Before Brené Brown made the arena popular, it sat under the glass in my office.
There’s a line I return to often—not from Torah or Talmud, but from Theodore Roosevelt. From a 1910 speech in Paris, often quoted, often misunderstood:
“It is not the critic who counts… The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena… who errs, who comes short again and again… but who does actually strive to do the deeds… who, at the best, knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
That final clause—“those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat”—is what I cannot shake. I can live with being wrong. I can live with failing, being told I pushed too hard. What I cannot abide—what none of us should—is going through life unmarked, untouched. A life unlit by passion is a life already half buried.
And for what it’s worth, I doubt Roosevelt was concerned with your net worth. He wasn’t praising the man with the most well-managed retirement portfolio or the safest reputation. Bank accounts didn’t impress him. Entitlement meant nothing. Sitting on your laurels—if you even had any—didn’t qualify as a moral achievement. The only currency he cared about was effort. Presence. Fire. Being in it.
If you want a life of mediocrity, go right ahead. It’s safer. It’s quieter. You’ll upset fewer people. But ask yourself: What will you be remembered for? What did you love so much you risked something for it?
We fault people for their mistakes—and rightly so. But most of us don’t fail because we tried and stumbled. We fail because we never tried. We spend our lives hedging, toning ourselves down, making sure not to come on too strong. We confuse cynicism for intelligence. We mistake caution for wisdom. We shrink ourselves to fit a world that is already starving for depth—and then wonder why we feel so hollow.
Passion—that wild, irrational, inconvenient force—is what wakes us up in the morning. It drives us to create, to argue, to parent, to pray, to build something that wasn’t there before. Yes, it leads us astray sometimes. Yes, we overreach. And yes, we will inevitably disappoint someone. I say this with love—oh well.
Would you rather your gravestone read, “They annoyed some people”? Or “They led a life of ordinary men and women”? Give me the former. At least I’ll know I cared enough to try.
Our tradition is filled with passionate people. Moses, who smashed the tablets at Sinai. Pinchas, whose zeal shocked even God. Miriam, who packed a tambourine in Egypt because she believed—before deliverance—that there would be dancing. These were not cold, calculated figures. They were alive to the moment. They felt. They raged. They rejoiced. And because they dared, we still speak their names.
One of my favorite rabbinic stories involves Rabbi Akiva. He began life as an illiterate shepherd. He fell in love with Rachel, the daughter of a wealthy man, who saw potential in him no one else did. She told him she would marry him only if he committed to Torah. He did. At 40 years old, he began learning like a child. He became the greatest sage of his generation.
But that’s not the part that moves me most. Years later, when he returned home surrounded by thousands of students, Rachel came to greet him. His students, not knowing who she was, tried to push her away. Akiva stopped them and said: “Everything that is mine and yours belongs to her.”
He didn’t mean just his scholarship. He meant his fire. His transformation. His risk. Passion carried him from obscurity to greatness. It cost him comfort, status, stability—but it made him who he was.
And it didn’t protect him from tragedy. Akiva was brutally executed by the Romans. But even as they tore his flesh, he recited the Shema—his final breath a prayer of love and defiance. Passion brought him there too. He died, yes. But not as a cold and timid soul.
In Jewish life, we often reward restraint. We like order—services that start on time, sermons that don’t go long, children who sit still. But our prayers are made fuller through passion. Not just the melody, but the kavanah—the fire behind the words. The shofar on Rosh Hashanah, the tears of Kol Nidrei, the zemirot of Shabbat—these move us because someone lets themselves feel. Because someone dares to care.
You can daven like you’re checking a box. Or you can daven like your heart is on fire. That choice matters.
A Hasidic story tells of a boy who wanders into synagogue on Yom Kippur. He doesn’t know how to pray, but he has a flute. Overwhelmed, he lifts it and plays. The congregants are horrified—how dare he disrupt such a sacred moment! But the Baal Shem Tov smiles. The boy’s music, he says, pierced the heavens in a way their words could not. Because it was real. Because it was full of soul.
That’s passion.
And yet, we are training it out of ourselves—and out of our children. In The Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt argues that we’re raising kids in a world engineered for passivity. Risk is minimized. Discomfort is pathologized. Identity is flattened into curated profiles. “Let them be bored,” he pleads. Let them fail. Let them feel. His argument is spiritual: we are depriving kids of the messy, emotional experiences that give rise to agency, resilience—and passion. And then we wonder why they are anxious, numb, or avoidant.
We are creating cold and timid souls.
But a full life requires feeling. Emotional literacy isn’t optional. I’m not sure it can be taught in a classroom. But I know it can be modeled. We learn it from passionate mentors, parents, teachers. People who cry in front of us. Who argue because they care. Who lose themselves in music, or prayer, or poetry. Who tell us what they love, and why.
Rabbi Nachman of Breslov, the ecstatic mystic, once said, “The whole world is a very narrow bridge, and the most important thing is not to be afraid.” But he also said something even more radical: “If you won’t be a better person tomorrow than you are today, what need do you have for tomorrow?” That’s not a call to perfection. It’s a call to passion. To not settle. To not resign.
Yes, passion will sometimes lead you astray. You’ll misjudge. You’ll overstep. And you will get hurt. But you will have lived. You will have been present to the beauty and the agony of it all. You will have been in the arena.
This, I think, is the deepest prayer we can offer—not just with words, but with our lives: Let me care so much it hurts. Let me be moved. Let me love fully, foolishly. Let me pray like it counts. Let me stay open. Let me fail while daring greatly.
We have enough critics. Enough cleverness. Enough curated lives. What we need are more hearts on sleeves. More teachers who still believe. More leaders who still feel. More parents who apologize. More friends who call first. More rabbis who weep at funerals and laugh too loud at weddings.
We need more people willing to be ridiculous for the sake of something real.
You don’t have to be perfect. But you do have to try. You do have to risk. You have to let your life matter.
And when you do, you’ll find yourself—surprisingly, inevitably—not alone.
You will be surrounded by others who dared. Some bruised. Some burned. All fully alive.
We are the ones in the arena.
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