Last Shabbat, I turned fifty.
For decades, I was a solid, unyielding man—constantly trying to hold a firm position in the world, to stand tall, to conquer, to be right. But that strength had a hidden cost: in hard moments, I had parts that would not bend, but break like a bone snapping under weight.
Now, my body is changing; it is rounding and softening. I am in better physical shape than I have been in two decades, yet my muscles are yielding. Something distinctly masculine in me is quietly passing away, making room for something feminine to take root. Where I once would have snapped, something inside now bends instead. Something in me is revealing itself as new, and I think I have never been more beautiful.
The more I accept this shifting body, the more I realize that the strength I carried for decades was not just vitality—it was also a wall against meeting the world as it truly is.
I sit with myself and try to understand what growth actually means. It seems to me there are two distinct paths within my soul to understand it.
The first views a human being like a Russian nesting doll. It assumes that deep inside us lies a seed of absolute, exact authenticity, buried beneath the layers left by a scarring reality. If we only listen closely enough, without judgment, we will meet ourselves again—as we once were, an embryo suspended in the womb, an angel holding a candle above our heads.
It is how I imagine the Buddha. Before he was the Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama was a husband and a father. To reach enlightenment, he had to shed the expectations of the world, his family, and himself. He turned inward, meditating into the absolute core. This may be a flawed reading, but I have always been troubled by the fact that after he achieved total clarity, there is no story of him returning to ask for his family’s forgiveness.
There is a similar Hasidic story about the Kotzker Rebbe (1787–1859), who spent the final years of his life locked in a room because even his own disciples had come to seem like frauds to him. Their desire for him to be their master, their tzaddik, was an attempt to reduce him to a category—a “teacher”—and that was a price his absolute truth refused to pay.
In Jewish tradition, the ultimate archetype of this purity was Moses. He peeled back every personal shell until the voice that prophesied through him was the raw Voice of the Divine itself. Other prophets filtered God’s word through their own unique personalities. Moses, according to Maimonides, had cleared away his ego so thoroughly that he had no individual personality left to color the light. He became a clear mirror. This is why his face radiated light: he had scrubbed away the small, irritable, disappointed self that usually gets in the way. The cost? From the moment he met the Infinite at Sinai, he separated from his wife, Zipporah. To this approach, like with the Buddha, that separation was simply “collateral damage” on the path to truth.
But there is another approach. One that suggests a person possesses no distilled, pre-packaged seed of self waiting to be excavated. It believes personality is not found, but forged—shaped continually in the friction of the encounter with the world, with the Other.
I grew up in the Hasidic world, where—with rare exceptions like the Kotzker—most leaders were not towering, larger-than-life figures, but what we call rebbelech: “little rebbes.” This reflects a profoundly different understanding of human growth. Somewhere inside me, “Yakir” is a subtle character trait I’ve known since childhood. But that trait only acquires a face when other people invite my soul to stand beside theirs.
One of the defining moments of my life occurred when I was nineteen, three decades ago, in a conversation with one of the sweet Hasidic rebbelech. He was an old Jerusalemite Hasid, with eyes as pale blue as a summer sky in Israel—blue, and completely blind.
He came to our yeshiva once a week to teach Pirkei Avot (Ethics of the Fathers). This was highly unusual; I studied in a strictly rationalist Litvish yeshiva, where Pirkei Avot was dismissed as a lightweight distraction from the grueling intellectual rigor of the Talmud. But a few of us came from Hasidic homes, so we were permitted—like a therapeutic elective—to study with Hasidic leaders.
I will never forget what he told us:
Dear children, know this. When you study a sacred text and understand it—wonderful, that is Torah becoming a part of you. But if you study a page of Talmud or Kabbalah and, despite every effort, cannot grasp it—that is no less holy. Because when you eventually stand before the Heavenly Court, that very page will speak on your behalf. It will say to the Almighty: ‘Our dear Yakir studied this passage, and he did not understand it. Before You judge him, let his ancestors, like Rav Papa who is mentioned in this Talmudic page, teach it to him properly.’ And because you never fully grasped it in this life, you will earn the privilege of sitting with the great sages of history until you do. And when Rav Papa finally asks you, ‘Sweet Shayne Child, do you understand it now?’—answer him: ‘A little, but not entirely. I need to stay with you a while longer.’ That way, the Holy One will never get around to judging you, because you will be permanently seated among thousands of scholars and mystics—Rav Papa, Abaye, the Baal Shem Tov, and the Holy Ari.
I studied with that blind tzaddik for years. I do not remember a single textual analysis he taught—only this story, and the hospital room where I visited him shortly before he died, where I realized his physical blindness allowed him to see my soul far more clearly than any sighted teacher ever could.
I was never a brilliant student. I am a simple, ordinary Jew, and for years my heart carried a quiet grief over the hundreds of passages I could not master. But his story taught me that my lack of understanding was not a flaw to be fixed before I could claim my place in tradition. My Torah did not need to be a closed book; it could remain wide open—tethered to thousands of voices from the Jewish past and the present, who touch me through stories, music, prayer, and broken study.
I discovered I did not need to find “The One” absolute truth. I could live within many open parentheses, and allow them to shape me.
This is true of texts, and it is true of human beings. I remember how desperately I once searched for “the one” perfect connection, “my” wife. Over time, I learned to let go of that rigid ideal. My character was built precisely by allowing different people to enter my life and leave their mark. The more I trained myself toward this softening, the more breathtakingly beautiful people began to appear to me. Today, human beings look increasingly luminous to me—especially those who have learned to loosen their grip on their younger selves.
Even in professional meetings today, I no longer feel the urgency to offer a “Grand Midrash” or prove my brilliance. I listen. I look at the faces around me, and I add a small note—like Rashi’s concise commentary in the margins. A precise question, a gentle word of support. And strangely, that quiet presence carries far more weight.
This growth is not only outward, toward others, but inward—toward my own past.
My body carries scars. I look at my aching foot and remember the terrorist attack I responded to as a young soldier, the trauma sealed into the bone. I look at another mark and remember myself as a fourteen-year-old boy in yeshiva, bearing the silent scars of abuse.
Growth, at fifty, is not about erasing these moments. It is about leaning into my own physical weakness and falling in love with those younger versions of myself. The young soldier-Yakir took pride in the fact that on the very day he was treating the dead bodies in a horrific terror attack, he rushed back to his university lecture to brilliantly present a thesis on Rabbinic philosophy and Jungian psychology. The Yakir of today looks at that young soldier, embraces him, and asks him to stop teaching. Just to sit, and finally weep over the horrors buried in his body.
My current body—weaker, less agile, softer—is becoming its own kind of blind tzaddik. Its loss of young, aggressive strength is precisely what allows me to see without judgment.
Slowly, I am realizing that some of the young people in their twenties who cross my path today might be looking at me the way I once looked at that blind Rebbele in Jerusalem. I hope to offer them that same soft, non-judgmental space. I hope to let go of my own story so that a small part of me can belong to theirs.
Perhaps this is the human growth: realizing that our lives are not a static monument we build for ourselves, but a melody that passes through us to someone else.
It is the same ancient melody from the Zohar, carried into modern Israeli soul music by Shotei HaNevuah:
The sound of a wheel rolling from below to above,
Hidden chariots moving and turning.
A voice of pleasantness rises and falls,
Walking and wandering through the world…