Mattot-Masei: Moving Forward through Life’s Journey

Another rejection email arrived in my inbox this year, and before I even opened it, I knew its rhythm. A gracious greeting, gratitude for my interest, appreciation for my qualifications, and then the sentence that mattered: We have decided not to move forward with your candidacy.

This year I was turned down by two chaplaincy residency programs. For most people, that sentence probably needs some explanation. A chaplaincy residency is an intensive year of clinical and spiritual formation in a hospital. Residents accompany patients and families through illness, trauma, dying, and grief while receiving rigorous supervision and training. The programs are small and highly competitive, and completing one often opens the door to board certification.

I’ve spent years carefully preparing for a residency. These years included an educational foundation, ordination, and previous training. Therefore, the rejection wasn’t simply the loss of a job. It felt as though the path I had been walking had suddenly narrowed before me.

The emails were thoughtful and professional. They still hurt, and I have been wondering why. The obvious answer is that rejection is painful. But lately I’ve begun to realize that something else is happening: Every rejection I’ve ever experienced as an adult has had to pass through the child who was bullied.

During upper elementary school and middle school, I was the child who rarely had anyone to play with at recess. I learned what it felt like to stand on the edges of conversations that continued without me, to watch friendships form around me while I remained outside them. I was left out of birthday parties, left out of plans, left out of the easy belonging that seemed to come so naturally to everyone else.

Children rarely have the language to explain what bullying does to them. They simply absorb its lessons. At times I thought that maybe I was too much, or maybe I wasn’t enough, or maybe everyone else could see something about me that I could not. Long after the bullying ended, those questions remained with me.

As adults, we tell ourselves that rejection is different. A hiring committee isn’t a group of middle school classmates. A department manager isn’t deciding whether you’re worthy of friendship. These are professional decisions made for countless reasons. I know that. But the heart is not always persuaded by logic.

Rejection has a way of collapsing time. The middle-aged rabbi reading another carefully worded email suddenly finds herself sharing space with the lonely little girl scanning the playground, wondering where she belongs. Every new disappointment must first pass through that younger self, who still fears that being passed over means being unseen and unworthy.

That is why Moses has been speaking to me so powerfully as we conclude BaMidbar, the Book of Numbers. When I was younger, I read Moses’ exclusion from the Promised Land as a punishment. This year I hear it differently. Moses spends forty years walking toward a destination he will never enter. The land is always before him, always just beyond the horizon, until finally he stands on the mountain and sees it with his own eyes, knowing he will go no farther. How does someone bear that? How does someone spend decades answering a call whose ending will never look the way he imagined?

The older I become, the more I realize that Moses’ story is not only about disappointment. It is about living faithfully when your life refuses to follow the script you had written for it. That realization is not only about me.

My mother believed she had found her calling in counseling. She returned to school because she wanted to spend her life helping people heal. She died before she could earn the degree that would have opened that door for her. I think, too, of my aunt-by-marriage, who now knows that her life will almost certainly end sooner than she once imagined. She is grieving not only the prospect of dying but also the future she expected to have—the years she assumed would still unfold before her.

Their stories are different from mine. A rejection letter is not the same as cancer. Not receiving a job offer is not the same as facing the end of life. And yet I wonder if we are all asking a similar  question. What do we do when we discover that we may never arrive at the place we believed we were meant to reach?

Moses receives his answer not by crossing the Jordan but by continuing to lead. After God tells him he will never enter the land (towards the end of parashat Pinchas), Moses does not withdraw. He teaches. He blesses. He prepares the people for a future he himself will never see. His vocation does not disappear simply because his dream changes. Perhaps that is why the Torah devotes so much attention to the wilderness journey itself. In this week’s Torah portion, the text carefully records every place where the Israelites camped. None of those places was the destination, yet none of them is forgotten.

We are tempted to believe that meaning exists only across the river—in the degree, the dream job, the healing, the retirement, the promised land. The Torah seems to suggest otherwise. Perhaps holiness is found in the journey that shapes us, in the people we love, in the students we teach, in the patients we comfort, in the sermons we preach, in the acts of kindness no search committee will ever read on a résumé.

I do not know whether another chaplain-residency position will one day say yes. But Moses leaves me with questions that matter even more. If Moses never crossed the Jordan, was his life any less complete? If my mother never became the counselor she longed to be, was her calling left unfinished—or did it find expression in ways no diploma could measure? If my aunt-by-marriage’s story ends sooner than she expected, how do we honor not only the years she lived but also the dreams she carried? And if every rejection I experience still passes through the child who was bullied, how do I learn to let that child grieve without allowing her to write the ending of my story?

I don’t know the answers. Perhaps neither did Moses as he stood looking across the Jordan. But I keep thinking about the child I was—the girl standing alone at recess, watching other children gather together, quietly absorbing the message that she was somehow outside the circle.

For years, I thought adulthood would mean leaving that child behind. I thought that once I found my people, my purpose, my vocation, the old ache would disappear. But every rejection I’ve experienced as an adult has had to go through her first. She is the one who hears the silence after an interview. She is the one who wonders if there is something about me that others can see but I cannot. She is the one who asks the oldest question: Am I wanted? Do I belong?

And maybe that is why Moses matters to me now. Moses spends his life leading people who are searching for a home. At the end of his journey, he stands outside the land he hoped to enter. But the Torah never tells us that being outside meant he was forgotten. It never tells us that the years in the wilderness were meaningless. The wilderness was where Moses became Moses.

Perhaps it is also where I am still becoming. The question is not whether the child who was bullied will always remember what it felt like to be left out. She definitely will. The question is whether I can also teach her another truth: That being rejected is not the same as being unworthy. That standing outside one circle does not mean there is no place for you. That a person can spend a lifetime longing for a promised land and still discover that God has been present on the journey all along.

The promised land matters. But so does the wilderness.