By trial, error, and hope

I’ve always thought life was a dance you improvise, trying to guess the rhythm while stepping wrong. The ground isn’t stable—never was—but we insist on believing we’re in control. We Jews might be the most stubborn of these dancers. We step firmly into the void, thinking we understand the melody, but it’s already changed.

Since Abraham, since that first step into the hot desert sand, we’ve never really known where we were going. We walk, blind with faith, guided by a promise that always seems too far away. And what have we learned over the centuries? How to fall without grace, perhaps. To fall, even if the fall is ridiculous, we keep going. Because that’s what we do: we stumble, we get up, and we make the same mistakes again, with a stubbornness that borders on the absurd.

The truth — that thing we never want to face — is that we’ve failed more than we’ve succeeded. It’s always been that way. And yet, we keep betting against destiny. Whenever we adjust the sails, thinking the wind is in our favor, the boat insists on following its course. Maybe it’s our curse, or perhaps it’s our strength. Who knows, the secret might not be winning but continuing to play, even when the odds are stacked against us.

There’s a strange beauty in this stubbornness. We know we’ll fail like a broken clock trying to keep time. But we don’t stop. The Jew is the eternal wanderer, with dust clinging to his feet, his gaze fixed on the horizon, and a heart heavy with the weight of the past. We keep walking, not because we believe in destiny, but because we don’t know how to stand still.

Failure, after all, is what shapes us. We are not heroes of perfect epics but the stumblers of incomplete stories. Each generation thinks it’s learned something new, and each generation finds itself back at the starting point. Like a child touching a flame and getting burned, we cry, but then we return to the fire as if it will be different this time. It never is.

And yet, we continue. Not because we’re confident the next step will be correct but because stopping would mean admitting defeat. And for us, stopping is unthinkable. We are the people who persist, who rise with scraped hands and bruised pride, but who move forward, driven not by certainty but by the sheer need to keep going.

If there is greatness in us, it’s not in getting it right but in trying. Always. In getting back up again, even when the ground seems farther away than ever. Perhaps what defines us isn’t success but persistence. Possibly, our victory isn’t in reaching the promised destination but in walking, even when the path leads to dead ends.

The war against Hamas was a mistake. We failed to bring our brothers back, leaving them in the shadows of their captors. The war against Hezbollah is another mistake. But the biggest mistake of all is pretending Iran can wait. The time we don’t act is the time they gain.

And in the end, we are not masters of guiding destiny. We never were. We are, instead, masters of failing and trying again. And something profoundly human about that is this absurd ability to believe, even when logic has left us. Life isn’t about winning every battle but getting back up after every fall. It’s in this almost irrational persistence that we find our true strength. Not in glory but in the dust. The dust on our feet, which always knows that despite everything, the path continues.