Judaism and feng shui agree about your front door

Moses spends the whole book of Deuteronomy telling people things they already know.

He recounts the exodus to a crowd that walked out of Egypt. He gives the Ten Commandments a second time to a generation raised on the story of Sinai. Forty years of history, laws they have been living under for most of their lives, and in his final months he says all of it again, out loud, in order.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks noticed something that explains why. Deuteronomy is the book where love runs in both directions, between God and the people, for the first time. The root for love appears twenty-three times there, more than in any other book. And once love is mutual, the book fills up with instructions.

Sacks builds that essay around a line from the writer David Brooks. "My favorite definition of commitment is falling in love with something and then building a structure of behavior around it for the moment when love falters."

For the moment when love falters. Not for the wedding, for the Tuesday.

That is also one of the truest things I know about living in a house. Love for a home leaves quietly, at ten at night, in front of a sink stacked with the pasta pot and every plate from dinner, the water gone cold and grey around them, and no one coming to help.

This is what the rituals are for, to remind us to love.

This week's portion, Va'etchanan (Deuteronomy 3:23–7:11), is where Moses does exactly that. He builds his ritual structure out of very small things, and standing there saying it all again is one of them.

It's also where he gives the people the Shema. Six verses that open with a declaration of God's oneness, move into loving God with all your heart and all your soul and all your might, and reach as far as what you say to your children at bedtime. And at the end, the instruction to write those same words on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.

That instruction is the mezuzah. A small scroll of parchment, hand written, holding this very passage, fixed to the right side of the doorframe as you come in. The word itself means doorpost, so the object took its name from the place it hangs, and it has gone up on the doorframe of every observant Jewish home since.

People disagree about what the mezuzah actually does. One tradition treats it as protection, guarding the house and everyone inside it. Maimonides argued against that reading and said its work is remembrance, that each time you pass through you meet the words again and wake up a little. Another approach teaches that a person who is reminded to love God at every crossing of their doorway lives differently inside, and the house becomes safer because of what happens in it.

On the other side of the world, with no contact with any of this, feng shui reached its own conclusion about doorways.

As I'm always mentioning, the front door in feng shui is called the mouth of chi. The name is exactly what it sounds like. A house is fed through that opening the way a person is fed through their mouth, and the chi that comes in at the front door is what then distributes itself through every room and reaches everyone who lives there. That's why it gets an outsized share of attention in any consultation, far more than any room behind it. The quality of the chi entering at the threshold is the quality of the chi in the whole house.

Two old traditions, no contact between them, both deciding the doorway was where the reminder to love had to live. And both of them, separately, ended up sorting things by the same question: whether a fixed object does its work on its own, or only when someone brings intention to it.

The feng shui concept: 3 secrets reinforcement

Feng shui has rituals for almost everything. Moving into a home, clearing what the last people left behind, blessing a threshold, settling a house after an illness or an argument. In the BTB school these are sorted into two kinds, and the difference is the whole point of this week.

Some fixes are mundane. They work on their own physical logic, whether or not you are paying attention, whether or not you believe in any of it. A door that sticks and gets planed so it opens smoothly. A dark entry that gets a lamp. You could be thinking about nothing at all while you do it and the house would still be better afterward.

Others are transcendental, and they only work if the person doing them activates them with intention. The method is called the Three Secret Reinforcement, and it puts the body, the mouth and the mind to work together. Make the hand gesture called the ousting mudra. Say the six perfect syllables out loud, om ma ni pad me hum. Hold a clear picture in your mind of what you're asking for. Repeat all three together, nine times.

Touch two fingers and thumb, then flick outward, repeating 9 times

Nobody needs the Three Secrets to make dishes clean. Washing up is about as mundane as a fix gets, and the kitchen will be better in the morning whether I did it lovingly or did it furious.

Intention is the difference between one more thing on a list that never ends and something I do on purpose, for a house I have decided to love, on a night when I don't feel it. The sink is the same and the water is the same, and from the outside you could not tell the two nights apart. What changes is whether I am maintaining a house or keeping a promise to one.

If it sounds like I say this a lot, it's because I need reminding as much as anyone. I'm not naturally wired to jump for joy at a sink full of dishes at the end of the day.

This week's experiment

Pick one piece of house maintenance this week and do it every day on purpose. Something small enough that you can't argue yourself out of it. Clearing the entry floor of shoes and bags. Putting the house to bed at night, lights off, cushions straightened, surfaces cleared of things that don't belong there. The dishes, so you wake up to a clean kitchen.

Before you start, tell yourself what you're doing it for. One sentence, out loud, if you can manage it without feeling ridiculous. Something like "I'm doing this for my house," or "I'm doing this so I wake up to a better morning."

Then do it on the night you don't want to, which will probably be the fourth. That night is the experiment, everything before it was housework.