Dispatches From Nationals

Children Of Israel Are Never Alone

Hey, beloved tribe.

My apologies for this newsletter arriving so late in the day. I’m not at home this week and I’m not keeping my regular hours.

For nine long days, I’m in Salt Lake City and I have no doubt that it’s a beautiful town, but what’s brought me here for the third time in two years is my daughter’s climbing career, and there isn’t much charm in the downtown area where we’re staying. It is, however, where the U.S. Olympic Climbing Team has their training center, and it’s where Youth Nationals has been held for the past two consecutive years.

Ironically, the U.S. Olympic Climbing Team itself has been displaced by this 8-day event, and so this week they’re training in… a new facility in Portland, Oregon. We traded locations. Like two ships in the night.

So I have to tell you, though it’s a profound honor to be here, it’s an incredibly grueling event, both physically and emotionally. Athletes work all year to place at Nationals, so the stakes feel very high to them. My daughter competes in two different disciplines, boulders and ropes, which fall on either side (time-wise) of an event she doesn’t do — speed climbing — but she has no choice but to be here since it’s right in the middle.

It’s an emotional roller coaster, and usually the lows outweigh the highs. For every ecstatic winner, there are often dozens and dozens of weeping kids — sometimes even the ones who came in second and third, if they were hoping to be the national champion.

Why am I telling you these personal details? Well, first, because you’re family, and also because the emotional turmoil of this marathon event often forces me to dig deeper within myself for spiritual sustenance. And those insights can apply to a range of other contexts, like the time we’re living through right now.

My daughter has had such a hard road to the place she’s in now, athletically speaking. Before she started to win, she lost and lost and lost and lost and lost. During one of the most disappointing seasons of her life, she got up at 5:00 am several mornings a week to climb by herself for 2 hours before school, and then she would go to practice after school. She made so much incredible progress that year, and she did wonderfully in every local competition, in the regional competition, and on the first day of the divisional competition — the one that determines who will go to Nationals.

But season in and season out, she would become so anxious — with her dream riding on that final day — that she would choke and bomb the final climb of the event, the one that mattered most.

It wasn’t until after many years of this that she finally made it to Nationals. And really, if we’re honest, she just barely made it. She needed to be in the top 6 and she came in 6th.

Then, less than two weeks before she was slated to compete, her very most beloved coach — the one who raised her as an athlete from the age of 7, the one who believed in her most relentlessly and fiercely even when she didn’t believe in herself, the one who always brought unconditional love to any climbing-related situation — this outsized figure of my daughter’s life was killed in a climbing accident on a wilderness crag when he fell to his death during a sudden rainstorm.

This is a grief that never goes away. Especially at times like these, it will never be okay that he isn’t here with her.

At any rate, to say the least, we had no expectations for a high placement at Nationals that year. But my daughter surprised herself and everyone else, except for maybe Bryan — her departed coach — if, as we all fantasized, he was watching from above. Her goal was to make it to semi-finals, but in fact, she came in 5th of more than 50 girls.

Fast forward to two years later: today. She climbed wonderfully yesterday, in her first qualifying round. But today was a disaster. She wasn’t in “the zone”. Her focus was off. She made what she considered inexcusable mistakes and fell much earlier than she should have, on a hold she should have been able to “stick”.

Very fortunately, because she did so well yesterday, her combined qualifying score allowed her to advance to semis. But she was heartbroken to find herself in a flashback of sorts, back in the place where she used to choke all the time in the most high-stakes situations, on routes she should have been able to send.

She spent the rest of the day in the kind of funereal state I haven’t seen for a long time, afraid she wouldn’t be able to recover her momentum and head space.

What can a mother find to say on a day like today?

I remembered what I told her on one of the worst days of her climbing life, the year she got up at 5 am and worked twice as hard and long as almost anyone else and then watched them go to Nationals without her.

In the car going home, after hours of anguished silence, I finally said into the gloom of the backseat: “Honey, I know you’re suffering. And I don’t know why you’re in this lonely place again after working as hard and long as you have. But I do know this: I know this suffering is going to serve you in some way we don’t yet know. Not because suffering builds character. I don’t actually believe that suffering in itself necessarily builds character. But the determination to wrest redemption from suffering IS what builds character, and that’s what you always do, because that’s who you are.”

I’ve said the wrong thing a thousand times in my life, but it turned out that this was the right thing to say that day. She stopped weeping and before long she actually brightened.

In the same spirit, but in a much more significant context, I don’t pretend to know why we Jews have to suffer as we do. I don’t know what kind of redemption we can wrest from the last nine ghastly months and all the layers of grief that have accumulated for us: our dead, our captives, the shattered dream that Israel was somewhere we would never again experience mass murder or pogroms, the broken illusion that our own friends and allies and colleagues were nothing like the Good Germans of the Third Reich, or that Israel would ever be allowed to do what any other nation experiencing a siege of that magnitude would do.

I don’t know why we have to experience the whiplash that is a hostage deal on the table, on the verge of completion, only to be snatched back out of reach, again and again and again. I don’t know why we have to live in terror for Israel’s continued existence for 75 straight years, directly in the wake of the Holocaust, which was itself directly in the wake of millenia of other agonies. I don’t know why the vanishingly tiny Jewish nation is such an insufferable affront to the hundreds of millions of Muslims in the rest of the Middle East, or to the rest of the world for that matter.

But I know that we are world-class champions at wresting redemption from suffering. We build beauty and sanctuary in the ashes of tragedy. We keep the eternal light of our tradition alive even in the darkest depths of hell. Our sense of community and pride is only stoked higher and hotter by the world’s hatred.

Today, during my daughter’s darkest hour of self-recrimination and disappointment, I said something else that I could just as easily have said to us, about us.

We were sitting on the curb of a parking lot next to the event, and I kept my arm tight around her shoulders as she sobbed.

Over and over, I told her: “You have been in this place so many times before, without any way to know how many glorious things were just around the corner.”

I have to hope and believe the same is true for us. That we will get through this, stronger and closer and more beautiful than ever.

Heartfelt love to you all.

Am Yisrael Chai.