Seven Times He Falls, and Rises

“For a righteous person falls seven times and rises, but the wicked stumble in evil.” A Question to Start “For a righteous person falls seven times and rises.” Stop on this verse for a moment. There is a question in it that will not let the mind rest. Why does the righteous person fall in the first place? If he is righteous, let him guard himself! If he is great, let him be careful! Isn’t the whole point of being righteous not to fall? And if he has already fallen, what is so great about getting up? Let him stand firm from the start, and then he won’t need to get up! But the verse says something completely different. It does not apologize for the fall. It shows the fall as part of the picture of the righteous person. “Falls seven times,” and after that, “and rises.” This is the path. It is not by chance. The Parable: What the System Does to Us Let’s look at something simple that we all know. A child grows up in school. The whole system is built on one thing: don’t make mistakes. Get good grades. Don’t fail. Don’t step out of line. The “top student” is the one who collects perfect grades, goes on to university, and then... works in someone else’s company. And who is that “someone else”? Very often, he is exactly the child the top student looked down on. The one who couldn’t sit still. The one who got bad grades. The one who failed and fell, then got up, tried again, failed again, and got up again. Out of all those failures, he built something that only he could have built. This is not an accident. It is a pattern. A system built to prevent failure blocks real growth at the same time. The “muscle” that lets a person stand grows stronger through falling. Someone who has never fallen does not know how to get up. The Lesson: The Voice That Plays With Your Head Dear friend, now feel where this touches you. How many times have you fallen short of a spiritual goal you set for yourself? In Torah study, in prayer, in some special practice you took on? And after the fall came that voice: “Again. You never change. You’re hopeless. It’s not even worth trying.” The evil inclination, the inner voice that pulls us toward wrong, works exactly like that school system. It convinces you that a spiritual fall is the end of the story. It tells you that if you fell, you have proven you are broken at the root. And with that, it freezes you completely. Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi, author of the Tanya, the classic book of Hasidic thought, writes about this. He says a person must not be sad and crushed because of his falls. That sadness is itself a greater obstacle than any other. He also reveals that the evil inclination drops a person into gloom and sadness so that he will stop serving Hashem. In other words, the evil inclination’s tool is not the fall itself. Its tool is the despair that comes after it. The Explanation: The Fall Is Part of the Plan Now to the heart of the matter. “For a righteous person falls seven times and rises.” The verse does not say, “The righteous person fell, and even so he got up.” It says that the righteous person falls, and rises. This is how Hashem builds righteous people. The fall is not a breakdown with no explanation. It is the tuition paid for true greatness. There is a well-known teaching of the holy Baal Shem Tov, founder of the Hasidic movement: a descent for the sake of a higher ascent. The descent is not an obstacle on the way up. The descent is what makes the climb possible. When a person goes down to a low place, deep strengths come out in him that he never knew he had. He is forced to search, to ask, and to take hold of his roots again. From there he rises to a place he could never have reached by a straight, step-by-step road. This is the secret of the verse “I am dark, yet beautiful.” The darkness itself, the dark side of serving Hashem, does not go against the beauty. It is part of it. The darkness is not proof of failure. It is proof of a process.