Before Shabbat

I just brought my big suitcase downstairs to start packing. For a long trip, I tend to start throwing items in as I think of them, a week or so before I travel, and then scale back the night before. It’s a ritual I love — but this time, standing over that open suitcase, I felt something I don’t usually feel: a low hum of anxiety beneath the excitement. Because we are going to Israel in 6 days.

This trip has been postponed and rescheduled a few times. The October 7th Massacre and the conflagration that ensued threw us off the tracks. It was deeply disappointing to pull the plug on our best-kept plans. More to the point, what led to the cancellation was so sad and so tragic. But the airlines weren’t flying, and the missiles were. We mourned the trip even as we mourned so much more.

As the crisis in Gaza mitigated, we decided to regather our travel group and try again. There were eager travelers still waiting in the wings. Now we have 35 people flying off 6 days from tonight. As we began planning this trip, I thought it was brave and funny, in that Jewish-humor way, to name our juggernaut The Hell or High Water Israel Tour. Little did I know that current events on the eve of our trip would require waders…

There is no clarity from Washington or Jerusalem about what comes next. The administration has not explained what it wants, what it will accept, or what it is prepared to do. Is the goal regime change? Nuclear disarmament? Getting rid of Iran’s ballistic missiles? Some diplomatic breakthrough no one has yet articulated? No one knows. Least of all the forty Hell or High Water travelers from Temple Beth Avodah, who are watching the news with focused dread.

Here is the truth of it: most of us in this country live at a comfortable remove from the world’s violence. We grieve Ukraine. We agonize over Sudan. These are real moral wounds. But they do not, most days, touch us directly. We live in what I’ve come to think of as a blessed and insulating bubble — protected by geography, by privilege, by sheer distance from the fire.

That bubble does not travel to the Middle East.

And so here I am, folding shirts and sorting socks, doing the ordinary things one does before a journey — as if everything were ordinary. Only it isn’t. My hands move through the motions of normal life while my mind tracks flight paths, geopolitics, and the unpredictable calculations of men not known for restraint. I am, I’ll admit it, a little dizzy. The world is brewing something enormous, and this time, I will be standing close enough to feel the heat.

And yet.

Our trip will offer what no news cycle can: the chance to stand inside the story, not just read about it. To walk the land. To hear the people. To touch what is ancient and find it startlingly alive. To sit with a bus full of seekers — first-timers and veterans alike — and feel the strange, irreducible weight of belonging to this people and this place. I have made this journey more than a dozen times. It never stops being extraordinary.

As Hillel put it with characteristic impatience: If not now, when? Not next year. Not when conditions are perfect, because conditions are never perfect. The only scenario in which we do not board that plane — God forbid — is if El Al stops flying. That’s it. Short of that, unless Robert Kraft is feeling unusually generous (anyone have his number?), the HHW team is wheels-up in six days.

I will keep praying that cooler heads — somewhere, somehow — prevail. That the men with their fingers near the triggers pause long enough to imagine what comes after. I can’t control any of it. What I can do is close my eyes and picture the stars blazing over Mitzpeh Ramon, the strange, heavy silence of the Dead Sea, the smell of falafel on Ben Yehuda Street, and the feeling — enormous and quiet at once — of being exactly where history placed you.

Kadima. Forward.

Like many Americans, I’ve been tuning in to watch the Olympics. There are several reasons I am motivated to do this. The most honorable of them is to appreciate the spectacle of it all. I’ve never been on ice skates – ever. I’ve gone skiing twice. The first time was cross-country skiing in the Sierra Nevada with my newly married spouse, who is, by the way, an extraordinary skier, the kind that causes people to stop and watch as she comes down the mountain. Liza was sprinting up the hills minutes after we got fitted with the boots and skis. And I… well, it was just so embarrassing. I could not figure out how to coordinate movement on two sticks. I spent more time on my butt than upright. And while it didn’t end our marriage (still here after 45 years…), it was a rather rocky acknowledgement of my gross motor skills as opposed to her graceful, enthusiastic embrace of the sport. The other ski experience is not even worth talking about, except to say it was the final nail in the coffin of my skiing ambition.

It’s also true that I’ve never curled, been in a bobsled, or on a snowboard. So I watch the athletes with child-like admiration. I don’t know how they do what they do, stunts in the middle of the air in a snowstorm, turning upside down and back around without dying. The slaloms, people travelling on those 2 fiberboard skis at 80 miles an hour? In flimsy outfits and helmets and no body armor? I cannot even vaguely imagine being in one of those skating pairs, speeding around the ice, twirling and jumping and gliding, small women tossed into the air and caught with grace. The curling? I watched for about 25 minutes without understanding the sport, the broom, or the stones. It was like watching a cricket match: incomprehensible. It’s all incomprehensible to me. They all live with a precision I do not possess in anything I do anywhere.

Another reason I watch, and this may be revealing a character flaw, is anticipating the agony of defeat, always included as a likelihood in the Wide World of Sports telecasts. I don’t wish for accidents and miscalculations to happen. But inevitably, they do. I have no experience akin to what a gold medal winner feels. To win anything due to physical prowess is just not in my wheelhouse. But when someone falls or slips or miscalculates or freezes or just gets it wrong – that I can feel. Not the physical pain or the sudden loss of endorsements and Wheaties boxes, but rather the shame and the crushing truth of that moment: there’s no rewind, no award for trying hard.

I think about the vast majority of Olympic athletes who win nothing, who aren’t fast enough, big enough, small enough, talented enough… They spend endless hours practicing, not to mention endless dollars: Estimates suggest that raising an Olympic-caliber skier from youth through the Games can cost families $500,000 to over $1 million across a career. Some estimate the annual cost for a competitive teenage racer at $50,000–$100,000. And then, they win nothing. I can’t imagine what it feels like on the winners’ platform. But I do resonate with the folks who are packing up, being thankful for the experience, and then moving on: to coaching, teaching, working in AI, on a car lot, or back to school.

Sure, some Olympians come back to try again, and sometimes they make it and rise to the top. And sometimes it’s a quixotic gesture, doomed to fail due to age, anxiety, malfunction, or any number of reasons. As Paul Simon once sang, “How many nights do you think that you can do what you’ve been doing? Who do you think you’re fooling?”

Alan Kildow watched his daughter Lindsey Vonn mount a comeback. He watched her crash 13 seconds out of the gate. When interviewed after the debacle, he said, “She’s 41 years old, and this is the end of her career.” I understood his definitive fatherly perspective. She may or may not have learned much in that terrible fall – but he did, and he said it with the intensity every parent feels when they realize how seriously they misjudged the moment. It’s not always about getting up and trying to do the same thing again. It’s about getting up and asking, what’s next. What do I do now?

Life hurts. We fall and then, God willing, we get up again. That’s called being human. Living with loss. Hopefully, we learn a lesson in the process of getting up again. About humility and limits and what motivates us. About what counts.

Walking through Newton Center days after the big storm, I noticed a man shoveling his sidewalk. Why now, I wondered, days after everyone else had cleared their walks? I almost crossed the street to ask, but caught myself. Maybe he’d been away. Maybe sick. Maybe it wasn’t even his property. Or maybe – like most of us – he’d simply been putting it off. 

We’ve all been that person, staring at what needs doing and… not doing it. Not because we’re bad people, but because we just can’t seem to get it together. We stall out. 

Here’s what makes this struggle so universal: our brains evolved to prioritize immediate threats and rewards because that’s what kept us alive. But modern life demands something unnatural – the ability to consistently choose distant, abstract future benefits over present comfort. The relentless planning, deadlines, and delayed gratification that define our days? These are relatively recent demands on the human psyche. Research suggests that 80-95% of us struggle with procrastination. We’re not broken. We’re human. 

When we face a task, we don’t just assess the work itself – we experience emotions about it. Anxiety: “What if I fail?” Boredom: “This is so tedious.” Resentment: “Why should I have to do this?” Insecurity: “I don’t even know how to start.” Procrastination, researchers now understand, is primarily an emotion regulation problem. We delay not to avoid the task, but to escape the uncomfortable feelings the task triggers. 

This creates a vicious cycle. Avoiding the task provides immediate relief, which reinforces the behavior. But avoidance breeds new negative emotions – guilt, shame, mounting anxiety. These make the task even more difficult when we finally face it, which makes us more likely to procrastinate again. 

Every morning, I wake up telling myself: “Treadmill time!” And then I immediately… check my phone for messages. Minutes pass. I glance at the clock: “Hmmm, probably don’t have time now before work.” So I skip it, knowing full well I’d have a better day if I did thirty minutes on the treadmill followed by fifteen minutes of meditation. Sometimes I bypass the phone entirely and just do it. Sometimes I give in to feeling good now and guilty later. 

Our tradition has language for this struggle: yetzer tov and yetzer hara – not simply “good inclination” versus “evil inclination,” but the ongoing tension between immediate gratification and intentional living. The rabbis understood that this isn’t about moral superiority. It’s about being human. 

Judaism begins with the assumption that we are flawed. We avoid difficult tasks. We duck confrontation. We choose the easier path. This isn’t wickedness – it’s the predictable way we try to manage uncomfortable emotions. The tradition doesn’t demand perfection; it asks for awareness and return. 

But here’s what matters: excessive self-judgment only makes procrastination worse. The shame we pile on ourselves becomes yet another uncomfortable emotion to avoid, deepening the cycle. The wisdom tradition suggests something different – not harsh self-punishment, but patient self-awareness. Not “How could I be so lazy?” but “What am I feeling? What am I avoiding?” 

At a certain point, the yetzer tov breaks through – not through willpower alone, but through recognizing that continued avoidance will only compound our suffering. The voice that says: this won’t get easier by waiting. The feelings won’t improve on their own. Start small. Start now. 

rebhayim