Light Through Struggle

I need to tell you something before we go further. I crossed a line I did not believe I was capable of crossing. I will not tell you what it was — that is not the point, and it is not yours to carry. What matters is what I did next.

I went into silence. I let myself go in, and I let myself go deep. I did not fill the space. I did not explain myself to anyone. I sat with what I had done and with what I had become, until something I had been holding shut for years cracked open.

And then the tears came. I begged Hashem for forgiveness with everything I had. And in the middle of that breaking — when I had nothing left to offer except the rubble of who I thought I was — I felt Him. Not as a concept. Not as a memory. Present. Close. Closer than I had felt Him when I was doing everything right.

That silence is why this book exists. That depth is the fire I am trying to keep lit.

Not close to the triumphant. Close to the brokenhearted. This is not a consolation. It is a revelation about the nature of Hashem — that He is drawn to the cracked places, that He moves toward what is broken, that the very thing we are most ashamed of may be the doorway He is standing in.

“There is a dveikus born of joy, and a dveikus born of struggle. The second clings more fiercely — for it has wrestled with concealment and refused to let go.”