Tight Rope School

If I ever opened a school for tightrope walkers, which I probably won't do in this gilgul, the first thing I'd do is get everyone up on the rope and have them fall.

Thirty times. Until they're comfortable falling. Until they know the net will catch them. Until they trust the net, and their body doesn't tense the second they get back on the rope.

I'd have them learn the skill of falling well. How to land with the right side of your body, so that the impact catches you and doesn't hurt you.

Because only once you've fallen and been caught can you get up and take the next step. Can you get creative with it. Can you turn it into a dance.

And then there's the line everybody knows. The whole world is a very narrow bridge, and the main thing is not to be afraid.

וְדַע, שֶׁהָאָדָם צָרִיךְ לַעֲבֹר עַל גֶּשֶׁר צַר מְאֹד מְאֹד, וְהַכְּלָל וְהָעִקָּר שֶׁלֹּא יִתְפַּחֵד כְּלָל

Know that a person has to cross a very, very narrow bridge, and the whole thing, the main thing, is not to frighten himself.

Narrow as it gets. Sounds like a tightrope to me.

I always thought not being afraid meant not being afraid that I'll fall.

But maybe it means not being afraid of the fall. The inevitable one. Cuz I can get back up. And that's just life.

A lot of us didn't get that developmentally. Nobody caught us enough times for our bodies to believe it. Which makes this whole season really uncomfortable. But what if the discomfort is built into the system on purpose? And we just need to learn to face the mess.

The seesaw and the table

A relationship can only happen when there's room for two people to be fully messy and real with each other. Otherwise it's narcissism on one side and self-erasure on the other.

Like a seesaw. One person's pain, one person's wants, one person's needs take up all the room, and the other person goes quiet and shrinks to make space for it.

I'm not talking about a healthy relationship where both partners can have needs, both take turns showing up for each other. Where there is appreciation and communication. I'm talking about a situation that is constantly and consistently one sided.

I'm not interested in that. Not the up and not the down.

Two people in a space together, honest with each other and honest with themselves, means disagreement. Different priorities pulling on the same resources. It's going to be uncomfortable. Messy. But it's not a seesaw. It's a table. A place where we can both sit down and work it out together.

Love is being willing to jump into that mess with someone you care about, without erasing them and without erasing yourself. True love endures mess.

What we've been calling yiras shamayim

In my office, when a couple tells me in the first ten minutes that they never fight, they usually say it like a credential. I've learned to hear it as a symptom.

Two people who have quietly agreed not to need anything from each other that the other might refuse. Parallel lives, perfect logistics, no friction because there's no contact. The fighting couple is exhausting. The parallel couple is further gone.

Secure attachment is not the absence of conflict. It's the presence of repair. A relationship that can hold rupture and come back, over and over, until the coming back is more believable than the rupture.

There are two ways to avoid needing that. Avoidant lowers the stakes so nothing can go wrong. Anxious requires perfection in order to feel connected: one wrong tone and the whole relationship is in question, so I monitor, I manage, I apologize before I'm asked.

Now hold that next to how a lot of us were taught to do these days.

Everything has to be right between me and Hashem, or we're not okay. One aveira and I'm out of the relationship until I fix it. So I grovel, I monitor, I make myself small.

That's not yiras shamayim. That's anxious attachment with a Yeshivish vocabulary.

And the other side is in the room too. The women who stopped davening because it got too painful to want something and not get it. That's avoidant. Both are protecting against the same thing.

He goes first

Here's what changed how I stand on Rosh Hashanah.

When Hashem wants atonement for having made the moon small, He doesn't just handle it Himself. He says:

הָבִיאוּ כַּפָּרָה עָלַי שֶׁמִּיעַטְתִּי אֶת הַיָּרֵחַ

Bring an atonement for Me, for I diminished the moon. He is the Boss of atonement. What does He want from me?

Rebbe Nachman says the reason the Day of Judgment sits on Rosh Chodesh is that otherwise we could never have lifted our faces. So He arranged to be asking on the same day we're asking.

כִּי אֵיךְ הָיִינוּ מְרִימִין פָּנֵינוּ לְבַקֵּשׁ כַּפָּרָה מֵאִתּוֹ יִתְבָּרַךְ

A judge who has never had to say sorry can't have real compassion. He understands what it costs, because He's bringing His own.

And then there's Rabbi Yishmael ben Elisha, who walks in to burn the ketores in the innermost place and hears: יִשְׁמָעֵאל בְּנִי, בָּרְכֵנִי. Yishmael My son, bless Me.

HaShem asks a human being for a bracha. And Rabbi Yishmael gives one, and Hashem nods.

Three sources, one shape. Bring My atonement. I'll ask on the same day you ask. Bless Me.

That is not a King who wants us on the floor. There is no king without a nation. He chose us as Yisrael, the ones who wrestle. He forgave us after the egel because we're a stiff-necked people, not despite it.

And look at what Moshe says when he's arguing for us after the egel. He has one shot at this. What he leads with is:

יֵלֶךְ נָא אֲדֹנָי בְּקִרְבֵּנוּ כִּי עַם קְשֵׁה עֹרֶף הוּא

Let my Lord go among us, because this is a stiff-necked people.

That's the argument? After what just happened?

Then look where he got the phrase. A chapter earlier Hashem says those same words, and says them as the reason to keep His distance.

כִּי לֹא אֶעֱלֶה בְּקִרְבְּךָ כִּי עַם קְשֵׁה עֹרֶף אַתָּה

I will not go up among you, because you are a stiff-necked people.

Same words. Same preposition. Opposite verdict. Moshe takes Hashem's own reason for staying away and hands it back as the reason to come close.

Because what is a stiff neck, really? It's the refusal to be moved. And yes, that is exactly what got us the calf. But it's also what keeps us in the room. We don't leave. We don't shrug and go find a god who's easier to be with. We are stubborn about this relationship. Stubborn enough to come back after a fall, and then after the next one.

The trait that broke it is the same trait that makes repair possible. Moshe isn't asking Hashem to overlook who we are. He's telling Him that who we are is the reason this can be fixed.

Two skills, not one

Rebbe Nachman says that whoever wants to walk the paths of teshuva needs two kinds of expertise.

בָּקִי בְּרָצוֹא, בָּקִי בְּשׁוֹב

Expert at running out, expert at coming back. And then he hangs it on a pasuk:

אִם אֶסַּק שָׁמַיִם שָׁם אָתָּה, וְאַצִּיעָה שְּׁאוֹל הִנֶּךָּ

If I climb to heaven, You're there. And if I make my bed in the pit, there You are too.

That's the rope and the net, named two hundred something years ago.

Most of us only ever trained the ratzo. We're excellent climbers. We know how to build a matzav, how to grow, how to get closer. Nobody taught us how to fall.

And the other pasuk he reads this way is אֲנִי לְדוֹדִי וְדוֹדִי לִי. Elul's own verse, the one the month is named from. It turns out to be the going-in-and-coming-back-out verse.

Vidui as unblending

The hardest part of these days for a lot of people is the endless vidui. Again and again, everything we did wrong.

אָשַׁמְנוּ. בָּגַדְנוּ. גָּזַלְנוּ. דִּבַּרְנוּ דֹּפִי.

What if naming them is actually an invitation to unblend?

Ashamnu. There were parts of me that led me into shame and away from my deepest self.

Bagadnu. There were parts whose choices betrayed what I'm actually about.

Gazalnu. There were parts that took time, energy and attention away from what mattered most, in my life or in someone else's.

Dibarnu dofi. There were parts that lost faith. In me, in other people, maybe in what I'm here to do.

As long as I'm completely blended with those parts, I can barely see them. They're simply me. And if they're simply me, there's no relationship to have with them and no possibility of choosing differently.

Vidui makes me name them. I can see what happened. I can take responsibility for what happened. And I can get curious about what those parts were trying to accomplish, what they were afraid of, what they believed was necessary.

That feels very different from shame. And it is exactly baki b'shov. Going down into the pit without drowning in it.

I don't need to be afraid of the mess! Just lean in. Put it all on the table. Talk it out. Have enough faith in the relationship to stay connected even though all that mess is right there in the open.

Somebody has to be there to do the crowning

Rav Kook has a piece called בקשת האני העצמי that opens with ואני בתוך הגולה. And I am in the exile. The I itself is in galus.

He says Adam's sin, which took place on the first Rosh Hashana, was that he became estranged from his own selfhood. He turned to the opinion of the snake and lost himself, and then couldn't give a clear answer to איכה, where are you, because he no longer knew his own soul.

And on his list of self-abandonment, right alongside Adam, is the moon. קטרגה הירח. She lost the turning of her own inwardness, the joy of her own portion, and started dreaming about somebody else's splendor.

Then comes the bombshell line:

וְכֵיוָן שֶׁאֵין אֲנִי, אֵין הוּא, וְקַל וָחֹמֶר שֶׁאֵין אַתָּה

Once there is no I, there is no He, and all the more so there is no You.

If I efface myself, there is nobody standing here to crown Him. Self-erasure does not produce a coronation. It cancels it.

So the answer to איכה is not "I never sinned." Adam hid. The answer is הנני. I'm here. I'm willing to be seen. I'm willing to see myself. I'm willing to come back into relationship.

He gets into the hut

Matan Torah is the sixth of Sivan. The next day Moshe goes up the mountain for forty days. Down below the people miscalculate when he's coming back, and by the seventeenth of Tammuz there's a calf. Moshe comes down, sees it, and breaks the luchos.

Then he goes back up. Forty more days, this time pleading. Rashi calls them the days of anger. They end on the twenty-ninth of Av.

On Rosh Chodesh Elul he goes up a third time, carrying the blank stones he carved himself. Forty more days. He comes down on the tenth of Tishrei with the second luchos and with סלחתי כדברך, and that day becomes Yom Kippur.

A hundred and twenty days on that mountain. Two of those three stretches only exist because we broke something.

And here is where the Gra picks up the count.

The eleventh of Tishrei, the day after Yom Kippur, Moshe gathers everyone and commands the work of the Mishkan. ויקהל משה. On the twelfth and thirteenth the people bring the nedava, בבקר בבקר, morning after morning. On the fourteenth each of the chachamim takes the gold from Moshe by count and by weight. On the fifteenth they begin to build.

And that is when the ananei hakavod come back.

They had left at the egel. They were gone for nearly three months while all of that was being worked out. And notice they don't return on Yom Kippur. Forgiveness came on Yom Kippur. The clouds waited until the fifteenth, until we actually picked up the tools.

Which means Sukkos doesn't sit in Nissan, when the clouds first appeared. It sits in Tishrei, on the day they returned.

We're not celebrating the clouds. We're celebrating the clouds coming back. The connection after the fall.

The Zohar says the Shechina spreads her wings over that little structure, and Avraham and the tzaddikim and David HaMelech set their dwelling together with us. Not visiting. Moving in.

And at the end of the week He asks us not to go yet.

בָּנַי, בְּבַקָּשָׁה מִכֶּם, עַכְּבוּ עִמִּי עוֹד יוֹם אֶחָד. קָשָׁה עָלַי פְּרֵדַתְכֶם.

My children, please, stay with me one more day. Parting from you is hard on me.

He doesn't crown Himself and disappear. He squeezes into a hut with walls that don't fully close and a roof you can see the sky through, and then tells us it's hard for Him when we leave.

And when that happens, my deepest desire and His desire for creation turn out to be the same desire. That's the coronation I actually want to be part of. Cuz in that one, my taking part is actually part of the party.