Gilad Shalit is home today, after five years and four months as a captive of Hamas. My initial reaction, as an Israeli, reflecting on these developments in Berlin, looking mostly at Israeli written press online: I think it is wonderful that Shalit’s mental and physical condition is good enough for him to be able to appreciate his return.

As for the “home” he will find, others have written about the Israeli society he left in contrast with the one to which he returns. I wish instead to comment on two significant symbolic questions: Was the “price” paid for his return justified? And, the more difficult question which requires the help of a philosopher to address: what is the nature and meaning of his homecoming?

The first issue concerning the “price” paid for the safe return of a soldier seems to me and to most of the Israeli public as a no- brainer: one has to save the life of a soldier sent in one’s name.  This issue has been covered in the German press I follow in Berlin, praising the commitment of the Israelis to their own people. However, the Israeli press’ apparent need to declare Hamas inhuman concerns me.

I am happy that Shalit is healthy, and recognize that the call in the Palestinian street today to capture other “Shalits” so that other prisoners will be released is obviously morally wrong. Yet, the parallel Israeli use of “price tag” to refer to the urge to hurt Palestinians, as well as the attacks upon what is conceived as the memory of left wing and secular Israel, specifically focused upon the Rabin Assassination, are no less morally wrong.

The attacks, about which Vered Vinitzky Seroussi has extensively written, seem to appear at moments of peaceful interaction and are deeply problematic. Last week, graffiti on the memorial site read: “free Yigal Amir” [Rabin’s assassin]. Perhaps the positive lesson from the discourse on “prices” is that it cannot be read in a vacuum: talking about costs involves agents, past and present, besides its seemingly benign metaphoric suggestion of the economy of life and death.

On the nature of the homecoming and its meaning: the first thing to note is the orchestrated take-over of Shalit by the state of Israel, which manifested itself, as was expected, in the swap of Shalit from the Hamas to the hands of the Egyptian state, and from Egypt to the Israeli state (the army was the first to greet him and dress him in uniform) and only then back to his family. It was significant that Shalit, the 25-year old captive soldier, wore his uniform and saluted Prime Minister Netanyahu, Security Minister Ehud Barak and the Chief of Staff upon his return, as he did. The Israeli collective partook in the state ceremony, in consuming the constant news reporting: flying flags and slogans greeting the returning soldier, and playing songs on radio, some were written for the occasion. Motti Neiger in a short Facebook status update suggested all this is proof that the Israeli media is used first and foremost for maintaining the cohesion of the Israeli collective. It was a classic media event in the sense of Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz. It made things expected, almost already rehearsed and habituated, like any other ritual, combining a memorial ceremony with holiday festivities.

But the return of specific young man, Gilad Shalit’s homecoming, his return to his family, reveals complexity and perhaps hope, beyond the meaning of the official ceremony.

In a short article published in March of 1945 in the American Journal of Sociology entitled “The Homecomer,” the phenomenologist Alfred Schutz wrote that the homecomer differs from the stranger in that he returns to a place that used to be his home, yet, it cannot be the home he left. Schutz reflected on returning veterans of WWII, but one cannot help but think of the relevance to his personal history, a German émigré scholar in America, who was forced to leave home in Europe for political and ethnic reasons and could never find the home he left behind.  Merging dimensions of time and space, Schutz writes: “home is a starting point as well as a terminus.”

Two year ago, Shalit’s father, Noam, took the Israeli flag off the roof of his house, demonstrating against what he saw as the lack of action to return his son. A few days ago, he was photographed flying the flag again, after the decision to return his son home in a swap for 1027 Palestinians accused in terrorist action and kept in Israeli jails. Shalit, the father, signified the key symbol of the starting point and terminus of home: the flag on the roof. More, we learned that its mere existence is not enough—it had to be removed and re-placed.

Life at home means intimacy and familiarity. Upon his return, PM Netanyahu greeted Shalit with a citation from an old, well known song: it is so good to have you back home.  To his parents he said: I returned the boy back home. This tension between the public homecoming (the song refers to a traveler returning home) and the homecoming of the child to his parents was no small part of the discussions of whether to “pay the price” for Shalit’s return. The other part, the national commitment to do everything to return prisoners home, played a large role in the public pressure to release Shalit, as it is one of the premises of obligatory conscription.

Yet about the young man, the homecomer himself: upon his release, Shalit told the Egyptian Press: “I am happy for the Palestinian prisoners to be released, hope that they won’t return to fight Israel. I hope that this deal will help advance peace.”

May the home he comes to find make his hope realizable.

Last week, Harold Garfinkel, one of the greatest sociologists of the second half of the 20th century, died. He was 93. Garfinkel, actually, would have scoffed at the idea of being called a sociologist. When he came of age, sociologists were too engaged in abstractions, in attempts to make sweeping generalizations. Though Garfinkel himself was the student of one of the greatest systematizers of them all, Talcott Parsons, he took a radically different stance.

Instead of allying himself with this way of doing sociology, Garfinkel turned to the New School, and the work of exiled philosopher Alfred Schutz, as a way out of grand abstractions. Instead of looking at society in the abstract, he slowly built up a language that would allow him to study what was going on in the here-and-now, the way people actually made sense of their world as they went along in the business of living. Instead of Society, with a capital “S,” he became immersed in the methods people use to make a situation what it is. In his apt, and often misunderstood, term, he became interested in ethnomethodology.

In the context of the 1960s, ethnomethodology became a banner for studying the actual way people navigate their lives. Intellectuals that were disillusioned with abstract sociology, people like Harvey Sacks, Emanuel Schegloff, Mel Pollner, and even the writer Carlos Castaneda, became allied with what was emerging as a movement on the West Coast of the USA, with its headquarters in UCLA, where Garfinkel did some of his most important work.

Though Garfinkel’s thought is rich and complex, and evolved throughout his life, there are a few themes that he stayed true to since his groundbreaking 1967 Studies in Ethnomethodology. One is how inherently fragile our world was, how much work went into sustaining it, work that was not natural, but could be always undone. In John Heritage’s terms, order was constructed in the making, like The Beatles’ “Yellow Brick Road.”  To show that, and to show how we constantly work to sustain our work, Garfinkel engaged in “Breaching Experiments,” unleashing his students on an unsuspecting world, wrecking interactional havoc. From simple assignments, such as asking them to haggle for prices at the supermarket, or blatantly disregard the rules of children’s game, he showed both how much work it took to sustain seeming order, and that this work was never-ending.

Thus, to be an ethnomethodologist, Garfinkel advised students to focus on actual action, to look at the minutiae of action in the making. To study how people played the piano, it wasn’t enough refer to “socialization” or “learning,” rather how people learned to put their fingers on the keyboard needed to be investigated. In order to study astrophysics, students needed to become immersed in the world astrophysicists created in their work. Almost in direct opposition to most sociology, he reiterated his disgust at abstraction, at the identification of abstract “social forces.”

But for all that, Harold Garfinkel had a profound influence on world sociology. The call to pay attention to actual action, to the ongoing production of order, is seen everywhere today—from the field of Conversation Analysis that attempts to perform an ethnomethodology of everyday conversations, to the study of organizations and the relationships between myths and practicalities of bureaucracy in the new institutionalism.  Anthony Giddens was inspired by Garfinkel in his stints at UCLA; Pierre Bourdieu read Garfinkel carefully, and the two had their own shouting match at the house of a mutual friend. Indeed ethnomethodology is so inscribed in sociology that it often becomes transparent, the greatest achievement a theory can have.

Garfinkel was active to the very end, re-organizing his life’s work, thinking of writing another book. It is a great loss that this book will not be written.