515 Disappointments

How do you keep going?

Moshe prayed 515 times to enter into the land of Israel. The answer was no, each time.

This is difficult. A person devotes real time conceiving and constructing the ideal situation in which they could do their work in the world. They use their own sensibilities, aligned with the values they have absorbed from genuine, real, solid sources of wisdom and guidance like the Torah, and then they do what must be done to set themselves up to do the work they think they should do. They use all the right tools - they communicate well, they ask nicely, they consider all angles, they use the proper Venn Diagrams and then they try to make it happen. And then it doesn’t happen. What then?

A person could spend the rest of their days in disappointment. A person could implode on themselves, convinced that they are not worthy, that they are not good enough and don’t deserve it and all that. A person could question the efficacy of prayer - 515 times and it didn’t work! A person could certainly resent the God Who makes it so, deciding in their heart of hearts that this God does not love us and wants us to suffer.

Or - and this is very difficult to do, and is certainly easy to “think-agree” but hard to implement on the level of emotion and action - that the loving God wants me in this place and not that, at least for now. It must be that my service is here. I thought it was there, in that situation I tried to construct, but it turns out that there is work to do here, in this annoying, second-rate, non-ideal, mucky messy situation. It turns out that my work is not what I thought it ought to be.

The writings indicate that if Moshe had entered the land, it would have brought about the final conclusion. He would have built the One Temple that would Never Be Destroyed. It turns out God didn’t want that. It turns out that God wanted - this? This difficult, messy exile world where so many Jews don’t know which way is up, where we cannot seem to find safe haven, where division roils us, where prayer often feels like a slog, where the words and sentiments don’t make sense anymore, where people would rather be on their phones than listen to the words of the Living God, where fasting is accomplished but feels somehow pointless or at least directionless - it turns out that God wants us to do work here, at least for now.

But don’t let go of your vision! Moshe didn’t just concede. He prayed and prayed and prayed, 515 times. His longing remained intact even as his acceptance kicked in. He held both, which is the most heartbreaking choice among all of them. It’s so much easier to spend your life disappointed that you couldn’t get the life you wanted. It’s so much easier to give up on your vision and enter the slog. The most challenging of all the approaches is to be in the slog but not of it, to hold the line between dream and acceptance, between reality and possibility, between out and in. This is our task.