Descending to Ascend: Spiritual Mountaineering

Over the last year-and-a-half I’ve cultivated a new hobby: mountaineering.  Let me be a little more specific: reading about mountain climbing, especially those who’ve summited the fourteen tallest mountains in the world, all of them 8,000+ meters, that is, at least 26,000 feet high.  Everest is on that short list, but so are mountains with names like K-2, Anapurna and Nanga Parbat.

The greatest climber of our time? Reinhold Messner hands down.  If you aren’t familiar with his name, you should be.  He was the first to conquer all 14 peaks over 8,000 meters; he was also the first to reach the top of Mount Everest without supplemental oxygen. His other adventures include a solo crossing of the Gobi desert on foot and Antarctica on skies.  What is most impressive about Reinhold Messner, however, is his candor in admitting acknowledging his many defeats "At least one-third of my plans have failed,” Messner reflected in an interview.  “I failed a total of 13 times on the 8000 meter peaks. I have [not only]  failed many times, but I am the mountaineer with the most failures.”

My new found fascination with mountaineering and the advent of COVID-19 are not coincidental.  Living in a more restrictive circle has occasioned in me a hunger to embrace a larger world.  And if I can’t get to places that are usually accessible to me, then I can at least mentally travel to places that are completely inaccessible to me -- even in more normal times. There’s an odd comfort in knowing I am really no farther away from summitting K-2 or the Matterhorn than I was before COVID.  Through photography, documentaries, and my own imagination I may accompany the great mountaineers of our time as well as those of earlier ages.

There are two very different approaches to mountain climbing.  In Alpine style, the climber carries all of her food, shelter, and equipment as she climbs.  Alpinists start up a mountain with the goal of not returning until they have achieved their objective.  Expedition style mountaineering, on the other hand, is totally different.  It requires setting up a fixed line of camps on a mountain in advance. Expeditionary climbers will carry equipment upward, establish a camp and then descend.  They will do so again and again, establishing subsequent camps higher up the slope, only to return to base camp after each trip.  Finally, they will set out to achieve the summit, stopping at the various camps they’ve set up along the way.  It is far more taxing and time consuming, but it’s by far the safest way to conquer the tallest mountains.

When we first encountered Mount COVID, we approached it as Alpinists.  It appeared as a single challenge to face, overcome, and put  behind us.  In the first few months of the pandemic, people were patient, philosophical even.  Couples postponed weddings or scaled back their festivities without complaint; b’nai mitzvah celebrations were held in empty sanctuaries as friends and family joined online. For several months we didn’t hold a single service in person, but instead moved Shabbat and weekday services to Zoom without a minyan.  School met largely online.  We knew a vaccine would come and we just had to sit tight.  And, indeed, for awhile it appeared that COVID was on the wane.

Yet what we thought was a straightforward Alpine-style climb has turned out to be a Himalayan expedition.  We suffer from pandemic fatigue.  Supermarkets no longer bother updating their signs with the latest CDC guidelines.  Although this surge has been worse in Florida than anything we encountered last year, more people shrug their shoulders.  Institutions striving to protect people and follow the guidance of medical professionals within the community are verbally attacked for being dictatorial, exclusionary, and paranoid. We are done with COVID, even if it clearly isn’t done with us.  

Yet if we’re prepared to learn, the pandemic has valuable life lessons to impart. In our impatient society, “If the Lord is my shepherd, I shall get what I want, He maketh my life linear, and leadeth me by the short cut. He restoreth my impatient soul, and guideth me by the black-and-white road for my own sake.”  

 Still, “Life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans,“ as John Lennon once observed.  We are on a mountain in the Himalayas, a windswept ledge, one in which the way forward is marked by jagged shoulders of rock and outcropings that need to be neogiated.  To reach the summit we will need to climb strategically and patiently, for responsible climbing necessitates moving downward to avoid certain obstacles before resuming the trek upward.

Of course, this is ultimately true of life in general.  Time and again we disappoint ourselves by expecting life to be linear.  We know problems arise, but then we solve them and life goes on, one and done. Except when it doesn’t. Life’s topography isn’t flat or smooth.  Alcoholics fall off the wagon, get back on, fall off and get back on again; they may need to fall many times before finally achieving long-term sobriety.  A person marries with the hope of living happily ever after, but then goes through a divorce, sometimes multiple times. A cancer in remission recurs, a friendship once mended can fracture yet again.  A city hit with a devastating hurricane may be hit by another monster storm on the same date 16 years later.  

Rabbi Elimelekh of Lizhensk, an early master of Hasidism wrote of the spiritual journey of the tzadik, the truly righteous leader, as one of yeridah l’tzorekh aliyah, descent for the sake of ascent.  For the Lizhensker, a rebbe travels between the realm of the supernal and the material -- in caring for his followers he brings God’s transcendent power down to earth in the form of blessings even as he seeks to elevate his Hasidim to higher spiritual levels.  Each time he descends from the spiritual heights to attend to the needs of others, he gathers strength to climb even higher.

We are not tzadikim, but on life’s mountain survival requires we embrace yeridah l’tzorekh aliyah.  Like trekkers to the great peaks of the Himalayas, the thinness of the atmosphere necessitates that we descend to climb higher.  Our faith in God teaches us to accept the labyrinthe in which we find ourselves as integral to the journey.  Our setbacks are detours, not failures.  We descend only to push higher and upward.  At this time of year, if we are truly honest with ourselves, we are more aware of our faults and blemishes, our disappointments and failures.  It is also taught that at no other time of year is God closer to us than at the season of the Yamim Noraim.  These are not coincidences, but are closely linked.  Near the peak of the greatest mountains, the air is at its thinnest, the going at its hardest.  To be truly worthy of a summit, one must have travelled up and down the lower slopes many times.

There’s a story of a man lost in a forest.  He comes upon another man, who is just as lost as he is.  Still, they walk on together -- not only because there is comfort in sharing a burden with another person, but also because they can guide one another away from the paths that each previously tried, yet led to nowhere. Reinhold Messner makes this point even more forcefully.  In his book, My Life at the Limit, he writes, “If I lose my climbing partner, I’ve lost everything. He’s the only one who can belay me on the next pitch, or help me survive another night.  We need our partners, even if it’s just to share the fear.  It’s not just one guy and another guy; it’s a unit, a fellowhip of the rope.  The team is the sum of its parts, and it’s not divisible.  This feeling of solidarity, of shared identity, is unconditional.”

The greatest challenge we face now more than ever is to realize there are no single climbers.  In truth there never are any single climbers --  to live in society is to impact others and be impacted by them.  The decision to wear masks in public or not affects others; the decision not to get vaccinated affects others -- more dramatically, but no less than myriad other decisions we make: to volunteer, to give tzedakah, to pay synagogue dues, to drive defensively, to quit smoking or to find a designated driver when attending a part.  In asserting our complete autonomy we slice through the rope that ties us to our fellow climbers.  The irony is that in cutting the rope we may think we are freeing ourselves of the burden of those below us, when in fact we may actually be cutting the very link that keeps us secured to the climber above us. We do this at great peril to ourselves and others.

In the village of Zermatt, Switzerland, in the shadow of the Matterhorn, there is a museum dedicated to climbing.  There you will learn the fascinating story of Edward Whymper whose party of seven were the first to conquer the Matterhorn in 1865.  Tragically, their great triumph was marred by tragedy during the descent: one of their ropes wore out and split apart; four of the seven fell to their deaths.  The broken end of that rope is still on display in Zermatt, 160 years later.

On this Rosh Hashanah let us check the ropes that tie us as climbers together on life’s slopes so that we may ascend together, because those ties that bind us are the best guarantee  we have of reaching the summit and back.  We've got some difficult days ahead, some downward stages on our upward journey, but we can reach the mountaintop and from it’s pinnacles see a land of promise.  “As “ שִׁ֗יר לַֽמַּֽ֫עֲל֥וֹת אֶשָּׂ֣א עֵ֭ינַי אֶל־הֶהָרִ֑ים מֵ֝אַ֗יִן יָ֘בֹ֥א עֶזְרִֽי -- A song for going upward: I lift my eyes to the mountains, from where will my help come?”  From the maker of mountains and the mover of hearts, together we will climb higher and lower, and ever higher, above and beyond.