who, when they return home, will not find the same home or business or relationship or work plan that they left behind when they were called up to army reserve service (or when their partner was called up, and they had to devote themselves to getting by moment by moment). If only I could find a way to help all of them.

I do not really have a bottom line to this stream of thought. I am still in my own “moment of return” right now. I am still searching, and I have not yet found…

Maybe the bottom line is appreciating the good – that I am returning from service on a sovereign Jewish army base – and not from captivity in Serbia, like Fernheim was in the story… Maybe it is appreciating my high school literature teacher, who introduced me to this story. Maybe it is simply longing for simpler days, and for choices that I will be satisfied with in the future.