Shalom Brothers: The Stories Men Tell About Their Lives (Devarim)

Rabbi Noam Raucher, MA.Ed – Executive Director, FJMC International

The Book of Deuteronomy begins with Moses telling a story.

He stands at the edge of the Promised Land and looks backward. He remembers the leaders he appointed, the spies who frightened the people, the choices that went wrong and the years spent wandering because fear became stronger than faith. Moses does not offer the clean, heroic version. He does not pretend that every decision was wise or that every setback was imposed upon him by someone else. He tells the truth about the journey because the people cannot enter a new land while remaining dishonest about the old one.

This may be one of the most important forms of work a man can undertake: learning how to tell the story of his life.

Men are often taught to tell our stories as accounts of achievement. We name the schools we attended, the positions we held, the people we led, the homes we built and the responsibilities we carried. When life moves upward, the story is easy to tell. We present each success as evidence that we understood the road and were strong enough to walk it.

The harder stories begin when the road disappears.

At the beginning of 2019, I lost my job. By the end of that same year, my marriage was over. In the span of twelve months, two of the structures through which I understood myself—my vocation and my family—had changed beyond recognition.

For a long time, I could have told that story as one of failure. I could have described 2019 as the year in which things were taken from me. I could have organized the memories around disappointment, rejection and the painful realization that the life I thought I was building would not continue in the form I had imagined.

None of that would have been entirely untrue. But it would not have been the whole truth.

Mary Oliver once wrote, “Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this, too, was a gift.” People can be like that. So can entire seasons of our lives.

Sometimes we receive something that looks only like darkness because we have not yet developed the eyes with which to see it. A job loss may initially appear to be an ending, while quietly creating the space for a different vocation. A divorce may feel like the collapse of a family, while slowly forcing everyone involved to become more honest about who they are, what they need and how they must learn to love differently.

This does not mean every painful event is secretly good. It does not require us to romanticize loss or absolve people of responsibility for the harm they cause. Darkness is darkness. Fear is fear. Failure has consequences. Moses does not erase the wilderness by calling it a blessing. But he does refuse to let the wilderness be meaningless.

That is the deeper challenge facing men when we review our lives. We must resist two equally tempting stories. The first says, “None of it was my fault.” The second says, “Everything that happened proves that I am a failure.” Neither story requires much courage. One protects the ego through blame; the other protects it through despair. Both keep a man trapped in the past. The more mature story is harder to tell.

The mature story asks: What happened? What part of it belonged to me? What did I fail to see? What did fear prevent me from doing? What did I learn only because the future I expected was taken away? What became possible after the life I had planned was no longer available?

Looking back now, I do not regard 2019 only as the year I lost a job and a marriage. It was also the year that demanded a more honest understanding of vocation, fatherhood, resilience and identity. It forced me to discover that I was more than a title and more than the role I occupied within a marriage. It did not give me immediate clarity. Like Moses and the Israelites, I still had to wander. But wandering is not the same as being abandoned. Sometimes it is the long, uneven process through which an old identity loosens its hold and a more truthful one begins to emerge.

Men often imagine strength as the ability to keep moving without looking back. Deuteronomy offers another possibility. Strength can also mean stopping, remembering and telling the truth about where we have been.

The purpose of life review is not to put ourselves on trial forever. It is to make sure that our unexamined fears do not lead the next stage of the journey. Moses speaks about the spies because fear once became contagious. He speaks about failed leadership because authority must be examined. He speaks about the people’s refusal to enter the land because missed opportunities can teach us how to recognize the next one.

A man who cannot revisit his failures is likely to repeat them. A man who can speak of nothing but his failures may never move beyond them. The work is to remember without becoming imprisoned by memory.

The stories we tell about our lives eventually become instructions. Our children hear them. Our friends absorb them. The younger men watching us learn whether disappointment produces bitterness, humility, wisdom or blame. They learn whether a man can acknowledge that he was afraid, that he made mistakes, that he lost things he loved and that he nevertheless remained capable of building a meaningful life. Perhaps this is why Deuteronomy begins with memory before it moves toward promise.

Before entering the land, the people must know who they have been. Before Moses leaves them, he must transform experience into teaching. And before any man begins the next chapter of his life, he must decide which story he will carry with him.

I was given a box of darkness in 2019. I would not have called it a gift then. Gifts are usually things we welcome, and there was much that year I did not welcome. But time has shown me that a gift does not always arrive as kindness. Sometimes it arrives as an interruption, a rupture or an ending. Its value lies not in the pain itself, but in what the pain eventually asks us to see.

The question is not whether darkness will enter our lives. It will. The question is whether, years later, we can open the box again and discover that something else was placed inside it: a truth we were not ready to hear, a strength we did not know we possessed or a road we could not see until the old one ended.