Last week I wrote about the record-breaking journey of Artemis II, how astronauts travelled farther than ever before, reaching distances no human has ever reached. There is something breathtaking about watching human beings refuse to stay confined by the old boundaries.

That itself carries a deeply Jewish message. That we are never meant to become comfortable with yesterday’s redemption. We commemorate our Exodus from Egypt, but we are not meant to spend the rest of our lives celebrating an old escape. Judaism demands of us to keep going. To keep growing. To keep leaving behind another inner Egypt, another fear, another limitation, another layer of who we were before.

After I posted that article, someone sent me a brilliant point.

The most difficult, most dangerous, and most critical part of their mission was not how far they went. It was not the records they broke, or how many times they orbited Earth.

The hardest part was their journey back home.

Travelling to the other side of the moon is astonishing. But the return to earth is far more terrifying. To come back from that distance meant reentering Earth’s atmosphere at roughly 24,500 miles per hour, hitting the atmosphere at exactly the right angle, surviving temperatures near 5,000 degrees, and then depending on a carefully timed parachute sequence to slow the capsule enough for a safe splashdown.

Imagine, they could have broken all records and still lost everything in the last stretch coming back home.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized how deeply Jewish that is.

We tend to think of spiritual greatness in levels of ascent. We think it’s all about rising higher. Feeling more inspired. Reaching beyond ourselves. We imagine holiness as the ability to transcend, to climb, to break past the limits of ordinary........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)