THE LONG WAY HOME

There is a particular kind of story that never grows old. It is retold in every generation, in every language, and through every medium—because, beneath the costumes and scenery, it is a story about all of us.

I have been thinking about this over the past few weeks, because it’s become impossible to scroll through a feed without encountering the oldest homecoming story in Western literature: Homer’s Odyssey.

Christopher Nolan’s lavish new cinematic retelling has captured the public imagination and, whatever one makes of the movie, it is a spectacular piece of filmmaking—audaciously conceived, beautifully made, and performed with tremendous power.

What interests me, though, is not the spectacle, but that a story almost three thousand years old has once again seized the cultural imagination. It clearly touches something permanent in the human heart.

On the surface, the premise of the Odyssey could hardly be simpler. Odysseus, a battle-weary soldier, survives the long and terrible war against Troy and wants to go home. There is no treasure to find, no new kingdom to conquer, and no power to seize.

Odysseus wants nothing more than to return to the rocky island of Ithaca—to his wife and son, his own bed, and his own people. And yet it takes him ten years to get there, and the journey nearly kills him a hundred times over.

But what has struck me most, as I watch this ancient story capture an audience all over again, is the sheer pull of home. It is as though Odysseus has a homing device buried deep in his chest—an internal compass that will not let him rest.

Storms wreck his ships. A one-eyed monster devours his men. An enchantress holds him captive for a year – and a goddess for seven. He is even offered immortality, if only he will agree to stop wanting to go home. And yet he refuses. He would rather be a mortal man growing old on his own poor island than a deathless god anywhere else.

But for all the drama and danger of his endless journey, the detail that best explains the story’s incredible endurance is this: the hardest part of Odysseus’s journey is not the journey. It is the arrival.

Because when Odysseus finally sets foot on the shore of Ithaca—the moment he has bled and wept and lost every companion to reach—home is not waiting like ripe fruit hanging low on a branch.

His house has been overrun by more than a hundred arrogant suitors: men who have moved into his palace, eaten his food, courted his wife, and plotted to murder his son. The kingdom is his by right, but utterly beyond his grasp.

Athena warns him not to charge through the front door and announce his return. Arrival and triumph are not the same thing, she tells him. He has come all this way, but now comes the hardest part. Now he must be patient. Now he must think. Now he must be shrewd.

And so, the great warrior disguises himself as a penniless beggar and walks unrecognized through his own home, absorbing insult after insult until the moment is right and his homecoming can be won. The prize was never the destination. The prize was surviving the arrival.

I don’t think there has ever been a people more thoroughly acquainted with the long way home than the Jewish people, nor a leader who understood the danger of arrival better than Moses. In Parshat Eikev, the Israelites are encamped on the eastern bank of the Jordan, close enough to see the Promised Land across the water.

This is the homecoming that has shaped their every hope since leaving Egypt—the land sworn to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; the destination toward which they have been drawn like a needle to a magnet.

And it has cost them everything. Forty years in a trackless wilderness. An entire generation that left Egypt but would not live to enter the Promised Land. Hunger, thirst, serpents, plague, war, rebellion, and the slow, grinding erosion of four decades of wandering.

They, too, had a homing device buried deep within them, pulling them across the desert. And now, finally, they are almost there. You would forgive them for thinking the hard part was behind them—for imagining the land as ripe fruit on a low branch, waiting to be picked.

But Moses knows better. Like Athena on the shore of Ithaca, he warns the returning people not to rush in. God, Moses tells them, “will clear away these nations before you—מְעַט מְעָט—little by little; you will not be able to finish them off quickly” (Deut. 7:22).

At the climax of a forty-year journey, Moses does not promise instant victory. He tells them it will happen little by little. Slowly. Incrementally. The homecoming is not the end of a journey; if anything, it is the beginning of a new one. You have not come all this way merely to pluck ripe fruit. You have come to begin the real work.

The Torah explains why the conquest must unfold slowly: otherwise, “the wild beasts would multiply against you.” A land seized too quickly may prove impossible to hold. The gradual path is not weakness; it is the only one that endures.

But Moses also warns of a subtler danger. Once settled and prosperous, the Israelites may say, “My own power and the might of my own hand have won me this wealth” (Deut. 8:17). In the wilderness, they knew they were vulnerable. At home, they might imagine they had succeeded on their own—and lose the very thing they crossed the desert to find.

And none of this is just ancient history: because the Jewish people are still on the same journey. After the destruction of the Second Temple, we began an odyssey that makes Odysseus’s ten years—and even the Israelites’ forty—look like a weekend excursion.

For nearly two thousand years, we wandered through expulsions and inquisitions, ghettos and pogroms, scattered across every continent and shore. Through it all, the same homing instinct kept beating in the national heart: Next year in Jerusalem. We were the people who would not accept immortality on someone else’s island. We refused to stop wanting to go home.

And then, astonishingly, we arrived. We set foot once again on the shore of the land sworn to our forefathers. The impossible homecoming became real. But Eikev—and Odysseus on the shore of Ithaca—teach the same lesson: setting foot on the shore is not the same as being home. The prize was not hanging like ripe fruit on a low branch, waiting to be picked.

We arrived in Israel to find the house full of “suitors”—those who insist that what is ours by covenant and by right is theirs to contest, deny, or seize. The struggle did not end at the water’s edge; in some ways, it began there.

And Moses’ warning remains urgent: in moments of comfort and strength, we may be tempted to say, “My own might won me this,” and forget both the long road that brought us home, and the God who carried us along it.

Eikev demands of us what Athena demanded of Odysseus at Ithaca, and what Moses demanded of the Israelites at the Jordan: never charge through the front door assuming victory is already won. Do not confuse arrival with homecoming.

That is the secret of the Odyssey. It is the secret of Eikev. And it is, I suspect, the real secret of Jewish history. The long way home does not end when you arrive. That is when the real work begins.