Matot-Masei: Yirmiyahu – Winning Isn’t the Point

“If you’re going through hell, keep going.”
— Attributed to Winston Churchill

This week’s role model is a particularly personal one. Living with a progressive neurological disease inevitably changes the way I think about words like success, victory and perseverance. Reflecting on the life of Yirmiyahu (known in English as Jeremiah), I realized that he has been teaching me a lesson I need now more than ever.

A prophet without the usual credentials

Yirmiyahu was never the obvious hero. He was not a king like David, a military leader like Yehoshua (Joshua), or a miracle-working prophet like Eliyahu (Elijah). His task was simply to speak G-d’s truth, even when nobody wanted to hear it.

For almost forty years he warned that unless the nation repented, Jerusalem would fall. Instead of listening, the people mocked him, imprisoned him, beat him, threw him into a muddy cistern and accused him of treason. In the end, everything he had foretold came to pass. Jerusalem fell, the Beit HaMikdash (The Jewish Temple) was destroyed and the people were exiled.

Judged only by visible success, Yirmiyahu appears to have failed. He did not change the course of the nation, avert the catastrophe, or prevent the world he loved from collapsing around him. Yet Jewish tradition remembers him as one of the greatest prophets who ever lived.

Why success was never the measure

Because G-d was never measuring him by the outcome.

G-d says something similar to the prophet Yechezkel (Ezekiel) :

בֶּן־אָדָם צֹפֶה נְתַתִּיךָ לְבֵית יִשְׂרָאֵל

“Son of man, I have made you a watchman for the House of Israel.” (Yechezkel 3:17)

A watchman’s responsibility is to sound the alarm. Whether the city listens is not his to control. That distinction changes the entire story. Yirmiyahu’s contemporaries rejected him, but later generations recognized the truth of his warnings.

His greatness becomes even more remarkable when we see the man behind the prophecy. The Talmud traces his lineage back to Rachav, the Canaanite woman whose leap of faith helped change Jewish history (Megillah 14b). Yet Yirmiyahu himself hardly looked destined for greatness. When G-d first called him, he protested:

וָאֹמַר אֲהָהּ אֲדֹנָי יֱהֹוִה הִנֵּה לֹא־יָדַעְתִּי דַּבֵּר כִּי־נַעַר אָנֹכִי

“Ah, Lord G-d, I do not know how to speak, for I am but a youth.” (Yirmiyahu 1:6)

He despaired, questioned G-d and even cursed the day he was born. Tanach does not hide these struggles. If anything, it highlights them. His courage was not the absence of fear, but the determination to continue despite it.

At one of his lowest moments he wrote:

וְהָיָה בְלִבִּי כְּאֵשׁ בֹּעֶרֶת עָצֻר בְּעַצְמֹתַי וְנִלְאֵיתִי כַּלְכֵל וְלֹא אוּכָל

“It was in my heart like a burning fire, shut up in my bones; I was weary of holding it in, and I could not.” (Yirmiyahu 20:9)

He wanted to stop, yet the truth he carried would not let him.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks notes that Moshe, Eliyahu and Yirmiyahu each reached moments of profound despair, even praying for death. Great leadership in Tanach is often inseparable from loneliness. Yet Yirmiyahu continued to carry out the mission G-d had entrusted to him.

Faithful to the end

One detail has always moved me.

After Jerusalem fell, a Midrash cited by Rashi describes Yirmiyahu walking beside the exiles in chains so that they would not suffer alone. Later, when offered safety and comfort in Babylon, he chose instead to remain with the shattered remnant in the Land of Israel. Even after decades of rejection, he refused to abandon his people.

The Talmud attributes the authorship of Eichahi (Lamentations) to Yirmiyahu. The prophet who could not prevent Jerusalem’s destruction became the man who gave every future generation the words with which to mourn it. His greatest influence came after the catastrophe, not before it.

Even that book, written amid the ashes of everything he had warned about, refuses to end in despair:

חַסְדֵי ה’ כִּי לֹא תָמְנוּ כִּי לֹא כָלוּ רַחֲמָיו חֲדָשִׁים לַבְּקָרִים רַבָּה אֱמוּנָתֶךָ

“The kindnesses of the Lord have not ended, His mercies are not exhausted. They are new every morning; great is Your faithfulness.” (Eichah 3:22–23)

What this teaches me now

For most of my life, I measured success by outcomes. There were problems to solve, organizations to lead and goals to achieve. Effort usually produced results, and results became the measure of whether I was succeeding.

Living with a progressive neurological disease has forced me to rethink that completely. I continue to hope, pray and believe in the possibility of miracles. Judaism demands no less. But hope is not the same thing as entitlement. I have been blessed beyond measure in so many areas of life that I cannot approach G-d as though He owes me rescue from this particular challenge.

What remains in my control is not the outcome, but the manner in which I meet it. There are days when success cannot be measured by achievement at all. The victory may simply be getting out of bed with gratitude intact, loving my family well, cherishing my friends, continuing to learn, continuing to teach, continuing to write, and refusing to surrender the person I want to be.

Yirmiyahu reminds me that winning was never the point. He did not save Jerusalem, persuade his generation or prevent the world he loved from collapsing around him. Yet Jewish tradition has never regarded his life as a failure. His greatness was never defined by the outcome. It was defined by the faithfulness with which he carried the mission G-d entrusted to him.

The Rambam (Maimonides) makes a similar point in his discussion of free will, citing Yirmiyahu’s words in Eichah. Human beings cannot control history, other people or even many of the circumstances of their own lives. What we are always accountable for are the choices we make in response. The prophet who could not control Jerusalem’s fate could still account for the one thing that was always his to give: his own choices. So can we.

That is the lesson I want to carry with me.

I cannot control how this illness unfolds. I cannot determine where the journey ends. What I can control is how I travel it: whether I choose gratitude over bitterness, whether I continue to love those around me, and whether I remain faithful to the responsibilities G-d has given me today rather than becoming consumed by tomorrow.

Perhaps Churchill and Yirmiyahu were teaching the same lesson.

“If you’re going through hell, keep going.”

Not because you know you will win. Not because success is guaranteed. But because faithfulness is sometimes a greater achievement than victory. Yirmiyahu never won the battle he was sent to fight. Yet thousands of years later, we still remember his faithfulness.

Perhaps that was the victory all along.