The Hardest Part is Coming Back Home

Last week I wrote about the record-breaking journey of Artemis II, how astronauts travelled farther than ever before, reaching distances no human has ever reached. There is something breathtaking about watching human beings refuse to stay confined by the old boundaries.

That itself carries a deeply Jewish message. That we are never meant to become comfortable with yesterday’s redemption. We commemorate our Exodus from Egypt, but we are not meant to spend the rest of our lives celebrating an old escape. Judaism demands of us to keep going. To keep growing. To keep leaving behind another inner Egypt, another fear, another limitation, another layer of who we were before.

After I posted that article, someone sent me a brilliant point.

The most difficult, most dangerous, and most critical part of their mission was not how far they went. It was not the records they broke, or how many times they orbited Earth.

The hardest part was their journey back home.

Travelling to the other side of the moon is astonishing. But the return to earth is far more terrifying. To come back from that distance meant reentering Earth’s atmosphere at roughly 24,500 miles per hour, hitting the atmosphere at exactly the right angle, surviving temperatures near 5,000 degrees, and then depending on a carefully timed parachute sequence to slow the capsule enough for a safe splashdown.

Imagine, they could have broken all records and still lost everything in the last stretch coming back home.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized how deeply Jewish that is.

We tend to think of spiritual greatness in levels of ascent. We think it’s all about rising higher. Feeling more inspired. Reaching beyond ourselves. We imagine holiness as the ability to transcend, to climb, to break past the limits of ordinary life.

And of course there is truth to that. A Jew is meant to soar high. We are meant to grow and to push beyond what we were yesterday.

But that is not the true test of a successful mission.

The greatest test is whether you can come back home?

Can you return from a moving moment of prayer and carry it into ordinary life? Can you bring the energy of the holiday back into your marriage, your parenting, your work, your conversations, your reactions, your tone of voice?

Can your spiritual high survive the landing back into gravity, back into the real world?

Because going far is impressive. But coming back home is what gives it meaning.

Our Sages tell us about the four great Rabbis who merited to enter the “Pardes”, the spiritual “Orchard” of Heaven, a place of profound spiritual experience. They were given the unbelievable opportunity to encounter the hidden dimensions of G-d.

They were entering a spiritual experience so deep and so intense that a person could lose his very identity in it. And indeed, one of the Rabbis died. His soul could no longer remain in a body. One went mad. One became a heretic.

Only Rabbi Akiva “entered in peace and left in peace”.

What was the secret of Rabbi Akiva that allowed him to survive, and return, from an experience so intense that no other great Sage could survive?

The Rebbe would point out that the first two words of the Talmud’s description of his journey explain everything: “he entered in peace”.

Rabbi Akiva was able to leave in peace because he did not enter the spiritual “Pardes” as someone trying to escape the world. He entered grounded, knowing that the purpose of ascending on high was not to disappear up there, but to come back down and bring that holiness into everyday life.

The reason he could survive the experience the others could not, was because he understood from the beginning what the experience was for. Not to stay in the orchard, but to return from it.

This is one of the great challenges of our generation.

We chase experiences. We want the powerful high, the uplifting trip, the emotional breakthrough. We chase intensity and look for thrills that will move us.

But we are much less practiced in the holiness of reentry. In coming back home. In letting a moment that stirred us actually change the way we live on a regular Tuesday.

A person can stand in the Synagogue with tears in his eyes and, an hour later, snap at his wife over something small. A person can hear a class that shakes him, walk out feeling different, and then cut someone off in traffic, or speak sharply to the next person who gets in his way. If you have a moving spiritual moment, but if it doesn’t change the way you talk, listen, react, or behave at home; then for all its beauty, it is a journey that never came back down to earth.

We see this in a much more painful way with the brave IDF reserve soldiers returning home from war. These are heroic people, brave fighters, and holy brothers who have lived for hundreds of days inside danger, sacrifice, loss, fear, and courage.

Yet many of them will tell you that the hardest part of the war was not the fighting itself. The hardest part is coming back home to a regular reality. The greatest challenge of reserve duty was not on the battlefield but in their living room. Not in the adrenaline of a dangerous nighttime operation, but in the regular daytime responsibilities of a loving dad.

They came back from war, and now many battle not against an enemy, but against themselves. They struggle to be a regular husband, a regular father, a regular son, a regular employee at work, doing regular errands and routines. They find it hard to sit at a table and make small talk. To hear nothing but their children laughing.

This is exactly the difference between Passover, and the 49-day period we are now in called “Sefiras HaOmer – the counting of the Omer”. On the surface, these forty-nine days between leaving Egypt and receiving the Torah, are a daily count of preparation for Mount Sinai.

But these 49 days are much more than just counting. They are a journey of inner refinement. Day by day, we work on the seven emotional traits of our inner character, and the ways these traits combine with one another. Kindness. Discipline. Compassion. Endurance. Humility. Connection. Leadership.

Forty-nine days of working on what kind of people we are going to become.

And that is the real Jewish journey. It began with the Exodus which was a dramatic take-off. It was a sudden burst of freedom, a miraculous escape, where we broke free from the pull of gravity.

The Omer is the reentry to earth. Counting the Omer is the return back home, where our newfound freedom must now enter our character. Where we don’t just leave Egypt, but where Egypt leaves us.

It is the slow and holy work of bringing a great moment back into the real world, into the tangible details of who we are. Into how we speak to others. Into how we handle frustration. Into how we respond when things do not go our way.

Into how we show up at

During these weeks of the Omer, the mission is not only to ask how far we can go, but how we come back home when no one is watching and nothing feels dramatic. To make sure we are reentering earth as people who live with freedom in a real, meaningful way.

Because going far is impressive.

But coming back home a better person is what gives the journey meaning.

Good Shabbos!

Rabbi Yankie & Chana Denburg