My neighbor used to say that she was going to have her house decorated by the Parks Department in Early Playground. Rubber matting would replace her much-abused carpeting, the wrought iron benches would be nailed down, and a fireman’s pole would make it much easier for her boys to slide downstairs.

This same woman is now scouting the stores for elegant chairs that will allow her to accommodate her children’s married friends and their families graciously.

Changes. Transitions. Growth. We furnish our homes to act as a backdrop to our lives, and as those lives become fuller and richer, our homes play new roles. They reflect the many different people we are and the many facets of our varied relationships.

It’s not just an adequate number of bedrooms for our kids, a functional kitchen, and some sort of living/dining area. It’s having room to put down a few extra mattresses for a child’s sleepover or Shabbaton, or an extra bed to put up relatives for the holidays. It’s thinking about adding a room for an aging parent, preferably on the ground floor. It’s keeping your house child-friendly even when your own kids are taller than you are, because many other children share your life — and soon there will be grandchildren.

It’s a kitchen with plenty of room for two sets of dishes and utensils — not to mention Passover — and meat and dairy clearly delineated so anyone can find a mug and a teaspoon. It’s putting in a microwave when your crew’s hectic schedule makes you feel like a short-order cook in a busy diner. It’s a freezer that can hold enough to allow your adolescent son and his friends to nuke their way to satiety when they’ve exhausted the contents of the refrigerator and the pantry.

It’s a dining room that’s big enough to hold the in-laws and the outlaws — the family that is related by blood, and the friends that are bonded to you by ties just as strong.

Lately we’ve noticed that when the whole family gets together for Pesach, the dining room table just isn’t big enough for all of us, even with two leaves added to it. So we drag a card table down from the attic and position it this way and that until it looks all right. We haul in the kitchen chairs plus additional old folding chairs (like my neighbor, I still haven’t gotten around to buying elegant ones), and then, somehow, we fit.

As I look around the Seder table and realize that we pulled it off, I think about the miracle of the Temple. Although the Jews stood packed together in the Beit HaMikdash, when they prostrated themselves, the miraculous happened and everyone had four cubits to himself. The spiritual function of the Temple superseded its physical boundaries, and everything was possible.

We are enjoined to create a sanctuary in our home. As the Torah says about the Tabernacle, “You shall make me a sanctuary, and I shall dwell among them” (Shemos 25:8). In establishing our home, we ask G-d to reside among us and to allow the spiritual nature of our dwelling to transcend its physical limitations. And just as it was in the Temple, when we define our home by the spiritual goals we seek rather than by physical walls, then all things are possible.

Chani Kurtz, a free-lance writer, lives in Brooklyn, NY.