My audition for entry into the New England Conservatory was one of the most intense and scary moments of my life. I still remember being lead (I remember it in slow motion) down the hallway towards the room that held the key to my fate; to glory or doom. Turning right to go in I tried to smile as I beheld six incredible musicians; the three that I would play with and another three behind a desk, taking notes on how I was doing. Their thoughts and words; their judgement of my quality as a musician was everything to me.

Judgment is not something most people think they need more of. Most of us have no burning desire to ask others for their unvarnished opinions of our lives. But for the things we really care about, we should want it — we should even welcome it. Imagine you’ve poured months into a business plan and you’re about to sink your savings into it. If someone spots a fatal flaw before you write the check, you’d be thrilled — even though they just judged your plan and found it wanting—to your great benefit.

But there’s a deeper aspect of judgment. The tribunal at my audition showed me that what I was doing was serious. It mattered. I mattered.

There’s an old sitcom bit where a character is talked into running for some minor local office and, amusingly, starts having delusions of grandeur — envisioning win after win, all the way to the presidency. Then he discovers that dozens of people are elected to this position every year and no one is ever turned away. It wasn’t really an honor at all.

Deep down, no one wants that kind of life. No one wants the participation trophy. We want to dig deep and discover what we’re actually capable of. It’s certainly easier to have the professor who hands out A’s for showing up — but it’s a different world when you’ve studied your brains out and scored at the top of the class. A test is also a judgment: one that shows us both how we’re doing and even who we are.

Rosh Hashana is called Yom HaDin — the Day of Judgment. As the day’s liturgy says: “As a shepherd musters his flock, making his sheep pass under his staff, so do You cause to pass, count, number, and review the souls of all the living…” Here it is the Judge of judges who will evaluate us — who looks directly into our souls to see what’s really there.

On the one hand, you’d think this would be a terrifying prospect. Who could be ready for that? And yet it’s a celebratory day — people dress in their finest, dip apples in honey, sit down to lavish meals. Despite its seriousness, we welcome the judgment; we revel in the prospect of real growth, confident that the Judge is firm but full of mercy. This is the essence of Rosh Hashana. It isn’t the Jewish New Year’s Eve. It’s a wild, festive, paradoxical celebration of Judgment Day.

It was a thrilling moment when I opened my mailbox and saw the thick packet from the New England Conservatory — the sign that I’d been accepted. My ordeal was over. I had been judged, and I had passed, and I was light-headed with joy. The difficulty of the test now felt sweet in retrospect. I was in — and ready for the next challenge.

Shanah Tova.

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I’ll admit that, like most people who’ve seen it, I’m a sucker for the famous training montage in Rocky. Who can be unmoved by the sight of a simple working-class guy from Philly gearing up to take on the heavyweight champ of the world? The kids running with him through the streets, the pounding of a side of beef with his bare hands, the one-armed push-ups, and the iconic sprint up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art — hands aloft, music swelling. It gets me every time.

But for all its drama, the montage can quietly misrepresent how growth actually works. Its compression makes it feel like Rocky got from hopeless to unstoppable in a matter of days — as if he got inspired, tried two or three times, fell short, and then arrived fully formed, ready to go toe to toe with the great Apollo Creed. A more realistic film — a duller one, admittedly — would have shown us the mornings he didn’t make it out of bed, the despair and self-doubt, the injuries that set him back, and the pervasive fear that he might not “be enough” to do this at all.

There’s an old maxim: slow and steady wins the race. It holds as true for spiritual development as for sports, or any great undertaking — though the truer word isn’t slow (plenty of growth is fast once it catches) but gradual: it comes in stages, each one real. Some hold the mistaken belief that Judaism is “all or nothing” — that if you’re not achieving at the highest levels, in learning, in prayer, in the performance of mitzvot, then you’ve essentially failed. This is false: not only because that’s not how the world works, but because the tradition itself insists on the opposite.

The Talmud (Avodah Zarah 3a) says that God does not deal with His creatures b’trunya — tyrannically. He makes no unreasonable demands and doesn’t expect perfection. The Torah does hold very high standards (I don’t think we’d respect it much otherwise) — but the way it lets you get there, gradually, in stages, is eminently generous.

Think of it a bit like Mick, Rocky’s curmudgeonly trainer: he pushes Rocky, he expects a lot, but he also loves him and believes in what he could become. No pushing, no championship fighter. But the pushing is never contempt for where Rocky is now; it’s faith in where he’s headed. And when the win was beyond him — as it was in that first film — the two of them celebrated what he could do: in this case, simply going the distance, staying on his feet all fifteen rounds.

The Jerusalem Talmud (Berakhot 1:1) has a beautiful image for this:

Rabbi Ḥiyya and Rabbi Shimon ben Ḥalafta were walking in the valley of Arbel at the break of dawn, and they saw the morning star breaking forth with its light. Rabbi Ḥiyya said to Rabbi Shimon ben Ḥalafta: “So is the redemption of Israel. At first, little by little; as it proceeds, it grows and grows.”

This is the key. Dawn is not a failed noon. The faint 5 a.m. light isn’t an imperfect day; it’s day, in its first measure — real light, doing exactly what light at that hour is meant to do. The prophet Micah said, “though I sit in darkness, the Lord is a light to me.” It’s not that the light will arrive eventually — it’s already here, while it’s still dark. So the vision of where you could go stays whole, and the standard stays high; but it’s something you grow into, little by little.

Another famous boxer, Mike Tyson, once said, “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” Maybe boxing still captivates us because the ring is a lot like life. You come out of your corner swinging and try to manage whatever’s arrayed against you. Sometimes you land a clean punch, and sometimes you get floored. But it’s not only the fighter with the title who wins — it’s anyone willing to get in the ring and go the distance. Neither Tyson nor Rocky became great overnight; they stand for something simpler — the willingness to get up, again and again. That’s how you win — little by little.

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Upon returning from synagogue recently, my fifteen-year-old son — who treats every bodily gurgle as a violation of the social contract — asked me what’s better: praying in a big crowd with everybody sneezing and “horking” every five seconds, or staying home where it’s nice and quiet and you can actually concentrate?

I'd be lying if I said he didn't have a point. I've wondered about this facet of Jewish practice myself. The Eastern contemplative paths hold up calm and stillness as the very goal of practice — the quiet mind, the untroubled breath — and here we are, week after week, trying to reach God in a hall that sounds like a waiting room during flu season. Why does my tradition seem to treat the tumult not as an obstacle to the spiritual life but as a critical part of it?

Jewish prayer has one central section — the Amidah — meant to be said in silence. But the rest of it sounds like a dinner party where everyone is talking at once. It has neither the reverent elegance of a Cathedral Mass nor the disciplined silence of a Zen meditation hall. When it’s done well, though, it feels something like a rock concert where everyone is doing their own thing, together — energy, improvisation, the pulse of life in motion. And kavvanah — intention, the inner focus that is the whole point — is somehow meant to be reached not despite the organized chaos but through it.

If prayer were only about reaching God in whatever way suits you best as an individual — and the loud way doesn’t suit you — then yes, the crowd is a problem, and you’d be right to go home. But that “as an individual” is the whole hidden assumption. My son was measuring prayer by a private yardstick: does it help me concentrate? Judaism hands him a different one: are we doing this together?

Ours is a stubbornly collective spirituality. We do almost everything as a group — Passover seders, bar mitzvahs, brises, and above all, prayer. Even Jewish learning, unlike the Western ideal of the hushed library, is a gloriously noisy affair: hundreds of people standing, sitting, arguing, yelling, flailing their arms. It is intense and unruly and somehow beautiful. It is a lot like life.

So the wisdom traditions that have chosen to block out or sidestep the din of daily life do have a real advantage, and there is an important place for that method. Judaism chose the other road — to barrel headlong into the melee and wrestle it heavenward. It is the deeply embodied expression of a people who love life in all its crazy swirl of emotion and experience. Silence is part of it — the Amidah, after all — but only one of the ways Godliness shows up. Nature has the bubbling brook and the cyclone; both should inspire awe.

Ironically, when I reached for an answer in the moment, what I handed my son was a meditative technique: when your mind wanders or grows agitated, gently bring it back. It’s a simple and valuable tool, and I’d give it to him again. But I’ve come to think it wasn’t the whole answer — because it still treats the noise as interference to be managed, a distraction to return from.

The deeper answer isn’t a better way to tune the crowd out. It’s to understand that the crowd was never the distraction. The coughing and the shuffling and the flailing are not chaos to be seen past; they are the sound of the people he came to stand among. You can reach a purer focus alone. You cannot stand with your people alone. And Judaism, in all its glorious din, has decided which of those it holds more sacred.

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Ben Kingsley is one of the great actors of our era. His chameleonic ability to take on almost any persona has given us roles as diverse as Gandhi, the quiet but intense accountant Itzak Stern in Schindler’s List, and the raging, unstable gangster Don Logan in Sexy Beast. But unique among these performances — for my money, at least — was his depiction of former Iranian colonel Massoud Amir Behrani in 2003’s House of Sand and Fog.

The film revolves around Behrani’s honest attempt to lift his family from their plight as newly arrived, struggling Iranian immigrants back toward something of the standing they had known in their homeland. He (legally) purchases a home at a county auction, meant as the centerpiece of that rehabilitation. The only problem was that the foreclosure was the result of a simple $500 shortfall by the owner, which she was working to remedy. Both parties were victims of circumstance, and each had a real case as to the rightness of their cause — but here, adherence to the letter of the law led to disaster for all involved.

In Deuteronomy 6:18 the Torah teaches that it is not sufficient to adhere to the letter of the law alone; we are expected to go above and beyond it. We are told to do ha-yashar ve-ha-tov — the right and the good. Classical commentators read these two words as pointing in two directions: the tov, the “good,” as what is good in the eyes of Heaven, and the yashar, the “right” or “straight,” as what is fair and upright in our dealings with other people. The Torah asks for both.

In the House of Sand and Fog case, the “right” was arguably followed — but not the “good.” Had it registered with him, Behrani might have thought differently about taking an emotionally broken woman’s home over a small missed payment. But in his zeal to rebuild his own family’s life, it never did.

So if the Torah wanted us to carry out these laws in a particular way, why didn’t it just say so? Why not rewrite the statutes to reflect what is actually expected, instead of handing us a watered-down version with a general injunction to do better than what’s outlined?

Ramban, commenting on this verse, draws out why this is even necessary. No code, he explains, can spell out every situation a person will face — every transaction, every quarrel, every neighbor. So having given its specific laws, the Torah adds a general instruction: in everything the law did not name, do what is right and good. It is the tradition’s own acknowledgment that the letter of the law, by itself, can never be enough.

But there is something deeper here than necessity. This is the brilliant, interactive nature of Jewish law. Yes, a minimum expectation is set. At the same time, we are asked to participate in the process rather than blindly follow statutes — to think it through on our own, and to contribute, through our own conduct, to the shape of the law itself. A code that specified everything would ask only for our obedience. A law that deliberately stops short asks for something greater: our judgment, our character, our participation. The gap is not a flaw. It is the invitation.

Behrani never saw the invitation. Everyone in that story stood firmly within their rights, and no one stepped into the space the law had left open — the very space that was the point. The law was satisfied, and that was precisely the tragedy. What was right and good sat there the whole time, unclaimed, on every side.

The code we are given was never meant to be the ceiling. It was meant to be the floor we build on. The good life — the right and good one — is lived in the space above it, in everything the law trusted us to figure out on our own.

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Last week I had the unusual experience of teaching an experimental workshop at a yoga studio in Connecticut. We gathered intimately, in a circle on the floor, and delved into some deep ideas together. At one point I asked everyone to pair off and talk through what the presentation had been reaching toward — and I found myself sitting with a lovely older woman, sharp and spiritual, the kind of person who has plainly spent a life paying attention.

In the course of our conversation, she told me that she had wanted to learn Kabbalah as a child. When she brought this to her Hebrew school teacher, she was told it was only for men over forty. It was then and there that she decided this tradition was not for her. She went looking elsewhere, found an Eastern path, and has been walking it ever since.

My first reaction was to shake my head at the kind of pedagogy that would rebuff a genuinely open and curious child. At a time when millions of our co-religionists have a tepid or even antagonistic relationship with their faith, it seems ill-advised at best to turn away any step someone takes toward it.

It’s true that guardrails were placed around the more mind-bending aspects of Kabbalistic thought, and true as well that without preparation the most esoteric works could lead a person into deep confusion or worse. But this is not so different from the prerequisites on any 201-level course. We require grounding before the advanced material — and yet no one suggests you can’t study any physics, or math, or psychology until the whole sequence is behind you.

There is a whole world of delight and meaning in the foundational forms of a discipline — forms that are accessible without being shallow. Why offer a seeker everything or nothing, and, finding her not ready for everything, hand her nothing at all?

The truth is that the tradition refused that binary four centuries ago. There are many classical works, Kabbalistically infused, that stand wide open to the curious seeker. A case in point is Reshit Chochmah, written in sixteenth-century Safed by Rabbi Eliyahu de Vidas, a primary student of the kabbalist Rabbi Moshe Cordovero. De Vidas quotes liberally from the Zohar and other mystical works, but he builds his book as a series of gates — Fear, Love, Holiness, Humility — and in each one draws the inner teachings down into practical, ethical life. The esoteric becomes a way of carrying yourself in the world.

The five-volume Shnei Luchot HaBrit, by Rabbi Isaiah HaLevi Horowitz (c. 1565–1630), does something similar. It doesn’t traffic in the raw, unfiltered complexity of a master like the Arizal; instead it takes the core of those teachings and clothes them in a far more digestible form — woven together with Jewish law, deep contemplation across hundreds of themes, and the ethical dimension throughout. It’s a stunning package, one that can be opened, with a little time and care, to nearly anyone.

So what does this mean for the great many Jewish people who have little or no exposure to these transcendent ideas, but who are nonetheless drawn toward spirituality? We need to make a more overt effort to nourish the souls of the seekers with something substantive and profound. Gender and age are beside the point when it comes to the open but guarded path afforded by the thinkers above — and much of the Chasidic approach besides. There really is something for everyone.

I wish the woman I met at the yoga studio had known these possibilities were hers. At one time in history, Kabbalah was for the elite, closely guarded in small but diligent groups working silently through the long night of exile. In certain quarters they are still at it. But the door was thrown open long ago — and we, too, have a place at the table, waiting for us.

For the last three months I’ve been dealing with vocal strain. It’s one of those parts of the body you never notice until it stops working. I’d been the unthinking beneficiary of a reliable voice for decades, and now, suddenly, I have to think about it. Taking seriously the Talmud’s counsel that when something goes wrong a person should examine his ways, I’ve spent that time thinking hard about the human voice — what it is, and what we’re actually doing when we use it.

One of the great wonders of our physiology is the brilliant economy of space that allows some parts to perform more than one function at a time. The bones, for instance, provide the hard structure that enables us to stand and walk, but, remarkably, the interior of the bones also produce red blood cells. So too with your throat; it’s one passage with two directions. It can receive food, water, and medicine and deliver it to the proper place but it also generates the sound that allows for our most intimate and effective form of communication.

These two capacities appear in the Torah as a pair of brothers: Jacob and Esau. When Esau stumbles in from the field, famished, and sells his birthright for a bowl of stew, the word he uses is telling. “Let me gulp down some of that red red stuff,” he says — haliteni — a verb the tradition associates with force-feeding an animal, pouring food down a beast’s throat. He doesn’t ask; he doesn’t savor; he wants the world shoveled into him. Esau is the food-pipe: the throat as pure intake, the passage that only takes.

Jacob is the other throat. When he comes disguised before his blind father, Isaac feels the goatskin on his arms and hesitates: “the voice is the voice of Jacob, but the hands are the hands of Esau.” The hands may be borrowed, but the voice is unmistakably his own. Jacob is not the pipe that takes the world in; he is the pipe that sends something out — breath shaped into word, air turned into prayer and Torah and song. Where Esau’s throat pulls the material world inward, Jacob’s releases something finer than matter: the voice that is his and no one else’s. If Esau is the passage that only takes, Jacob is the passage that gives.

The Vilna Gaon points out that the word for voice itself, kol, can be spelled two ways, full (kuf, vav, lamed) or lacking (kuf, lamed). The shape of that variable letter, vav, is a straight line, reminiscent of the pipes we’re discussing. The idea is that we are called to be “full throated” — to express ourselves honestly, and all the way. A voice half-sounded, hedged, held back, is chaser, defective, and collapses into kal, light — and then the hands take over. Most people don’t lose their voice by being silenced; they lose it by never sounding it to completion — the chaser life, the withheld voice.

There is one more place the two pipes meet, and it is the strangest of all.

To make an animal fit to eat, Jewish law requires an act of precise severing. The two things the knife must cut are called the simanim — the signs — and they are exactly our two pipes: the kaneh, the windpipe, and the veshet, the food-pipe. For a mammal, both must be severed. For a bird — a lighter, more air-bound creature — one will do.

Sit with what that means. The act that makes taking a life permitted, that lifts eating out of raw appetite and turns it into something governed and holy, runs precisely through the food-pipe — the Esau-organ, the throat that only takes. You are never allowed to leave the taking-pipe alone. Consumption is not forbidden, but it is never left intact and unexamined; to be made fit, it must be cut through. And the more earthbound the creature — the more of the gullet and the ground in it — the more of the throat the act must address. The bird, half-made of air, needs less.

I don’t think the tradition is teaching anatomy. I think it is teaching what to do with a throat.

We are each a single passage running in two directions. One direction pulls the world in — food, noise, appetite, the endless red red stuff we ask to have poured into us. The other sends something out that exists nowhere else in creation: a voice that is ours and no one else’s, air turned to word. Both are ours. Neither can be wished away. But only one of them, sounded fully, is the thing we were given a throat to do.

I have spent three months unable to take my own voice for granted — reduced, some days, to the light and lacking version of it, the kol that has thinned into kal. I would not have chosen the lesson. But it has made me notice the pipe I’d used my whole life without once considering what it was for. And what it is for, I think, is not to be stuffed full. It is to be sounded — all the way.

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Jutting provocatively from the flying buttresses and roof edges of St. Vitus Cathedral in Prague is an array of rather unattractive gargoyles — animals, fantastical beasts, and human figures, no two alike. The oldest and finest were carved in the 14th century under Peter Parler, the German-Bohemian master mason who shaped the cathedral's Gothic core. Their design was cleverly twofold: functional, draining rainwater clear of the walls, and symbolic — warding off evil and reminding the faithful of sin and judgment.

But the most remarkable thing about Parler's carvings is a detail you cannot even see. Their craftsmanship includes bulging veins and fully modeled mouth interiors — a tongue, a palate — worked with precision, on figures set more than a hundred feet above anyone who might look up.

Now — what is a Catholic cathedral doing at the start of a Jewish essay? Everything, as it turns out.

Because that anonymous carver, chiseling a tongue into a mouth no one would ever peer into, understood something our tradition places near its very center: that the truest measure of a thing is the part no one sees. He worked as carefully on the hidden as on the visible — perhaps more so — as though the worth of the carving had nothing to do with whether a human eye would ever find it. Judaism did not merely admire that instinct. It built a way of living on it.

Judaism places an enormous premium on a way of being that modern life both misunderstands and undervalues: modesty. Through the prophet Micah, we are told what God most wants of us — “to act justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God.” That famous last phrase, hatzne’a lechet, is usually rendered “walk humbly.” But the Hebrew carries something more specific. Its root, צ-נ-ע, means hidden, concealed, out of sight. To walk with God, the prophet says, is to walk discreetly — to do your deepest living where no one is watching.

The tradition builds on exactly this. The true test of modesty, it teaches, comes when we are completely alone, with no audience nudging us into a performance. In an unglamorous but very real example, the Talmud measures a person’s modesty by their conduct in the beit hakisei, the bathroom — the one place we are truly unseen. The Semak, the halachic work of Rabbi Isaac of Corbeil, codifies it plainly: ein tzanua ela hamitztania b’veit hakisei — none is truly modest but the one who is modest in the most private place.

The tradition calls this quality tzniut — not the narrow modern sense of dress codes, but the older, deeper one: dignity in concealment, the inward self. Ikkar tzniut b’tzina — the essence of modesty is in the hidden.

And there is something profound in the fact that this same hiddenness is ascribed to God Himself. “Wherever you find the greatness of the Holy One, blessed be He,” taught Rabbi Yochanan, “there you find His humility” (Megillah 31a). The greatest Being conceals rather than displays — cares, unwatched, for the orphan and the widow, the ones no one else notices. Greatness and hiddenness turn out to be the same gesture: the refusal to perform. Perhaps it runs in the other direction, too. Wherever you find that quiet, unwitnessed goodness in a person, you have found something very close to God.

The Gothic carver and the Talmudic sage, from opposite ends of the earth, reached the same truth — that the essence of a thing lives in its unwitnessed part. A cathedral is held up by the stones no one inspects; a person is held together by what they do b’tzina — the honesty no one would know of, the restraint no one ever sees.

This is not about being seen to be good. It is about being good whether or not you are seen. The word for it is integrity — from the Latin for whole, undivided. The truly integrated person is not a polished public self laid over a truer private one. There are not two of them. There is a genuine goodness felt within, and the quiet allowing of it to show — indifferent to whether anyone ever knows.

If this way of thinking speaks to you, there’s more where it came from.

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