How can I tell whether an obstacle is a closed door or a wall?

Rabbi Landau teaches that this is the real skill in life: “knowing the difference between a door and a wall.” People ruin their lives in two ways. They walk away from doors the second they close, as if they were walls. Or, worse, they bleed on a wall thinking it’s just a stubborn door.

In A Soul at Peace, he calls both of these failures of diagnosis, not of effort. And the key to diagnosing correctly is setting the self aside. When a person is full of himself, every obstacle feels like a personal challenge to break through. When he stops asking “How will I win?” and asks “What do You want from me right now?”, the awareness to tell the difference begins to appear.

And even a wall is not final. “With the right tools,” he says, “you can actually remove walls.”

Going deeper: Rabbi Landau's teaching, level by level

Surface claim

Both giving up on doors and pushing on walls come from misreading the obstacle.

Deepest human truth

In the book Rabbi Landau writes that even the wall is a message, and our work is to hear it.

More questions from this teaching

• What should I do when a door closes on me?