Kol Nidre 5787 – “Standing on the Narrow Bridge” by Rabbi Suzie Jacobson

“Standing on the Narrow Bridge”

Rabbi Suzie Jacobson | Kol Nidre 5787
September 20, 2026 | Temple Israel of Boston 

View the video recording of this sermon

 

Every year after the High Holy Days, I take a trip with my rabbinical school best friends. Between the three of us we have seven children under the age of eight, three congregations, and middle-aged lives full of ordinary joys and struggle. Over twelve years, this trip has become essential: a few days when we do not parent, we do not rabbi, and our only role is friend. We talk—a lot. We encourage each other, or push each other. It is our postponed Elul, our cheshbon hanefesh, a reckoning that comes only after the gates have closed. Those conversations carry us through the year. Which is good, because we are spectacularly bad at reaching each other on the phone.

Last year we went to Sedona and spent a few days hiking, cooking, and talking beneath the red rock mountains. One day we hiked to a place called Devil’s Bridge. The trail began as a ribbon of rust-colored sand, winding between silver-green juniper and the twisted, cherry-red limbs of manzanita. As we walked and talked, Sedona’s great sandstone monuments glowed around us in the morning light. Prickly pear spread its paddles like open hands along the path, and agave rose taller than any of us, standing sentinel over our conversation. Like that conversation, the desert felt both harsh and tender, challenging and protective.

As the trail climbed, sand gave way to slickrock, and slickrock to a staircase of uneven stone the mountain seemed to have built for us. With every step the view widened over the green sweep of the Coconino National Forest. My heart hammered – more from fear than exertion. I am scared of heights, and even more terrified of climbing on unsteady ground. But that day I was feeling brave. This felt like something I had to do.

The bridge surprised me. Suddenly we were on level ground, and there it was. A slender span of sandstone arcing across empty space, seventy feet above the canyon floor, carved over millions of years by nothing more than wind, water, and time.

My friends did not want to stand on the bridge. Somehow, I knew I needed to.

When I think of that moment, it’s like I’m still standing there. Above me the sky is a blue so deep it edges toward purple. Below, the forest is nothing but shadow. I step out.

The stone is solid beneath my boots, and the vertigo hits me at once – a terror that courses through my whole body. Every instinct tells me to drop to my knees, to touch as much solid ground as I can. But somehow, I walk to the bridge’s end and stand still. The world goes silent. Nothing exists but my body suspended above the canyon and the narrow strip of rock beneath my feet.

And in an instant, my fear of heights gives way to something far more terrifying. This, I think, is my gesher tzar me’od—the very narrow bridge Rebbe Nachman of Breslov told us not to fear. The bridge is no longer a bridge. The canyon is no longer a canyon. On one side stands my terror of continuing to live the life I am living. On the other, my terror of changing it. I understand why the Yavapai and Apache held these rocks sacred. On this stone hanging in the air, metaphor becomes meaning, and I see clearly what I have never allowed myself to face.

I don’t know how long I spent on that bridge. I don’t remember what made me return to my friends.  But as we began our descent, the walk grew easier on my legs and harder on my heart. I kept glancing over my shoulder, trying to understand what had just changed. We covered ten miles that day. It felt as though I had traveled much farther.

“The whole world is a very narrow bridge, and the main thing is to have no fear at all.” That is the Rebbe Nachman we sing. But in Likutei Moharan, he teaches something slightly different:

הָאָדָם צָרִיךְ לַעֲבֹר עַל גֶּשֶׁר צַר מְאֹד מְאֹד 

A person must cross a very, very narrow bridge.

 וְהַכְּלָל וְהָעִקָּר – שֶׁלֹּא יִתְפַּחֵד כְּלָל 

And the whole rule, the essence, is this: do not make yourself afraid at all.

Two differences. First, it is not that the whole world is a narrow bridge – it is that each of us, alone, must cross our own. Second, we sing lo l’fached, do not fear. But Rebbe Nachman writes lo yitpached – do not frighten yourself. He is not asking us to feel nothing. He is asking us not to manufacture our own terror. 

Not three years after Rebbe Nachman died in Ukraine, Søren Kierkegaard was born in Copenhagen. The father of existentialism never wrote about narrow bridges, but he wrote a great deal about standing at the edge.

In his 1844 book The Concept of Anxiety, Kierkegaard asks us to imagine someone who looks down into a yawning abyss and grows dizzy. Why? Part of it is fear of falling. Fear of crumbling rock, of gravity, of something you cannot control. But then a second, deeper feeling arrives: the realization that nothing is stopping you from stepping off. You could. The only thing between you and the abyss is your own choice. This feeling has no external object. Its object is your own freedom. It comes from inside. “Anxiety,” Kierkegaard writes, “is the dizziness of freedom.”

We have free will. We choose our own actions, our own path. 

Fear can be avoided – step back from the edge and it is gone. Anxiety cannot, because you cannot step back from yourself. Which is uniquely human. 

Kierkegaard does not think anxiety is something to get rid of. He calls it “a serving spirit”—a teacher. “Whoever has learned to be anxious in the right way,” he writes, “has learned the ultimate.” Anxiety, faced rather than fled, strips away every false comfort and leaves you in the only place where faith is actually possible: standing before your own freedom with nothing to hold onto.

That is what happened to me above the canyon in Sedona. The bridge stopped being a bridge because the real abyss wasn’t below me. It was the open questions of my own life.

Tonight, as we enter Yom Kippur together, our tradition asks each of us to stand at that same edge—to walk Rebbe Nachman’s very, very narrow bridge.

We spend the High Holidays cultivating fear on purpose. We call these days the Yamim Noraim, and we usually translate that as the Days of Awe. But yirah means fear just as much as it means awe. Yamim Noraim: the Fearful Days.

We stand and recite the Unetaneh Tokef, with its terrible litany of everything that might happen in the year ahead – who by fire, who by water. It tells us we are grass that withers, flowers that fade, no more substantial than a cloud passing overhead. On Yom Kippur we dress in white, the color of the shroud we will one day be buried in, so that we cannot look away from death.

And throughout Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, in every Amidah, we recite a prayer called U’v’chen:

וּבְכֵן תֵּן פַּחְדְּךָ 

“And so, Adonai our God, place Your pachad—Your fear—upon all You have made, and Your terror upon all You have created…”

Pachad. It is the very root Rebbe Nachman uses when he warns us lo yitpached – do not frighten yourself. He tells us not to cultivate fear, and then we stand up, Amidah after Amidah, and ask God to cultivate it for us. On the surface, it sounds like we are doing a spectacularly poor job of following Rebbe Nahman’s teaching. We are sitting here reading liturgy designed to make us afraid! I wasn’t thinking about my own death—but now I am. Thank you, machzor.

Unless the liturgy knows exactly what it is doing. Perhaps before we can recognize how much power we have to change our lives, we have to stop ignoring and deflecting the fears we already carry. The philosopher Bertrand Russell put it this way: “Until you have admitted your own fears to yourself… you cannot hope to think truly about many matters of great importance… To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.”

I should admit that Russell was attacking religion when he wrote that. He believed religion breeds superstition in order to create fear, and fear in order to justify cruelty.

But I don’t think he was describing Judaism. Judaism does not manufacture fear to keep us in line. It asks us to see ourselves, our relationships, and our world clearly and bravely, because only then can we build the tools we need to live well. And there is no need to manufacture fear. Being a Jew is frightening enough.

For centuries our people have been harassed, expelled, ghettoed, shut out of work and civic life, and murdered by an antisemitism that can be tracked and measured across every century and every continent. That is real. That is terrifying.

Being a human is frightening enough. We raise children – small beings with their own hearts and minds who live beyond our protection and control. Anything can happen to them, even while we are on duty. Every choice we make about our work, our marriages, our money, our time carries consequences, some within our control and some far outside it. If we live with our eyes open, we see that every moment holds the possibility of calamity.

No one needs superstition to be afraid. Fear is baked into the human condition.

But seeing that is only the first step. The harder question is what to do with it.

I have always been troubled by a mitzvah in Deuteronomy. Before Israel goes to war, the priest tells them to not be afraid. Maimonides counts this as one of the 613 commandments. But how can a person be commanded not to be afraid in the middle of a war?

The Tzemach Tzedek offers an answer I find both interesting and troubling. The soul, he teaches, wears three garments: thought, speech, and action. These three are where a person’s conduct takes place, and these three are where free will lives. You can always choose what to think about, what to speak about, what to do. So even if your heart is terrified, you can pull your thought, your speech, and your action away from that fear. The main thing, he writes, is not to think or speak about it at all – instead we should focus on whatever is opposite.

I am not sure about his conclusion. Distraction is a real emotional tool, but avoidance only gets us so far. Whether the battle is literal or metaphorical, between people or within ourselves, what we refuse to look at is usually what hurts us most. Often the only way to manage pain is to walk through it.

But I think he is right about the garments. Thought, speech, and action. That is where our will lives. That is where we are free to decide who we are.

Martin Buber, the great Jewish existentialist, wrote that “sin in man is decisionlessness.” For Buber, the opposite of sin is not perfection. It is agency. We sin when we refuse to see the world and ourselves as they are – when we forget that we have the power to choose. And fear feeds on exactly that forgetting. It thrives in chaos and in silence.

The rabbis had a response. The Talmud teaches: “My child, if this wretched one—the evil inclination—encounters you, drag it into the study hall. If it is stone, it will melt. If it is iron, it will shatter.”

Drag it into the study hall. We are not meant to live alone with our anxieties. We are not supposed to hide our struggles behind a curtain of respectable denial. We are supposed to make them the topic of conversation. When we speak our fears aloud, they lose some of their power. When we study and argue and live in honest conversation with others, our perspective shifts.

I think about that bridge in Sedona. Rebbe Nachman told me not to frighten myself. The Tzemach Tzedek told me to turn away from fear. Kierkegaard told me my anxiety is what makes me human. And standing seventy feet above the canyon, I did none of those things well. I was terrified. I did not distract or stop frightening myself. I simply felt the fear.

But then I came down. And for the next five miles, with the two friends who had waited for me at the edge, I talked. About what I had seen out there, the two terrors, the life I was living and the life I was afraid to choose. I did not carry it home in silence. I dragged it into the study hall. That is what those trips have always been, I realize now: a study hall with better scenery and a cheese plate. And somewhere on that long walk down, what had felt like stone began to melt.

When the Unetaneh Tokef asks who will live and who will die, we are not meant to stay in the terror. Anxiety is meant to be our teacher. When we recognize that our lives are temporary, we understand that they are precious. And because we have will, change is possible. Which is exactly where the prayer ends:

וּתְשׁוּבָה וּתְפִלָּה וּצְדָקָה מַעֲבִירִין אֶת רֹעַ הַגְּזֵרָה 

Repentance, prayer, and charity avert the severity of the decree.

Three garments. Three places where the will lives.

Teshuvah—the work of thought. Honest reckoning with who we have been, and the decision to change how we live.

Tefillah—the work of speech. A practice of truth-telling and reflection, a daily push against the narcissism of the world, a reminder that we are a small part of something magnificent.

Tzedakah—the work of the hands. The tangible acceptance that generosity is not merely nice. We are responsible for one another. And whatever we lack, we still have so much to give.

The Talmud tells a story about teshuvah. Rabbi Eliezer said: “Repent one day before your death.” His students asked the obvious question: “But how can a person know which day they will die?” And he answered: “Exactly. So repent today, lest you die tomorrow—and in this way, all your days will be lived in teshuvah.”

I love the honesty. Rabbi Eliezer is not being morbid. He is saying: don’t wait to repent. And I would extend his teaching. Don’t wait to root your life in your values. Don’t wait to pray, to reflect. Don’t wait to be generous. The time is always now.

My friends took two pictures of me on that bridge.

In the first, I am frozen. Arms at my sides, eyes down, staring at the strip of stone beneath my feet. In the second, I have turned back toward them, arms raised over my head, triumphant. That is the one I put on Instagram.

Neither picture is honest. What happened out there was more complicated than either one, and it happened in the space between them—the space no camera caught. A person standing still, recognizing her fear, deciding.

Today we stand before God and before each other with no filter and admit that we are somewhere between frozen and triumphant, and we are not sure which way we are facing.

Later that week my friends bought me a small piece of art—a painting of Devil’s Bridge. They wanted me to have something to help me remember what happened up there. It sits on my dresser now. I see it every morning.

But the truth is, I don’t need to remember because I am still standing on that bridge. I think I always have been. I think we all are. Most days we just don’t let ourselves notice.

This is what I finally understand: the narrow bridge isn’t just a beautiful place in Sedona. Every one of us is always standing between our life as it is and our life as it could be. Between the fear of standing still and the fear of changing. Between the self we have been and the self we have not yet decided to become. The canyon is always there. The question is only whether we look.

Rebbe Nachman knew that. He didn’t promise us the bridge would get wider. He didn’t say we would stop being afraid. He said: lo yitpached klal. Do not frighten yourself. Do not manufacture a terror larger than the one you already carry. Stand still if you must. Look down if you must. And then—with your thoughts, with your words, with your actions—decide.

That is what these days are for. Not to leave us frozen or make us feel triumphant. To make us honest. Standing on the narrow bridge with our eyes open, with people beside us who will wait at the edge, with a tradition that tells us the decree is not yet sealed.

Kol ha’olam kulo gesher tzar me’od. The whole world is a very narrow bridge.

We are all out on it, together, right now.

The main thing is not to frighten ourselves.

The main thing is to take the next step.