Standing is a life-changing accomplishment. The first moment a toddler rises unaided marks her transition from four-legged to two-legged locomotion. Through scrapes and scratches and bruises she will come to grasp that walking and running are styles of controlling and overcoming the fall. Eventually, the young child begins to feel dignity in taking a stand and courage in standing firm in the face of resistance.
There is great religious significance to the act of standing. Above the ark in many a synagogue you will see the inscription, “Know before Whom you stand.” The central prayer in traditional Jewish worship is known simply as the Amidah, the “Standing.” The prayer begins with three steps taken forward into the presence of God, a bending of the knee, and then standing upright. While Jews pray in many postures, standing tall is primary.
But it is precisely because we stand that at times we fall. And this is true in Jewish prayer as well. We bend and we bow and even fall to the ground, as Job did. Psalm 30 gives voice to the choreography of prayer when it describes the terror of estrangement from God. Verses 6-8 of that psalm could be read like this: “Once, calm and confident, I thought to myself I will never slip or fall. God, it was Your will, that I stand like a granite mountain, but when you hid Your face I stumbled and collapsed in dread.”
Falling is in fact the condition through which animate and inanimate life happens. Standing is a kind of temporary protest against that condition: I will not be blown down by the wind, will not be withered by time, but will rather take my stand and fight.
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In the Western imagination, the fall is how we describe the tragic descent of humanity that resulted from Adam and Eve eating the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden. By this reading, sin brought death into the world, and the Christian Church offers a way for the faithful to atone for that sin and thus to defeat death.
The Judaism that I (but certainly not all Jews) feel called by suggests that dying, itself a kind of falling, is a precious and essential part of life. The talmudic sage Rabbi Meir taught that the concluding verse in Genesis’ description of creation — “And God saw all that He had made and behold it was very (m’od) good.” (Genesis 1:31) — should be read: “And behold dying (mot) is very good.” Like life itself, dying can be received as a gift. I stand, when I can, with Rabbi Meir on this.
Albert Einstein reported that his happiest thought occurred when he suddenly realized that if a person falls, say from a rooftop or a tree, he does not feel his own weight, but actually experiences himself floating or flying. Falling then is a pure delight — until, that is, you hit the ground. Contra Isaac Newton, Einstein maintained that the nature of gravity is not revealed in the crash, but rather in the free fall of an object. Thus the earth is ever falling around the sun as the moon falls around the earth. The universe itself may be falling. But to where?
Rainer Maria Rilke seems to give voice to Einstein’s insight in his poem “Autumn”:
The leaves fall, fall as from far,
Like distant gardens withered in the heavens;
They fall with slow and lingering descent.
And in the nights the heavy Earth, too, falls
From out the stars into the Solitude.
Thus all doth fall. This hand of mine must fall
And lo! the other one:—it is the law.
But there is One who holds this falling
Infinitely softly in His hands.
It is in the falling that we taste the freedom and flow of existence, that we find (and lose) the trust to float, to fly, to let be. We began floating in the nurturing fluids of our mother’s womb, but from there we exit, ready or not, into gravity, heaviness of heart and limb, and learn the great fear of falling.
Consider: We fall asleep and we fall sick. We fall into a trap, or a trance, or off a cliff. We also fall in love, fall apart, fall for tricks, and fall into habits and error and moods. There may be no solution to falling except learning how to fall better, to grasp more fully that walking, like dancing, is a kind of playing with the fallingness of existence. There are seasons of standing and seasons of falling and both of these, our resistance and our surrender, are possibly held softly, somewhere, by some One. But we do not know. And we will not know.
One of the great and essential circumlocutions for God is the Hebrew term Adonai (pronounced ahh-doe-NIGH). Literally it means, “my Lord.” But when I say it, I hear the English phrase, “I don’t know.” When you fall you do not know where or if or when you will land. As the questions build, the response is available: I don’t know.
This article initially appeared in My Jewish Learning’s Shabbat newsletter Recharge on February 7, 2026. To sign up to receive Recharge each week in your inbox, click here.
