By Rabbi Eva R. Cohen
Approaching Rosh Hashanah’s “great door,”¹ a portal into a new year of new seasons, I’m excited to share that Jack, Freyja, and I passed through another “great door” this summer. We’ve become homeowners! After working toward this goal for many years, it’s wonderful to be living in a beautiful, updated home that we love in the Cooper neighborhood of Minneapolis. We’re close to the river, conveniently near to Lake Street (but removed enough to minimize traffic noise), and smack-dab in the middle of the Twin Cities. This is a great home base for a rabbi whose congregation holds events in rented locations across the metro area. (Or Emet does not have an edifice complex, Madrikh Harold Londer, z”l, used to joke.) The Adult B Mitzvah Program has already met at our new house, and I’m excited to host future Or Emet gatherings here.
Along with feeling gratitude for these blessings, I’ve been thinking about homeownership from a variety of angles. Affordability is one angle: while the median age of first-time U.S. homebuyers was 28 in 1991, by 2025 that age had climbed to 40, pushed by rising costs of living and “lack of affordable housing inventory.” As a first-time homebuyer at 39, I’m not “behind”—I’m right on schedule. Communal responsibility is a related angle: while it’s exhilarating to no longer share a quirky duplex with an upstairs landlord, this is a time to recommit myself to the shared work of making housing affordable, safe, clean, and functional for renters, unhoused people, and everyone in the Twin Cities across the income spectrum. Not only is this right, but it’s also an investment in my family’s future security if our luck were to turn. There’s a Talmudic story about a man who throws stones from his property into the public domain, later stumbling over these same stones when a reversal of fortune leaves him with nowhere to occupy except the public domain. (BT Bava Kama 50b:2-3) What’s privately owned is ours for a little while; the public domain is our common property forever. In that vein, I’ve been thinking about all the stuff that I, like most Americans, own. Managing the objects that fill our homes is a private activity (and part-time job in some life stages!) with broad public entanglements and impacts. Stay tuned for more on this topic in my Rosh Hashanah sermon (working title: “What Are We Going to Do with All the Stuff?”).
Or Emet members have cheered me on through many life transitions—rabbinical school, new parenthood, ordination and installation, and now homeownership. Thank you for your ongoing support, and I feel privileged to share my joy and reflections on this new chapter with you.
Join Or Emet for the High Holidays¹ Marge Piercy, “Coming Up on September,” in The Art of Blessing the Day: Poems with a Jewish Theme (Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), 171.