September 23, 2025
Author(s): Rabbi Wes Gardenswartz,
Rosh Hashanah, Day One
Flipping Hard Into Beautiful
September 23, 2025 – 1 Tishri 5786
Temple Emanuel, Newton, MA
An older gentlemen needed surgery for a rare medical challenge. Turns out that the best surgeon in town was his own son. As the father was about to go under, he asked to speak to his son. Yes, Dad, what is it? Son, do not be nervous. Do your best. I trust you. Just remember one thing. If it does not go well, if something happens to me on the operating table, your mother will live with you and your wife for the rest of her life.
How do we navigate hard times? We all know that we are living in hard times. Is there some way to turn hard times into beautiful outcomes—in fact beautiful outcomes that only happen as a result of how we navigated those hard times?
I want to share with you three stories of people who did just this. They encountered a hard time, and they flipped it into something beautiful. These stories are concentric circles. The first concentric circle is about a person’s journey of faith. It is an internal story, concerning only him. The second concentric circle takes place within a family—a father and son who reconcile after a lifetime of distance. The third concentric circle encompasses the world, a person who is inspired by his own health challenges to bring healing in the most unexpected time and place.
Let’s start with the first concentric circle, the faith journey of one human being. Many of us have encountered Pirkei Avot, a rabbinic work which teaches us how to live a meaningful life. The very last teaching is striking both for what is says, and for who says it. A last teaching is what the reader is left with. A last teaching is the last word. The last teaching of Pirkei Avot is offered by a sage with a very odd name, Ben Hay-Hay, who taught: Lefum tza’arah agarah, the reward is proportionate to the suffering. In other words: do hard things, and good things follow.
Who is Ben Hay-Hay? This is his only moment in rabbinic literature. We never heard from him before. We never hear from him again. What kind of a name is Ben Hay-Hay anyway?
I did some sophisticated research. I asked chatgpt, hay, who is Ben Hay-Hay. The answer is that he was a convert to Judaism who lived in the land of Israel during the first century before the destruction of the Temple when Rome was prohibiting Jewish practice. Ben Hay-Hay is a pseudonym. Ben means he is the son of. And the Hay-Hay is a call out to Abraham and Sarah. Avram got the Hebrew letter Hay and became Avraham. Sarai got the Hebrew letter Hay and became Sarah. Jews by choice are known as the son or daughter of Abraham and Sarah. Meaning that Ben Hay-Hay is a Jew by choice.
The climactic teaching of Ben Hay-Hay reflects his personal story. He risked his life by becoming a Jew during the Roman occupation. But doing so allowed him to live a life of the deepest meaning. His story is so important that he gets the final word in Pirkei Avot. Doing hard things, in a hard time, can lead to a beautiful outcome.
What is something hard that you can do, that concerns you, that can lead to a beautiful outcome?
The second story, the second concentric circle, is an inner family drama about the complexity of a father and son relationship, Jay and Daniel Mendelsohn who were so close, and yet so far away. Jay was a mathematician and scientist whose favorite word was “rigorous.” He believed truth comes from quantitative analysis. He distrusted emotion. He distrusted displays of affection. He never said “I love you.” He was skeptical of literature, which he felt lacked rigor.
For his part, Daniel did not connect with math and science. He was drawn to literature. Daniel got a PhD in classics which he teaches at Bard College in New York.
Father and son just did not fully get one another. The father was 81. The son was 51. And that is where things stood for the duration of their relationship.
Then they each chose to do something hard to make it better. Daniel was teaching a freshman seminar on Homer’s classic, The Odyssey. His father wanted to take the class. From Long Island, where the father lived, to Bard, where the son taught, was a two-hour drive each way. At the age of 81, the father made that trip every week, from January through May. After class, the two would go out for dinner, the father would sleep on a single bed that he had made for Daniel 50 years earlier, which Daniel had slept on throughout his childhood. All those years later, the father would sleep in that bed when spending the night with his son. The next morning the father would drive or take the train back home. Hard at any age, especially hard at 81. Hard in any season, especially amidst east coast winter weather.
And hard for the son, because the father, who had promised just to sit quietly and listen, did not sit quietly and listen. Daniel writes about the experience in his book called An Odyssey. He shares how his father would sit in the back of the classroom, his hand always up, constantly complaining, interjecting, and undermining his son’s teaching When the class was over, father and son took a cruise retracing Odysseus’s journey. The sites they had read about, talked about, argued about, they now saw in person.
In the course of their many conversations, Jay did something he had never done before: share vulnerability. He had harbored regrets, personal and professional, which he had never before revealed. Daniel had had no idea. Sharing those regrets resulted in a softening on both sides. Sharing his vulnerability liberated the father in a certain way. On the cruise, at the end of a travel day, he would regale fellow travelers with amusing stories that Daniel had never heard before. This light and relaxed father was a total contrast to the rigorous mathematician father Daniel had grown up with. Father and son were at last, and for the first time, really clicking.
And then, shortly after the cruise, the father died.
But as a result of the hard work that they had done in the final year of the father’s life, they came to a deeper understanding and love of one another. Jay could die in peace, and Daniel could live in peace, knowing they had put in the hard work to heal. Doing hard things, in hard times, can lead to a beautiful outcome.
What kind of healing can we do now within our own family?
The third story, the third concentric circle, concerns a person who does a hard thing, in a hard time, to lead to a beautiful outcome in the place where one would least expect to find it.
Founding Editor of the Times of Israel, David Horovitz, had been flagged for speeding in Jerusalem twice in two days. If he did not want to lose his driver’s license, he was required to attend two four-hour sessions of remedial driver’s education. This busy reporter gave up his limited free time, Friday morning, to take the class two weeks in a row. He did not want to be there, in a class with 35 unwilling students, all of whom were flagged for traffic violations, all of whom did not want to be there.
The driver’s ed teacher was a man in his 70s named Uri Tsihy. The atmosphere for this teacher was initially hostile, but Horovitz describes how the tone and tenor of the class changed as Uri Tsihy began his work. Over the course of his 8 hours with the class, he shared his vulnerability, his story of how he came to be teaching driver’s ed to remedial Israeli drivers in the first place. Namely, he experienced lots of medical challenges. Diabetes. Parkinson’s. And, fifteen years ago, malignant cancer. The doctors gave him two weeks to live. He told God that if his life were spared, he would devote the rest of his time to trying to save lives. Since so many Israeli lives are lost in traffic accidents, becoming a driver’s ed teacher would enable him to urge drivers to drive more safely. He taught the technicalities of Israeli driving laws. But more he talked about what God wants from us, and how living more intentionally, slowly, respectfully can help us save lives and make of our own lives a blessing. He did not get paid. He would not take a single shekel. He taught all these students who initially did not want to be there as a labor of love.
Horovitz reports that a common reaction among the 35 students was that they had encountered one of the lamed vav tzadikim, the righteous 36 people whose quiet decency, humanity and humility sustain the world.
Where might we bring healing and hope to the world in an unexpected time and place?
Which brings us to our Rosh Hashanah now. We would all love easy. We would love the easy button for life. But on the things that really matter to us most, we don’t usually get easy. We get hard.
Marriage, long-term faithful monogamous marriage, is the best. But it is not easy.
Raising children is the biggest blessing in the world. But it is not easy.
America is the greatest country in the world. But it is not easy.
Israel is our beloved eternal homeland. But it is not easy.
Work that matters is not easy. Building a community that hangs together in hard times is not easy. Waking up in the morning with a positive outlook despite it all is not easy.
An easy button is for buying things off the shelf. For the ideals we love most, there is no easy button. Hard just is. Which is why it is so very important to flip hard into beautiful.
What will we do this year to flip the hard that we did not want, the hard that we did not deserve, the hard that just is, into something beautiful? Ben Hay-Hay did it. Jay and Daniel Mendelsohn did it. Uri Tsihy did it. Life is calling upon us to do it too. In this new year, what hard thing will you flip into something beautiful because Ben Hay-Hay’s final words in Pikei Avot speak so loudly to us now: Lefum tzaarah agarah, do hard things, and beautiful things will follow. Shanah Tovah.