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Many people these days, especially people my age and younger, have become very good at interpreting difficulty as a prognosis.
Something becomes painful, and we assume the pain is trying to tell us something. Maybe this is not right for me. Maybe I chose incorrectly. Maybe the fact that this has become difficult means it was never supposed to be for me in the first place.
I see this mentality increasingly common in workplaces, in sports and other forms of competition, in how young Jews perceive Israel and Zionism, and in relationships.
There is certainly wisdom in recognizing when something is truly destructive, but I sometimes wonder whether we have become so obsessed with protecting ourselves from difficulty that we have forgotten how many of the right and worthwhile things are difficult too.
Growth is difficult. Forgiveness is difficult. Trust is difficult. Self-awareness is difficult. Making adjustments is difficult. Allowing another person to disappoint you without reducing them to their worst moment is difficult. Remaining open after you have been hurt is difficult. And perhaps most difficult of all is confronting the possibility that something we desperately want to blame on circumstances may actually require something from us.
This week’s Torah portion, Nitzavim-Vayelech, begins with an extraordinary word: Nitzavim. It is usually translated as “standing.” Moses tells the Jewish People: “You are standing today, all of you, before the Lord your God.” Before anything happens, they must stand.
There is something deeply Jewish about that.
When life becomes uncomfortable, our instinct is often movement. We want to do something immediately because action gives us the illusion that we are in control. We chase or withdraw, make declarations or close doors, fight or flee. We demand answers. We decide what everything means before we have even understood what happened.
This Torah portion begins differently: Stand where you are. Observe. Do not flinch.
And then Moses says: “The hidden things belong to the Lord our God, but the revealed things belong to us.”
I cannot think of many verses more necessary for an anxious human being.
There are things we do not know. We do not know exactly what another person is thinking. We do not know whether someone’s fear is permanent. We do not know what someone will understand six months from now that they cannot understand today. We do not know what would have happened had we chosen differently. We do not know whether silence means indifference, confusion, fear, pride, exhaustion, or something else entirely. We do not know the future.
Those are the hidden things.
The revealed things belong to us. How did I behave? Did fear make me impatient? Did I demand certainty before certainty was possible? Did I listen to what was actually being said, or only to what I was afraid was being said? Did I mistake another person’s weakness for a threat? Did I turn my own wounds into evidence against someone who did not create them?
Those questions belong to us.
Then Nitzavim gives us perhaps its central idea: “You shall return.”
The Hebrew word is teshuvah, which is sometimes translated as “repentance” — but the better translation is “return.”
This is one of Judaism’s most beautiful ideas because it assumes something modern culture increasingly struggles to believe: Human beings are not frozen in the worst version of themselves. We can return. We can see something differently. We can discover that what felt obvious to us in one emotional state looks completely different once fear subsides. We can learn. We can apologize. We can become more patient. We can recognize that we were protecting ourselves against an old wound while believing we were responding to a new one.
And, crucially, Judaism does not treat the existence of failure as proof that the endeavor itself was a mistake. The entire Jewish story would collapse under that logic. The Jewish People fail constantly. They rebel. They betray. They lose faith. God becomes angry with them. Moses becomes angry with them. There are consequences. And yet the covenant survives.
Why?
Because Judaism does not assume that a damaged relationship is necessarily a dead relationship. It builds an entire theology around return. Some things should end, but the mere fact that something has broken does not tell us that it cannot be repaired. Sometimes something broken is an ending; sometimes it is an invitation.
A few verses later comes one of the strangest lines in the Torah: “The Lord your God will circumcise your heart.”
The Torah imagines the heart as something that can become covered. I think about that often. Human beings rarely become hard for no reason. We become hard because softness once cost us something. We become suspicious because trust once frightened us. We become controlling because uncertainty once hurt us. We demand reassurance because someone once disappeared. We pull away because someone once came too close and made us feel vulnerable.
Then, eventually, the defenses become so familiar that we stop experiencing them as defenses. We call them personality, intuition, standards. We call them “knowing what I want” and “not settling.”
But sometimes fear is simply very good at dressing itself up as wisdom. The Torah’s image suggests that beneath all of that armor, the heart may still be intact. It does not necessarily need replacing; it needs uncovering.
And that is a much harder project than simply deciding that another person, another circumstance, another place, or another job will make everything easier. Wherever we go, we bring the uncovered (or covered) heart with us.
And then comes the line everybody knows: “I have placed before you life and death, blessing and curse. Choose life.”
We often treat “choose life” as a literal slogan, but the Torah is describing something more demanding: Choosing life means choosing to be optimistic, even cautiously.
Choosing life means resisting the temptation to turn disappointment into prophecy. It means refusing to say, “Because this hurt me in the past, it will always hurt me.” Or, “Because this failed, it cannot succeed differently.” Or, “Because someone disappointed me, they are incapable of becoming better.”
Pessimism often masquerades as wisdom because it protects us from being surprised again. If we expect less, hope less, trust less, and risk less, then perhaps we can suffer less. But that is not always wisdom. Sometimes it is simply fear that has learned how to sound reasonable.
The Torah’s command is not “choose certainty.” It is choose life.
Life is uncertain. Life asks us to plant before we know what will grow, to forgive before we know what another person will become, to try again before we have proof that this time will be different.
To choose life is therefore to leave some room for redemption — room for people to surprise us, room for you to surprise yourself, room for a painful chapter not to become the conclusion.
And then the Torah portion changes names. Nitzavim becomes Vayelech. Standing becomes going. I love that sequence. First stand, then go.
Stand first, understand, take responsibility, return, uncover the heart, choose life, and then move. Vayelech tells the Jewish People again and again: “Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid.”
What’s striking is that God does not say this because everything is about to become easy. He says it because everything is about to become difficult. Moses is leaving. The people are entering unknown territory. They will face enemies. They will fail again. They will be frightened again. Courage would be unnecessary if the path were obvious.
We often think a good decision should feel peaceful. The Torah does not seem to believe that. Sometimes the right road is terrifying precisely because something important is at stake. Fear is therefore not always a warning; sometimes fear is simply the price of caring.
Nitzavim-Vayelech tells us: Do not confuse suffering with hopelessness. Do not assume that because something became painful, it became wrong. Do not believe that because something became difficult, it is incapable of success.
Thank you so, so much for this insight. It gives me new energy to reach out again to people I have shut out because they have hurt me.🙏🏻
You don't have to be the best to be just a little better.