Now You're At The Grocery Store
Spiritual Hangovers
Being hungover is the worst. When it’s from certain intoxicants though, there’s usually a fix: something greasy, lots of water, and some rest. But what about hangovers of a different variety? The ones that come after exhausting but impactful journeys that we take.
There’s a specific kind of exhaustion that only comes after you’ve been through something big. The kinds of journeys where you’ve been fully opened up by any number of intense emotions: grief, joy, intensity, or by something that cracked you at the seams, and now the world just carries on. Life resumes with its dishes, laundry, school rides, activities and I am sitting there in a daze wondering,
didn’t we just had a Seder?
The Jewish antidote to this hangover, I want to suggest, is the Omer, the ritual counting of the days between Passover and Shavuot that is really so much more than just a rote numbering.
But first, Everest.
There is a phenomenon that climbers have documented for decades, referred to variously as “post-expedition depression” or, with characteristic mountaineer bluntness, the “post-summit blues.” You get home, and you find you don’t know how to manage the concept of walking into a grocery store with no one knowing you just summited Everest or K2. The intensity that organized your entire life is over. And ordinary life, which was waiting patiently the whole time, just resumes. And many climbers find, to their confusion and shame, that they can’t handle it.
The depression abyss opens up not on the way up, but on the way back down.1
The cruel irony is that reaching the summit doesn’t protect you from this. It might actually make it worse. You did the thing and succeeded, and now you’re at the grocery store.
What the climbers are describing, I think, is a spiritual problem. It’s not exclusively of course but underneath the science is something the great Sfat Emet noticed about the structure of Pesach roughly a century and a half before any of us had heard of Everest.
He opens a teaching of his from Pesach with what sounds like a technicality: tahara (purification) is supposed to precede kedusha (holiness). You get clean, then you get holy. That’s the order.
Except at Pesach, it wasn’t.
At the Exodus, God didn’t wait for us to be ready. We were forty-nine gates of tumah (impurity) deep. That’s the Zohar’s way of saying we were as far from prepared as a person can be. So sunken were were in the shmutz of Egypt that we had 49 rungs to climb, which, left to our own devices, we could not have crested. And yet with some divine nudging, the gates opened anyway. The the world of freedom, where impurity simply has no foothold, cracked open and light poured through, and the childen of Israel received a holiness they hadn’t earned. The gift came before the clean up, which, as a relatively new parent, isn’t advisable. Yet, here we are.
That’s what the Omer is. The forty-nine days are purification retroactively applied. We’re doing the purification work after the fact, powered by a holiness that arrived before we were ready to receive it properly.
The Sfat Emet is describing the structure of every profound human experience.
There are moments in life that hand you a transformation before you’re equipped to integrate it. Pesach is one and, I imagine, climbing to a summit is another. There are others that are more familiar: grief, falling in love, and having a child are just some of the more intense examples. Being part of something that felt like the world was briefly different in a way that exceeds your ordinary life is intoxicating. These things flood you with meaning before you know what to do with it. Then they end, and you’re back at the store.
The mistake, the one the Sfat Emet is quietly correcting, is thinking that because the experience is over, the work is also over. You’ve left the mountain and Passover in the rear view.
The Sfat Emet’s insight is that the Exodus didn’t end at the sea. It opened a door that then required forty-nine days of active, incremental, daily work just to absorb what had happened. ממחרת השבת “from the day after Shabbat”, the words the Torah uses to commence the omer, you start counting. Because even drawing on the power of what came through at Pesach, you still have to do the hard, unglamorous work of purifying each gate. You can’t skip it. You just get to do it with more fuel in the tank than you would have had otherwise.
This is the move the post-summit blues misses. The climbers who spiral aren’t wrong to feel the crash because he crash is real, and it’s telling them something true about how disorienting it is to return from extremity. What they’re missing is the frame: the summit was not the end of the story. It was the gift that arrived before they were ready. What’s left is the gift that now powers the much less dramatic work of actually becoming someone who has summited Everest, rather than someone who just did it once and has no idea what to do with that fact.
The Omer doesn’t let you coast on Pesach. It doesn’t say: you had the Seder, you did the thing, good job, back to normal. It says: what you received there was real, but you haven’t fully inhabited it yet, and inhabiting it is going to take some work. Every day is a gate in which a particular attribute lives: kindness, wonder, strength, beauty, majesty, eternality, kingship, foundationality (I am making that word up). The tradition is inviting us to actually do the granular work of integration rather than just nostalgia-ing back toward the holiday.
I don’t always do this well. The Seder felt meaningful as did the rest of the holiday, and six days later I’ve mostly filed it under “nice memories” and returned to whatever I was doing before.
What the Sfat Emet is offering is a different posture. The window doesn’t close for forty-nine days. And the holiness that blew in when you weren’t ready, that unconditional gift, that’s not gone. It’s available as the energy source for the work you now need to do.
The question isn’t whether you’re still riding the high. The question is whether you’re using the light from the peak to see more clearly in the ordinary days.
What got stirred up during the intensity: the questions, the longings, the things the holiday cracked open in you, those aren’t meant to be sealed back up. They’re the raw material with the omer waiting to be your container.
Shabbat Shalom and Happy Weekend!
Adir, I really love this piece!