Courage to go against the whole world, that is what my grandfather Abraham taught us some 4000 years ago. Strength to keep Hashem’s statutes and commandments and His Torah. Genesis 26

The Easy Way Brings Atrophy and No Growth

Friction is the key to this world. You were tricked into coming — and you will need Heaven’s strength to stay faithful.

Keeping the Torah will take courage and strength. That sentence is not a slogan. It is the plain reading of Moshe Rabbeinu’s last charge to Israel and to Yehoshua, and it is the plain reading of life. The world was not built as a smooth path. Friction is the key to this world.

The soul is drawn down into concealment, and the same concealment that hides Hashem is the workshop in which a human being becomes strong. The strength does not originate in personality, willpower, or public approval. The strength comes from Hashem.

Be Strong and Courageous: The Torah’s Own Charge

At the threshold of the Land, Moshe does not tell Israel that observance will feel easy. He says: “Chizku ve’imtzu — be strong and courageous; do not fear and do not be terrified of them, for Hashem your God is the One who goes with you. He will not fail you, and He will not forsake you.”

The same words are repeated to Yehoshua by Moshe and then by Hashem Himself: “Be strong and very courageous to observe, to do, according to all the Torah that Moshe My servant commanded you.” Strength here is not only battlefield nerve. Rashi, following the Sifrei, reads the doubled language as two fronts: strength in Torah and courage against the yetzer and against those who mock the mitzvah.

Physical bravery without moral clarity is incomplete. Moral clarity without the strength to act is incomplete. Both are required, and both are gifts that Hashem places in the one who stands.

The same grammar appears when Israel goes to war. The Kohen addresses the people with four expressions — do not be faint-hearted, do not fear, do not panic, do not be broken before them — because the enemy’s first weapon is noise: shields clashing, horses screaming, trumpets, shouts.

Rashi, citing the Sifrei, maps each phrase onto one of those tactics. The answer is not a louder shout. The answer is: “Hashem, your God, is the One who goes with you to fight for you.” Courage is not the absence of noise. Courage is knowing who stands in the camp.

Bold as a Leopard: Public Faith Without Shame

King David wrote, “I will speak of Your testimonies before kings, and I will not be ashamed.” The Tur opens the entire code of daily Jewish life with that posture. Before a Jew puts on clothes, before he washes his hands, he is told to be bold as a leopard, light as an eagle, swift as a deer, and strong as a lion to do the will of his Father in Heaven. The source is the Mishnah in Pirkei Avot.

Boldness here is not aggression. It is the courage to be different: to keep Shabbat when the marketplace does not, to guard speech when mockery is cheap, to wrap tefillin and make a berachah when no one is watching and when everyone is watching. The foundation of a life of Torah is not private sentiment. It is public fidelity without embarrassment.

You Were Tricked into Coming to This World

Why does keeping Torah require that kind of nerve? Because this world is not the soul’s native climate. The Sages taught that a person must carry two notes: “I am dust and ashes,” and “For my sake the world was created.” Both are true. The descent is real.

Before birth, the Talmud says, the soul is made to take an oath: be a tzaddik and do not be a rasha — and even if the whole world tells you that you are righteous, be in your own eyes a rasha, meaning never stop the work. The soul does not volunteer for concealment. Chassidic teaching, drawing on the Zohar and Tanya, describes the descent as a kind of holy trick. Above, the soul basks in revealed Godliness.

It does not want the body, the hunger, the confusion, the friction. Hashem sends it down anyway, because only in a world of concealment can a created being choose. Only here can a spark be lifted by a human hand. You were tricked into coming to this world — not as a cruelty, but as a mission.

And you are tricked into leaving it: death comes when the work of this body is complete, not when the ego is finished shopping. The soul that screamed against descent will one day scream against departure, because by then it will have learned to love the work.

Tanya states the metaphysics without romance: the Jewish soul is “an actual portion of God above.” That is why the strength is available. Immutable permanence is a Divine quality — “I, Hashem, have not changed” — and a spark of that unchanging firmness was placed in mortal flesh. The courage to keep Torah is not self-invention. It is the soul remembering what it already is.

Friction Is the Key to This World

Kabbalah hears the word olam, “world,” from helem, concealment. What the eye sees — trees, oceans, markets, governments — is a veneer. Beneath the veneer is Godliness. The purpose of creation, the Midrash and Tanya insist, is not that heaven remain heaven. It is that this lowest world becomes a dwelling place for Hashem. Sparks fell. Every object, every hour, every difficult person holds a spark waiting to be elevated by a berachah, a mitzvah, a word of Torah, an act of chessed.

That elevation produces heat. Friction is not evidence that you chose the wrong path. Friction is evidence that you are moving something heavy. A soul that stays in the harbor of ease generates no traction. The Chassidic masters describe the soul as sandpaper, a plow, and a polishing cloth.

The resistance that wears a person down is the same resistance that makes the world shine. If spiritual life feels effortless, it may be because it is producing nothing of substance. If marriage, work, tefillah, and Torah study generate strain, that strain may be the price of traction. Statics has no friction. Dynamics always do.

This is why obedience does not cancel struggle. The yetzer does not retire when a person takes on more mitzvot. Often, it intensifies as more light enters the room. The Sages already knew this: a person does not stand on words of Torah unless he has stumbled over them. Standing is a dance, not a statue. The people at Sinai moved backward twelve miles at each commandment and were pushed forward again by angels. To stand before Hashem is to know the tremor and remain.

Three Pillars, Deep Roots, and Deeds Greater Than Talk

Shimon HaTzaddik taught that the world stands on three things: Torah, avodah, and gemilut chasadim. Ideas without deeds cannot hold. R. Elazar ben Azariah compared a person whose wisdom exceeds his deeds to a tree with many branches and shallow roots: any wind turns it over.

Judaism is not a theory of courage. It is the art of doing — wrapping, blessing, giving, stopping work before sunset, returning a lost object, honoring parents, guarding the tongue — whether feeling is absent or present.

Moshe comforts a generation that has just heard the curses of Ki Tavo: “Atem nitzavim hayom — you are standing today.” Rashi, citing the Tanchuma, hears consolation: you angered Hashem in the desert, you made a calf, you refused the Land — and nevertheless you are still standing. Nitzavim is not a casual pose. It is a pillar.

It is a nation set firmly in place, a leader showing humanity a way. The same parashah then insists that the Torah is not hidden in heaven or across the sea. “It is very near to you, in your mouth and in your heart, to do it.” Near does not mean easy. Near means possible. The Rambam rules that every person can be a tzaddik like Moshe in the sense that matters: each can choose, and each is helped along the path he chooses.

Where the Strength Comes From

If the work is this hard, where does the power come from? Not from optimism as a mood. From Hashem as a Presence.

“Do not fear, for I am with you; do not be dismayed, for I am your God. I strengthen you, and I help you.” “Those who hope in Hashem will renew their strength.” The priest’s speech before battle ends in the same place: Hashem walks with you. Yehoshua is told the same thing three times in one chapter because leadership, inheritance of the Land, and daily Torah all require a strength that is borrowed from the One who does not change.

Chassidut adds a practical mercy. Even when a Heavenly voice seems to close a door, teshuvah remains open to the one who overpowers his impulse and returns. The Alter Rebbe writes that if a person strives with great effort, his repentance is accepted. Strength is not the same as never falling. Strength is getting up with help that was waiting before the fall.

Moshe also binds the living to the dead and the unborn. The covenant is made with those who stand here today and with those who are not here today. Immortality, as later teachers read that verse, is not an escape from this world. It is writing the next chapter so that the dead live in our deeds and we live in our children. That too takes courage: to keep a covenant you did not invent, in a generation that did not ask for it, with a strength that is not your own.

What This Asks of Us

Keep the Torah anyway. Hold fast to it when the world is loud. Do it when the soul remembers that it was tricked into a body. Keep it when friction burns. The concealment is the point. The sparks are the work. The pillar is the stance.

Be bold as a leopard without becoming cruel. Be strong as a lion without confusing force with holiness. Speak of Hashem’s statutes before kings and do not be ashamed. When the shields clash and the horses scream, remember the four phrases of the Kohen and the one fact underneath them: Hashem, your God, walks with you.

You were sent here. You will be taken from here. Between those two tricks lies a short, severe, luminous assignment: reveal the Godliness that the word olam hides, lift what fell, stand today, and draw the strength from the only Place it has ever come from.

Chazak ve’ematz. Be strong and courageous. Hashem will not fail you, and He will not forsake you.

Hazan Gavriel ben David

• Nitzavim–Vayelech: Courage, Return, and the Door Noach Opened
• “You Shall Not Murder” – The Hair That Binds Isaac, Esau, and Samson
• Being Bold
• The True Story of King David: Unraveling Misconceptions in Jewish Tradition
• Parashat Shemot