Can Dreams Be So Large That They Keep Us Standing Still?
Can Dreams Be So Large That They Keep Us Standing Still?
Can Dreams Be So Large That They Keep Us Standing Still?
There is a person who has wanted for years to write a book. Not an article, not a chapter, not one page a day, a book. In the imagination there is already a cover, a launch, and readers, but precisely the size of the dream is the reason the first page has still not been written. Another person wants to “change life”: lose weight, get fit, learn a language, finish a tractate, change professions, and organize the entire house. On the first day there is tremendous enthusiasm. On the fourth day the distance looks enormous. By the tenth day the whole program has disappeared. Sometimes the problem is not that our goal is too low. It is so high that we cannot see the next step from where we stand.
The Mishnah opens Tractate Sukkah with a surprising law: “A sukkah that is higher than twenty cubits is invalid,” according to the sages (Mishnah, Sukkah 1:1). At first glance, why? If the sukkah is higher and more impressive, what is wrong with that?
The Gemara gives three different explanations. Rabbah derives from the verse, “So that your generations shall know that I caused the children of Israel to dwell in sukkot” (Leviticus 23:43): up to twenty cubits a person is conscious of dwelling in a sukkah, while above twenty cubits the eye does not ordinarily take in the schach. Rabbi Zeira derives from the verse, “A sukkah shall be for shade by day from the heat” (Isaiah 4:6): the sukkah should receive its shade from the schach, while at great height much of the shade is produced by the walls. Rava explains that a sukkah is a temporary dwelling, while above twenty cubits the structure requires the character of a permanent dwelling (Babylonian Talmud, Sukkah 2a).
These are three different halachic explanations and must not be merged into one another. But for our reflection they share an intriguing point: it is possible to raise something until it loses the very function for which it was built.
Height is not always an advantage.
Sometimes more height is already too much.
This is surprisingly true of the goals we set for ourselves as well.
We are accustomed to speaking about the need to “dream big,” and there is truth in that. Without vision a person may settle for a life smaller than one's capacity. The Torah itself places enormous demands before a person: “You shall be holy” (Leviticus 19:2), “You shall walk in His ways” (Deuteronomy 28:9), “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might” (Deuteronomy 6:5). Judaism does not educate toward mediocrity.
But the Torah does not stop at the ideal.
It breaks the ideal down into actions.
Want a person to become holy? It does not leave the person with the word “holiness.” It gives commandments.
Want there to be charity? It establishes to whom one gives and how.
Want there to be Shabbat? It does not say merely, “Experience holiness once a week.” It establishes a time, Kiddush, meals, prohibited labor, and Havdalah.
Want to remember the Exodus from Egypt? It gives matzah, maror, story, and Haggadah.
The Torah holds enormous ideals and gives them hands and feet.
That is exactly what many of our dreams lack.
“I want to be a better father” is a beautiful sentence, but it cannot be performed on Tuesday at five.
“I want to be healthy” does not appear in the calendar.
“I want to be a Torah scholar” is a vision, not an action.
“I want a better marriage” does not say what to do tonight.
The more abstract the goal, the easier it is to love and the harder it is to execute.
Research in the psychology of goals has distinguished between general, abstract goals and concrete goals. Edwin Locke and Gary Latham showed in their work on Goal-Setting Theory that specific and challenging goals can, under appropriate conditions, improve performance more than general instructions such as “do your best.” But there is an important condition: the person must understand what is required, receive feedback, and be capable of acting in relation to the goal. A great goal that is not translated into actions can remain an inspiring declaration.
Psychology also recognizes the goal-gradient effect: as a person feels closer to a goal, motivation can increase. By contrast, a goal experienced as extremely distant may feel abstract and difficult to grasp. We need not only a summit. We need to know where to place the foot now.
This explains a very strange phenomenon.
Sometimes people with great ambitions do less than people with more modest ambitions.
One person says: this year I will finish the entire Talmud. After two weeks the schedule is behind, discouragement sets in, and the project stops. Another says: every evening I will study one page. At the end of the year hundreds of pages stand behind him.
One person decides: from today I will exercise for an hour every day. For one week it works. On the day when an hour is impossible, nothing is done, and gradually the plan collapses. Another decides that on busy days there will be a twenty-minute walk. It is not a revolution, but after a year the body knows that this is a person who walks.
The first dreamed higher.
The second went farther.
Proverbs says: “The path of life leads upward for the wise” (Proverbs 15:24). The path indeed goes upward, but it is called a path. There is no single jump from where we stand to the person we want to become.
Jacob dreams an enormous dream: “Behold, a ladder was set upon the earth, and its top reached heavenward” (Genesis 28:12). This is a beautiful image for human growth. Its top reaches heaven, but the ladder is set upon the earth. A vision with no point of contact with the ground is not a ladder. It is a cloud.
There is another detail of the ladder we cannot ignore.
Rungs.
No one climbs a ladder by looking at its top. Even when the destination is heaven, the road runs through the rung thirty centimeters above the foot.
This may be one of the mistakes we make in processes of change. We compare ourselves with the person we hope to be in five years instead of asking what today's step is. The enormous gap creates a sense of failure before we begin.
A person begins studying Torah and looks at a Torah scholar who has studied for forty years. The gap is unimaginable.
A couple in crisis looks at a family that appears perfect from the outside. The gap hurts.
A person opens a small business and compares it with a company built over thirty years. Already on the first day the person feels behind.
But that is a comparison between chapter one and chapter twenty.
The Gemara relates that Rabbi Akiva began his path in Torah at the age of forty and later became one of the greatest sages of Israel (Babylonian Talmud, Ketubot 62b; Avot de-Rabbi Natan 6). We love to tell the ending of the story: twenty-four thousand students. But there is no way to reach such an ending without many days in which progress was small, local, and unimpressive.
The sages say: “If you grasp much, you have not grasped; if you grasp little, you have grasped” (Babylonian Talmud, Sukkah 5a). In context this is a rule concerning interpretation and halachic measurements, not psychological advice for goal management. But as a metaphor for life it is sharp: sometimes the desire to seize everything results in holding nothing.
The same is true in repentance. A person leaves Yom Kippur with a list of twenty things to change: wake earlier, study more, become less angry, pray differently, eat differently, speak differently, become an entirely different person.
The intention is wonderful.
But a month later the person may be exactly where things began.
Not because there was no desire to change.
But because there was an attempt to change the entire person at once.
The Torah says: “Little by little I will drive them out from before you, until you have increased and possess the land” (Exodus 23:30). In context, this speaks about the conquest of the land, not psychological work. Yet the Torah itself recognizes a structure in which some processes do not happen all at once, because even success that comes too quickly may be impossible to sustain.
This is true in education as well.
A parent sees a struggling child and presents everything that must be fixed: the room is messy, grades have fallen, bedtime is too late, there is too much phone use, the child does not help enough at home, and prayer is not what the parent would like.
The child hears one message: I am a renovation project.
What would happen if, instead of seven fronts, they chose one point?
Not because the other matters are unimportant, but because human beings do not change through lists of deficiencies. They change when they perform one step, experience capability, and then build another step on top of it.
There is a deep difference between vision and distance.
A great vision tells me where to go.
Too great a distance tells me how far away I am.
If I look only at the summit, I may experience the entire road as proof that I have not yet arrived. If I know how to look at the next rung as well, the road itself becomes part of the success.
Perhaps this is one of the questions worth asking after Yom Kippur, precisely as we enter the sukkah.
I accepted something significant upon myself.
Excellent.
Now: what is the first rung?
Not “I want more peace in my marriage,” but which sentence will I stop saying during an argument.
Not “I want a better relationship with my children,” but which evening this week will I sit with one child without interruptions.
Not “I want to study more Torah,” but which book will be on the table tomorrow and at what time will I open it.
Not “I want to be a giving person,” but to whom will I give this week and how much.
Not “I want to pray better,” but which one blessing will I say more slowly tomorrow.
A goal that cannot be translated into the next action is not yet a plan. It is a wish.
Here, perhaps, lies the deeper meaning of the overly high sukkah.
There is nothing wrong with the heavens.
The problem begins when what is supposed to be above you can no longer be felt where you are standing.
So too in life: an aspiration should be high enough to pull us upward, but close enough to affect what we do today.
A real goal is not only something I can see from far away.
It is something that changes my next step.
The question is therefore not only, “Where do I want to arrive?”
The harder question is: “What in my life will be different tomorrow morning because I truly want to arrive there?”
A person can spend an entire life looking at summits.
But no one has ever climbed a mountain in one step.
The dream may reach the heavens. The next step must remain on the ground.