Why you can’t free yourself from your own prison cell

Here’s a favorite maxim. “A prisoner can’t free themself from from their own prison cell.” That is, someone else has to open the door for them. Assistance from the outside is always needed. As vital as self-care and self-improvement are to your life, it’s important to remember: these are not do-it-yourself endeavors. 

I once asked a very perceptive fellow-learner in our community, why this is so. Why is it so hard to release ourselves from our own cell? She thought for a moment as we sat across my office coffee-table. Then, having made eye contact with an idea, she looked back at me and said: “Maybe because most of us don’t realize we’ve put ourselves inside one. So we need somebody else to tell us we have.” 

How true. If you’re like me, your most stubborn battlefields are inside you. Why can’t I resist that craving? Why can’t I be more patient, courageous, and forgiving – with myself. Try as I do, I can’t seem to get out of my own way. 

The gifted writer Tara Westover recently said of our struggle to master those inner-battles: “sometimes that part of you needs to take a break. And you find other ways to speak to yourself.” She speaks of a different kind of energy that’s better-suited for those battles. One that admits of things in life that don’t make sense. Explaining things is important to us as humans. Diagnosing what’s wrong serves to allay real fears of the unknown. But sometimes, as Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel noted, to explain can make deep-things too plain. 

The second of this week’s portions of Torah itemizes holiness. It lists holy habits, from loving your neighbor and the stranger to leaving the corners of your field for the hungry. Yes, holiness prefers improving interpersonal relations to sharpening your contact with God. But it goes deeper. It seeks to sharpen your contact with yourself. 

A mysterious cluster of laws show up in the heart of the list. They prohibit certain mixtures; wool and linen, cross breeding animals, and planting incompatible seeds together (Lev. 19:19). Why? Nobody knows. Actually, these practices defy reason. They’re about limitations. The limits of reason. Perhaps an often-overlooked goal of reason is to prepare you for what lies beyond it.  

Here’s a way to sum up holiness: Give people as much dignity as you can. Including you. Why can’t you free yourself from your own prison cell? Because you were never meant to. 

The door to human flourishing is opened from the outside. It also opens outwards. Holding the door open for somebody is a great and good practice.