September 17, 2022
Author(s): Rabbi Wes Gardenswartz,
Parshat Ki Tavo
September 17, 2022 — 21 Elul 5782
Everything Worthwhile is Uphill
Temple Emanuel, Newton, MA
This summer Shira and I tried a new move. We started riding e-bikes. An e-bike is like a regular bike, with a seat, handlebars, two wheels, shifting gears. You pedal, and the bike moves. There is only one difference. The e in e-bike is for electricity. There are three settings, and you can give your bike a jolt of a little electricity, a moderate amount, or a whole lot of electricity when the going gets tough. All summer, I felt vaguely like this was not kosher. This was not authentic. A real cyclist would eschew an e-bike. I particularly felt this pang of inauthenticity while going uphill because the steeper the hill, the more electricity I summoned, with the result that it kind of felt like I was Lance Armstrong, climbing the steepest hills with ease, while all the while I knew it was the electricity, it was not me. It felt off, but I couldn’t place why it felt off—until this week.
This week I was listening to the Andy Stanley Leadership Podcast. Andy Stanley, as I have shared before, is in my view the greatest religious thinker and speaker in America today, and he speaks not only about sacred texts, but also about leadership. In the most recent episode he was interviewing a leadership guru named John Maxwell. John Maxwell has sold 30 million books on leadership.
Maxwell is 75 years old. He has been teaching leadership for decades. He said something simple that really stuck with me.
He often asks people: what is the greatest life lesson you have ever learned? Whenever he asks this question, people always answer by referring to a failure, to a set-back, to a hard time, to some adversity. The business I spent years building went bankrupt, and I learned… After many years of marriage, my spouse and I got a divorce, divorce was intensely painful, and I learned…People never answer his question by pointing to successes. They never say: my company ipo’d, I made a ton of money, and here are the seven bullet points you need to know for a successful life.
John Maxwell distills all this into a simple statement: Everything worthwhile is uphill.
Everything worthwhile is uphill. It is precisely the struggle, the wrestling, the working our way through the uphill hard parts, which is how we grow and how we get better. Pirkei Avot makes the same point using ancient Aramaic: lefum tza’arah agarah, according to the struggle is the reward. Or we would say the reward is commensurate to the struggle. Which is why any real cyclist on a real bike values the hills. Everything worthwhile is uphill. It is precisely the struggle to get up that hill that makes the ride valuable. Which is why the e-bike, that allows us to skirt the struggle also costs us the reward.
This teaching, that everything worthwhile is uphill, is not literally true, of course. We all love a simcha. We love an auf ruf. We love a wedding. We love a birth. We love an anniversary. All of those joyful occasions, all of those smakot, are devoutly worthwhile, and they are lovely, not uphill. No bike race is all uphill. No life can be lived all uphill. So it is not literally true. But this teaching reminds us that our struggles are to be savored. Our struggles have a redeeming purpose. Our struggles to make it up the hill can; lead to growth for us and for others.
A woman named Priya Parker relates that every other Friday afternoon, she would leave the home of her mother and stepfather to go 1.4 miles to the home of her father and stepmother. The home of her mother and stepfather was in her words “Indian, British, atheist, Buddhist, agnostic, vegetarian, new age-y and Democratic.” The home of her father and stepmother was “white, evangelical Christian, Conservative Republican, twice-a-week-church-going, meat-eating.” When she sneezed in her mother’s home, her mother said: bless you. When she sneezed in her father’s home, her father said: God bless you. There was an undeniable tension between these two homes.
That was peddling uphill. It must have been disorienting for Priya Parker to go from the home of bless you to the home of God bless you; from the home of vegans to the home of carnivores; from the home of liberal Democrats to the home of Conservative Republicans. How could she hold all that complexity, especially when they were her own parents?
Her struggle up that hill had a redeeming purpose. Her struggle up that hill inspired her to create her life work—a book called The Art of Gathering, in which she invites us to think about how we gather; and how to make our gatherings intentional, memorable and consequential. She urges the reader to use what she calls “creative heat,” the heat of difference, to create what she calls “beautiful electricity” in the room. This of course is easier to say than to do, and how to do it is the subject of her book.
Priya Parker mines meaning from her steep climb up the hill: a book that can teach all of us in our divided age how to create gatherings of meaning and uplift that bring people together.
What would it look like if we could pull a Priya Parker? If we made meaning from our steep climbs?
Not every climb has a happy ending. Not every climb leads to a best-seller. What happens when we are engaged in a worthwhile uphill climb that does not have a happy ending?
This week I listened to a dialogue between Marc Baker, the CEO of CJP, and Yehuda Kurtzer, president of the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America. It began with them talking about the condition of the Jewish world today. They both had lots of sparkling insights. But for me, at least, the evening reached its moment when Marc said to Yehuda: we’ve been working with you for many years in Boston. But we don’t know your story. Why do you do what you do? How did you come to devote your life to building Jewish community?
He said his father was in the foreign service. His father’s life project was working on the Israeli Palestinian conflict. His life project was working on the peace that has not yet come. But he never stopped trying. He never stopped climbing. He is still trying. He is still climbing.
His father’s example inspired him with this simple truth: we are defined by the worthiness, the difficulty, the challenge, the consequential quality, of our life projects. That inspired him to his own life project: the building and deepening of Jewish community, and of connections between American and Israeli Jewry. The work is never done. The climb is ever steep.
L’fum tzaarah agarah. According to the struggle is the reward. Sometimes our climb up the hill gives us the reward of a new idea, a new move, new impact, like Priya Parker’s bestseller which grew out of the pain of the two homes of her childhood. Other times our climb up the hill yields a different kind of meaning and satisfaction: that we are striving for something hard and worthy, not easily attainable, but commendable because we keep on keeping on. Noble lives require noble hills.
What noble hills are you climbing? Shabbat shalom.