Touching Fire Without Getting Burned
On holiness, noise, and learning to glow without combusting
The Yom Tov–Shabbos combo left me somewhere between burned out and burning bright.
Two full days of no creating, no brainstorming, no researching, no writing — just being. Existing. Serving no purpose other than being a Jew. A human.
Which, as it turns out, is its own Olympic sport in endurance.
For someone with misophonia — where one loud slurp or shriek can flip the switch from Eishes Chayil to holy banshee — “just being” often feels less meditative and more gladiatorial.
But the sukkah was stunning. The weather was perfect. My kids — miracle of miracles — actually got along (mostly.)
And my husband, the unsung tzaddik of man who is married to a woman with ADHD, took over generously every time my nervous system threatened to quit.
So yes, gratitude — deep, trembling gratitude.
And yet, tangled up with it, a thread of holy madness.
Because holiness often shows up like that — gentle on the surface, wild underneath.
It invites you in, then stretches you past the point of comfort, whispering, "This, too, is love. Grow, my dear one."
And somewhere in that flickering tension between aw, overwhelm, and a lot of mental yoga - a question rose up in my mind. A metaphor for my experience.
> Why does G-d let us touch fire?
Because that’s what Yom Tov and shabbos feel like — cradling the impossible.
Too divine to ignore, too human to manage.
Too beautiful for my bandwidth.
Too relentless for my better self to keep up.
Too close to infinity for comfort, too bound to mortality for perfection.
So yes, I felt gratitude — deep, sincere, impossible-to-deny gratitude.
But also the dizzy kind that teeters dangerously close to madness.
Because holiness can be both peaceful and overwhelming.
These two days wore me thin — by 12 p.m. on the second day, we had no working kitchen sink.
Maybe that’s spiritual growth?
The laughter we shared over our disassembled faucet was growth. We carried that burden easily.
The truth is there are certain holidays, certain weeks, that seem to always bring out the secret scars. Those are much worse.
We all know what happens when you touch real fire.
Maybe it was the Havdalah candle — or the Menorah, if you were feeling bold.
Did anyone else have that inevitable pyromania stage around eight years old?
I’m convinced every Orthodox kid does.
There’s just so much fire in this religion.
Shabbos candles, menorahs, yahrzeit flames, Lag BaOmer bonfires.
Even our stories come smoking — Avraham’s furnace, Moshe’s bush, Eliyahu’s showdown.
(And charcuterie boards. Don’t ask. It felt relevant.)
Fire calls to us. It’s ancient, alive, magnetic — a shimmering contradiction that both warms and warns.
We reach for it, wide-eyed and curious, not out of rebellion but recognition.
It’s familiar. It’s us.
And then there’s that core memory — holding your finger in the flame for a second longer than you should have.
Feeling nothing at first, then that quick, electric sting.
Wonder and pain, coiled together.
That moment when the soul says, See? You touched eternity!
And the skin answers, Yes, and it hurts.
Fire doesn’t compromise boundaries.
It doesn’t care that you were a kid who thought you were Superman for one second.
It gives you that illusion — then takes it away.
But why?
Why does it let you believe you’re infinite before reminding you you’re dust?
Why bother letting us feel like Superman at all?
I think of Moshe, standing before a bush engulfed in fire yet unconsumed.
How did he do it?
How do you stand that close to divine heat — the raw, unfiltered kind — and not be reduced to ash, when your humanness is so painfully visible before the Infinite?
Maybe Moshe found something called empathy — or perhaps acceptance.
Maybe it’s not that the fire stopped burning.
Maybe he simply learned how to stand in it.
> “וַיַּרְא ה' כִּי סָר לִרְאוֹת – רָאָה מֹשֶׁה שֶׁהַשְּׁכִינָה שְׁרוּיָה בְּצַעַר יִשְׂרָאֵל, וְנֵעוֹר בּוֹ רַחֲמָנוּת, וּמִתּוֹךְ רַחֲמָנוּת בָּאָה הַגְּאֻלָּה.”
“‘And G-d saw that he turned aside to see’ — Moshe saw that the Shechinah was dwelling in the sorrow of Israel, and compassion was awakened within him, and through that compassion came redemption.”
— Sfas Emes, Shemos 5631
When Moshe realized that even G-d was inside the pain — that the Shechinah itself was burning with Israel — something shifted.
If G-d could be inside the fire and not despise Himself for it, maybe Moshe could too.
Seeing the Shechinah’s pain opened him to empathy for his own.
He stopped fighting his stammer, his self-doubt, the parts of him that felt too human for the holiness of his mission.
It took 7 days for Moshe to accept that G-d was not asking him to complete a perfect or even successful mission, only to stay present in the flame - to show up, to do.
---
Moshe, in his quiet work as a shepherd, had nowhere to hide his thoughts.
The wilderness gave him no walls to lean on, no noise to dissolve into.
Just the sheep, the wind, and G-d.
He learned to live in the fire without fleeing from it — to hold life’s heat in his hands and not be consumed.
---
Maybe Shabbos and Yom Tov are my version of that desert.
The stillness demands presence.
A space, a room where only I and G-d exist.
When pain was stitched into the sounds of Shabbos and Yom Tov growing up, presence as an adult takes work.
It’s not serenity — it’s exposure therapy.
It’s your gut tightening as Kiddush begins, your nervous system remembering before you do.
It’s whispering “amen” while your body hums along with the ghosts of its past.
Being with Hashem in those moments feels like learning to touch the same flame that once seared you —
to feel the heat without letting it consume you. To feel the heat and be comfortably warmed.
Shabbos isn’t always a haven.
Often where I meet the past without the option of running.
And ironically, Shabbos isn’t a noun at all — it’s a verb, a command to stop fleeing. A command to not do, and to just be.
The hardest thing is neither to fight nor to flee, but to stare down the barrel of memory and say,
“No thank you, sir. I don’t deserve to feel this today.”
That’s power.
That’s healing that lasts.
---
The arizal expounds on this idea.
הָאֵשׁ כְּלוּלָה מִבְּחִינַת חֶסֶד וּגְבוּרָה; הַחֶסֶד מֵאִיר, וְהַגְּבוּרָה שׂוֹרֶפֶת."
“Every flame is composed of chesed and gevurah — kindness and strength; the chesed illuminates, and the gevurah burns."
Too much gevurah (strength) and we’re scorched (obsessive);
too much chesed and the fire goes dim (burnout from too much giving.)
Somewhere between the two, lives the light that warms without wounding .
That’s the bush Moshe saw — a fire that had learned restraint, illumination.
Divine power refined by compassion.
The kind of holiness that doesn’t destroy — it transforms.
That, I think, is the invitation of Shabbos and Yom Tov:
to let the inner fire burn, but to sweeten it.
To let G-d’s intensity light us from within, yet learn not to let it consume us from without.
It takes bravery to feel everything and not run.
To listen to the noise of life, even when your nervous system files several urgent complaints in quick succession, and whisper back,
“Okay, I’m here. I’m still here. I’ll give it another ten minutes.”
Maybe that’s the point of this kind of holiness — the holy ambiguity.
The knowing and the unknowing. The spiritual whiplash we experience this time of year.
The gratitude and the insanity.
The fire that burns and the skin that somehow doesn't get singed immediately.
As commanded, I didn’t create. I didn’t write. I didn’t escape into clever words or research or business ideas.
Instead, I read. I played Uno several thousand times with my kids. I ate. I slept. I took walks. Hosted an intense sour candy competition. I just was.
And in that silence — that noise-filled, sugar-fueled, sensory-overwhelming, emotionally claustrophobic silence — I brushed against the edge of something eternal.
Something that drew me in and repelled me at the same time.
For two days, I touched fire.
I thought it would consume me.
But it didn’t burn me.
It lit something inside me.
And here I am, wondering what to call it.
Faith in myself?
Maybe even love — for the parts of me that don’t perform, that simply exist.
Maybe that’s the fragment Moshe found in the fire: not perfection, but permission.
The acceptance of his humanness — his stammer, his exhaustion, his people.
And maybe that’s the holiest thing I can do, too.
After the long string of Shabbos and Yamim Tovim — I try to
whisper to myself: theres no doing it "right."
I’m okay. I did good. I showed up.
I played Uno — meaning one in Spanish.
Who knew a children’s card game could double as Kabbalistic meditation?
Between the grape-juice elbow placements, theological debates over whether something was pink or magenta, and “Draw ten, Mommy! UNO!”
I think I finally got it.
G-d’s been sitting at the table this whole time —
smiling, shuffling the deck,
letting me win way more often than I deserve.
Because I’m His kid.
I let my kid win. It makes me happier than winning the games myself, because her joy is my greatest joy. Her win is my greatest win.
Maybe that’s what Moshe saw at the bush.
When he realized that even the Shechinah burned with Israel’s pain,
he understood that G-d’s compassion isn’t pity — it’s identification.
It’s G-d saying, “These are My children. My future. My everything.
Of course I’m in pain — how could I not be?”
For Moshe, who never truly experienced the meaning of family, that experience hit home, and healed something inside him.
You are Mine. I love you because you are Mine.
And maybe that’s what I’m learning too
that the more I glimpse G-d’s tenderness for me,
the easier it becomes to extend that tenderness inward, toward myself.
"Ani l'dodi, V'dodi li"
"I am to my beloved, as my beloved is to me."