The Art of Passing Through Straits
click mattot masei 2026 to download
The Art of Passing Through Straits
My whole life, I had one financial rule: never let my bank account go into minus. Never. This week, for the first time, my Israeli account slipped into overdraft — and stayed there. It’s been eating at me. So I did some research, and what I found made me laugh: most Israelis live in overdraft. People dip in, climb out, and everyone keeps moving forward.
But it got me thinking about something deeper than a bank balance. Right now, the Jewish calendar places us inside the Bein HaMetzarim — the twenty-one days “between the straits,” from the 17th of Tammuz until Tisha B’Av. These days carry a secret about every difficulty you will ever face. With everyone talking about the Strait of Hormuz, we can appreciate a strait on a new level: a place so narrow it seems insignificant — yet what it leads to can make it the most significant thing in the world.
The Rabbis teach that these twenty-one days of mourning run parallel to another twenty-one days: from Rosh Hashanah through Hoshana Rabbah — the holiest, most luminous days of the year. The tears we shed now, the honest reckoning with how far we’ve drifted from G-d, our Av, our Father, is what fuels the closeness of the High Holidays, when we refer to Him as Avinu Malkenu. Think about that. The blackest days on the calendar are the mirror image of the whitest ones.
Why? Because that’s how light works. White script can only be read against a black background. No coincidence that the 17th of Tammuz is the day the first Tablets were shattered — and Yom Kippur is the day we received the second ones. A hidden current of growth flows from the breaking to the receiving. The shattering wasn’t the end of the story; it was the beginning. Only because the first Tablets were broken did we forget our learning — the very catalyst for the Mishna, the Talmud, and all the Oral Torah to be written. And those broken Tablets were placed in the Ark right beside the complete ones, because what is broken is not less precious than what is whole.
Here’s what most of us get wrong. When life breaks — a divorce, a bankruptcy, an illness, a child who takes a path that shatters you — we feel like something has gone off script. Like G-d wrote a beautiful story for us and we somehow fell out of it. But open the very first page of the Torah. Before the Jewish people existed, before anyone could make a mistake, and Exile was already born! The script first reads: “And darkness was upon the face of the deep” — and only then, “Let there be light.” וְהָאָרֶץ הָיְתָה תֹהוּ וָבֹהוּ וְחֹשֶׁךְ עַל־פְּנֵי תְהוֹם. Exile first. The Sages say the four exiles — תהוEgypt, בהו Babylon,חשך Persia, and על פני תהום Edom, the one we’re in now — are all hinted at in those opening words of creation. Exile isn’t a punishment inserted into the story. Exile is the story’s structure. First the black background, then the white fire.
So, when we feel G-d has favorites and we’re not one of them — that He’s against us or punishing us — we’ve misread the whole book. G-d loves us exactly as we are, and He wants to hear from us, especially from inside the strait. The hard thing in front of you may be the very thing carrying you toward the best thing.
Look at every great figure in our history and you’ll see the same pattern. Yosef had to be thrown into the pit to end up in the palace. No pit, no palace! It’s the mechanics of his story. Moshe Rabbeinu had to flee as a fugitive to Midian; without the running, there is no burning bush and no redeemer of Bnei Yisrael. David HaMelech didn’t compose Tehillim comfortably on his throne — he wrote it hunted by his father in law King Shaul, betrayed by his family, and broken by his rebellious son, and three thousand years later we still pray with his words in our own dark moments. Esther, the most modest of them all, had to be married off to a drunken king who ran beauty contests, to be positioned for salvation. And the Jewish people themselves had to pass through Mitzrayim — literally, “the narrow places” — to become a nation. Think of a birth canal. The straits are not where life ends; the straits are where life gets born. A nation, like a baby, enters the world through the narrowest passage of all.
This is why Avraham Avinu, at the Brit Bein HaBetarim, the Covenant Between the Parts, heard that his children would endure four hundred years of exile — and didn’t pray to cancel it. The same Avraham who argued with G-d to save Sodom! He would plead for strangers, but not against his own children’s exile? Because he understood: Egypt was the furnace that would forge them into a people.
The Talmud (Berachot 60b) tells of Rabbi Akiva traveling with a donkey, a rooster alarm clock, and a lamp to learn. No one in the city would give him lodging. “All that the Merciful One does is for good,” he said, and slept in the field. That night the wind blew out his lamp, a cat ate his rooster, and a lion took his donkey. Again: “All that the Merciful One does is for good.” By morning he learned troops had raided the city and captured everyone. Had his lamp been burning, had the rooster crowed, had the donkey brayed — they would have found him. Every “loss” was a rescue in disguise — not Divine punishment, not payback.
Rabbi Akiva learned this from his teacher, Nachum Ish Gam Zu — the man who answered everything with gam zu l’tovah, “this too is for the good.” The Sages once sent him to Rome with a chest of jewels for the Emperor. At an inn, the innkeeper emptied the chest and refilled it with dirt. When the Emperor opened it, he was so insulted, and he wanted Nachum executed. “This too is for the good,” Nachum said. And it was: Eliyahu HaNavi appeared as one of the Emperor’s advisers and suggested this might be the miraculous dust of Avraham, which turned to swords and arrows when thrown at enemies. Rome tested it in battle, conquered a province it could never defeat, and sent Nachum home laden with treasure (Ta’anit 21a).
This is what David meant: “One who trusts in Hashem — chesed yesovevenu — kindness surrounds him” (Tehillim 32:10). Kindness is happening behind your back, on all sides, in places you can’t see. The stolen jewels were the kindness. The locked city gate was the kindness. You only find out later.
Modern research confirms this. A study tracking nearly 29,000 American adults found that high stress raised the risk of premature death by 43 percent — but only among people who believed their stress was harming them. Those under heavy stress who didn’t view it as destructive showed no increased risk. Simply shifting people to a “stress is enhancing” mindset improved their health and performance. People who see setbacks as the raw material of growth respond to failure differently, persisting where others quit. In other words: the interpretation is the outcome.
We have to ask: if G-d can do anything and grant us success so easily, why must we go from pit to palace? Why not straight to the palace, without the pit stop?
Here is something beautiful, hidden in Parshat Masei. The Targum Yonatan ben Uziel teaches that on the night of the first Pesach, G-d carried Israel “on eagles’ wings” — miraculously, on the Clouds of Glory — from Egypt to Jerusalem to offer the Pesach sacrifice, and then back to Egypt. Rav Shlomo Kluger asks: if You’ve already flown them to the Land, why send them back to walk forty-two grueling journeys through a wilderness of “snakes, serpents, and scorpions”?
He answers: the miraculous flight imprinted the path. Just as the Gemara (Niddah 30b) teaches that an angel learns the entire Torah with a baby in the womb and then makes him forget it — so that when he learns it later, it is already engraved in his heart — so too, Bnei Yisrael flew the route once so they could survive walking it. The destination was already written inside them. They had what to believe in, what to hope for, what to aspire to. They just had to live their way there. This is the meaning of the verse: וַיִּכְתֹּב מֹשֶׁה אֶת־מוֹצָאֵיהֶם לְמַסְעֵיהֶם — Moshe recorded “their goings-out according to their journeys.” First the going out, the taste of the destination; only then the journeys. G-d showed them the end so they would understand: if the road is hard, it is because He wants them to build themselves through the struggle. After all, we don’t stand up when a pregnant woman enters the room, even though she may be carrying a Talmid Chacham taught by an angel. That Talmid Chacham hasn’t yet struggled to become one. Greatness that isn’t earned through struggle isn’t yet greatness.
So when you find yourself in your strait, know this: the palace is already imprinted in your pit. When the account goes into minus, when the diagnosis comes, when the child wanders — don’t break. You’re not off script. You’re standing on the black background against which your white fire is about to be written.
The straits aren’t crushing you.
They’re birthing you.
