Vayelech: Have fun falling
Moses, in these last few chapters of the Torah, in the last few hours of his life, has three major messages for us.
1.You can do it…
First, our intimate relationship with the Divine, and our ability to live holy lives, are within our capacity to feel and to do. We are qualified for the job, we have been hired, and it is our task, now, to show up and live into who we are meant to be. Moses says:
6 Be strong and courageous! Neither fear, nor be dismayed of them, for the Unnamable, your God, it is the One Who goes with you. It will neither fail you, nor forsake you. "
Devarim: 31:6
You can do it, he tells us, you will be taken care of and supported. You are not alone.
2. And you will fail…
And yet, lest we feel overly confident, in this week’s parsha (Torah portion) we also get a bitter dose of reality about where we are headed as a people:
16 And the One said to Moses: Behold, you are [about to] lie with your forefathers, and this nation will rise up and stray after the deities of the nations of the land, into which they are coming. And they will forsake Me and violate My covenant which I made with them.
20 When I bring them to the land which I have sworn to their forefathers [to give them], a land flowing with milk and honey, they will eat and be satisfied, and live on the fat [of the land]. Then, they will turn to other deities and
serve them, provoking Me and violating My covenant
Chapter 31: (16,20)
So perhaps we have the capacity to be who we are meant to be, but (God tells Moses and Moses tells us) we will fail at it. We will get distracted and rebellious and lose our way. It is inevitable. God says, “For I know their inclination what they [are planning] to do today, [even] before I bring them in to the land which I have sworn [to give them]." (Ch. 31:21)
It seems so depressing. What is the point of crossing into the Promised Land if we are going to fail anyway? Why does God care about us if we are going to bungle the relationship again and again?
I think Moses is asking us to conceptualize failure in a different way. Rather than understand failure as a disappointing end to a journey, Moses is asking us to see failure as a necessary stop on the path of growth and transformation.
Kim Stafford writes about this type of failure in a vignette about his daughter. He says that one day, he brought his daughter to a public fountain on a hot day and let her walk along its narrow edge. Just as she rounds a corner, she slips and falls in.
But a mother near her grabbed her, and hoisted her out, and she came panting to me across the hot pavement. Her dress left a trail of wet, her hair streamed down, and her face was bright. She stood stubby tall before me. “When I was falling dad, I heard my little voice. But it didn't say ‘Be afraid’ – it said, ‘Have fun falling.’” Her eyebrows went up, and her mouth clamped into a line of conviction. When I live my life now, when I write, when I enter a hard time, in an uncertain way, I want my little voice saying, “Have fun falling.” Have fun tumbling into the changes that reign and root and every pair of wings has to carry out – a secret the wind and lightning and sorrow, and love keep making plain. By falling you find the bottom, and without that, no joy.
The major impediment to us taking risks in life is the “little voice” that tells us to “be afraid,” rather than to “have fun falling.” Moses says “do not be afraid” ( וּאריתּלאַ ) three times in this short parsha. He knows fear is our natural response to change, to the death of our leader and to moving forward into unknown territory He knows we will need ample courage to go forth. Perhaps by having us stare our inevitable failure in the face so that we can come to terms with it and make peace with it, he is trying to ease the overwhelming fear of setting out on the journey in the first place.
Peter Bregman, in an article for the Harvard Business Review uses the metaphor of surfing when describing what it might be like to accept failure as a main feature of living a full life. He writes of the different surfers:
What really struck me though, was what they had in common. No matter how good, how experienced, how graceful they were on the wave, every surfer ended their ride in precisely the same way: By falling. Some had fun with their fall, while others tried desperately to avoid it. And not all falls were failures some fell into the water only when their wave fizzled and their ride ended… the only difference between a failure and a fizzle was the element of surprise. In all cases, the surfer ends up in the water There’s no other possible way to wrap up a ride.
Bregman argues that our fear of failure is really a fear of the unpleasant feelings that surround the failure – the stories we attach to ourselves (I am a loser, I am unworthy), the feeling of not getting what we wanted, the shame of being vulnerable and exposed. The catch in trying to avoid these feelings, however, is that the fear doesn’t really protect us from them. As Bregman says, “it simply subjects us to them for an agonizingly long time.” The only way to conquer failure, he writes, is to fail, and to realize that it did not kill you. As we become increasingly familiar and intimate with the feelings on the other side of risk and failure, it becomes much more possible to “have fun falling.”
Moses’s prophecy, after all, does not end with our failure. It is there, it is real and painful, but it is not the end of the story. Moses’s third message to us is:
3. We can always come home.
God tells Moses that we will turn away from holiness and lose our way, but that something essential from our intimacy with God and life will linger.
21 And it will be, when they will encounter many evils and troubles, this song will bear witness against them, for it will not be forgotten from the mouth of their offspring.
- Chapter 31:21
Rashi argues that this line is a ray of light in the otherwise dark prophecy. He writes: “This is a promise to Israel that the Torah will never be entirely forgotten by their offspring.” (Shab. 138b). In the darkest of times, when we are far away from happiness, joy or connection, God and Moses tells us that there is an ancient melody, buried in our bones, our mouths, and our hearts. This song bears witness to who we really are. No matter how many times we fail, the future iterations of us (our “offspring”) will remember. We can always dig deep to hear that melody. We can always come home.
This is the message for this time of year, and perhaps one of the central themes of the entire Torah. We have a connection with God and the universe, and at some
point, we become afraid or distracted and wander away. We forget. We fail. We suffer. And then hopefully, at some point, we return. We wake up and remember who we really are and try again. In this cycle, we learn more about our original connection. Our bond is strengthened, and our love is deepened. We cannot skip any of the steps. We can only try and see where we are in the journey.
The Institute for Jewish Spirituality’s mission is to develop and teach Jewish spiritual practices so that individuals and communities may experience greater awareness, purpose, and interconnection.
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