Out. Of. Control.
Those three words neatly sum up the state of affairs as we enter the new year 5787.
Let’s count the many ways –
Technology is out of control. Bill Gates and numerous others are sharing dire predictions about AI. “Even under the best circumstances,” Gates recently wrote, “the transition to this new AI era will be one of the most turbulent times in human history.”
The economy is out of control. Financial experts are sounding the warning bells that the 40 trillion dollars of national debt will likely soon be felt in higher interest rates and by extension, every single sector of the economy.
Antisemitism is out of control. According to the ADL, 46% of adults worldwide harbor antisemitic feelings. Very comforting, isn’t it. Antisemitism is no longer relegated to crackpots and the underworld; it has become the assumed position in all respectable circles of society.
Geopolitics is out of control. Bret Stephens just published an article, highlighting how numerous regional conflicts – Russia/ Ukraine, China/ Hong Kong, North and South Korea, Iran and Israel, are all intertwined. He suggested that World War Three may have already begun.
And it’s overwhelming us.
Our mental health is out of control. The number of Americans experiencing anxiety continues to climb. In 2025, 43% of Americans felt more anxious than the year before. In 2026, the number rose to 48%. Formal anxiety disorders increased by 10% in one year. Those are alarming statistics. Not only out of control but we are a mess.
Anyone else feeling anxious about the year ahead? We have a lot to pray for.
What to do when things feel out of control is a personal struggle. Beneath this sweet smile is an intensely uptight person who is a bit of a control freak. I cannot stand when things are not the way I think they should be.
For most of my life I could not figure out why I had such a hard time on vacation. I love my family, I know I need a break, vacations should be great. And yet, almost as soon as vacation begins, I am on edge. I also couldn’t figure out why I had stress headaches almost every Sunday, what is supposed to be the most relaxed day of the week.
Until one day, not that long ago, listening to an insightful podcast by Rabbi YY Jacobson, it clicked.
Six days a week, I am the master of my time. My calendar app, which will not surprise you to learn is my favorite app, tells me exactly what I am supposed to be doing and when. Every moment has its place. Meetings, classes, appointments, they all follow a structured schedule. Even the crises that come my way get processed in my head through some sort of reliable algorithm.
But Sunday? Vacation?! An amorphous day with one hour casually spilling into the next? (shudder)
Now throw five cute but rambunctious children into the mix. Five people with minds of their own, schedules of their own, and I lose it.
You may think I’m exaggerating for laughs. I am not. I’m embarrassed to say that this has been a genuine struggle for me my whole life.
Some of you, I am sure, can relate to these feelings; whether it’s an unstructured day or a world whose guardrails seem to have fallen by the wayside. You feel overwhelmed, stressed out, scared, when things appear out of control.
Some of you probably just think I’m crazy. That’s fine. You were blessed with a very different temperament and I am happy for you, I really am.
But the reality is that every single one of us, sooner or later, will run into a wall that refuses to move, a situation we cannot change, a situation we cannot control, no matter how much we try. Illness. Loss. A difficult relationship. A child making choices we would never have chosen. Financial uncertainty. A life that stubbornly refuses to follow the calendar we prepared for it. Or just an overarching feeling of emptiness that we cannot shake. We’ve all been there, right?
What do we do then?
Some people distract themselves. They attempt to overcome their lack of control and the deep discomfort that comes with it with substances, sex, or gambling. Unsurprisingly, addiction rates have surged among adults in the past year.
Others numb themselves with endless distractions like entertainment, travel, sports, social media, or whatever else allows them to not confront the fact that life is not behaving the way they think it should.
Some tell themselves a story to make all the chaos less chaotic and in doing so, gives themselves a sense of control. There is a correlation between the growing popularity of conspiracy theories and a society that feels on edge.
Some respond by trying to force the world back into a shape that makes sense to them. That’s what I do. When faced with chaos, I jump headfirst into solving the problem and doing everything I can to make things less chaotic. I am actually pretty good at it. Sometimes I even fool myself to think that I am so successful because I can control so much of my environment. But I am not really so successful. I’m just really scared.
In Kabbalistic literature there is a concept called bittul. It’s sometimes translated as nullifying oneself, making yourself into a shmatta, but that is not a Jewish idea. Bittul takes place when we encounter what we cannot change – which is so much – and we stop trying to bend our surroundings to conform to us. Instead, we proclaim, “I accept that I am not in control.”
Let me share with you two simple every-day examples:
- Your teenaged child makes a decision you think is a terrible mistake. Should you speak to them? Maybe. Should you advise them? Sure.
But eventually you’ve said what there is to say. And now you have a choice: keep pushing until the relationship itself is damaged – or say, I love you enough to accept that your life belongs to you, not me. That’s bittul. I accept that I am not in control.
Or,
- Someone thinks poorly of me. Maybe I should explain myself. Maybe I should apologize. But I cannot make another person understand me. I cannot force someone to like me.
At some point I have to say: I am responsible for my behavior. I am not responsible for your opinion of me. That too is bittul.
This idea is beautifully formulated in the famous serenity prayer that emerged from the philosophy of Alcoholics Anonymous: “Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”
Bittul is the muscle we use to stop ourselves at that fine line between the things we can change and the things we cannot, and it’s relevant to all of our relationships, all of our interactions, all of our experiences big and small.
This idea is not only the key to the sobriety of hundreds of thousands of addicts, it is not only emotionally healthy for all of us, it also has a profound impact on our spirituality. And that’s because underlying the notion of bittul is a deceptively simple concept that all of us, addict or not, struggle to embrace, the idea that we are not G-d.
As long as I insist that the world conforms to my will, as long as I am a control freak, I am effectively proclaiming myself to be a god. When I am finally able to accept that I cannot control it all, that’s when I let the real G-d in.
Let me explain how this works with a metaphor that may or may not be fictional:
Hindy and I both like steak, we both like Cabernet Sauvignon. If we go to Serengeti’s, order a steak and a bottle of Cabernet, have I expressed my love for my wife?
Not really.
I’m sure it would be a lovely evening, but I never had to move beyond myself. I got what I wanted.
Now imagine Hindy says, “I know we have fifty-three gift certificates to Serengeti’s thanks to your Rosh Hashana speech… but tonight I want to go to Tov Pizza.”
I can respond in one of three ways.
Option one: “That’s ridiculous.”
It is. But experience has taught me that saying that is not a good idea.
Option two: I can try to understand her. Why Tov Pizza? Why tonight? I can analyze her reasoning until eventually I say, “Oh! Now I understand. That makes sense. Okay, let’s go.”
That’s a little better. But I still only agreed once her preference made sense to me.
There is an even deeper possibility.
I can say to myself: I don’t understand why she wants Tov Pizza. It makes absolutely no sense to me. It may not even make sense to her. But I love her. And because I love her, I accept that I don’t need everything she wants to make sense to me.
“Sure, honey, let’s go to Tov Pizza.”
That’s bittul.
Because you see, that wall which so often stands before me, that immovable, annoying, painful, incomprehensible situation or person, it may be stressing me out and driving me crazy – that wall is getting in the way of what I want!
And precisely for that reason, that wall is where I encounter G-d most profoundly – because it is those moments of frustration, of feeling stuck, of not knowing how to move forward, it is then and only then, that I am forced to confront the fact that I am not in control, I am not G-d.
And just like when I accept my wife’s desire to go to Tov Pizza, when I am ready to accept G-d’s will, I have finally stopped serving myself, and I’m ready for a real relationship with Hashem, to submit, and to acknowledge Him.
This is something that took me 42 years to understand.
I wish I would have understood this earlier; I would have been so much healthier. But now that I have, and now that I work on this regularly – though I fail just as regularly – let me tell you, it is the most sublime, most incredible and most freeing feeling I’ve experienced in my lifetime.
On a good day, when I’m really living bittul, instead of being surrounded by frustrating situations and people, I am surrounded by opportunities to interact with G-d. As long as things are going my way, that’s great, but that’s me in the driver’s seat. When things go off the rails, instead of getting frustrated or flustered, I open my eyes and see that it’s not an annoying person or situation before me, it’s G-d. I can’t move forward because G-d is standing in my way. He’s in control; I’m not. And it’s beautiful.
Three-thousand-seven-hundred-and-two years ago to this day, G-d gave Avraham the challenge of a lifetime; the most irrational, illogical, backward directive imaginable – “Slaughter your beloved son.”
This was the ultimate challenge because Avraham had at this point, defeated all the idols of the world, but there was still one idol – himself. He still believed that he understood his place in the world, that he had some control. There was a plan and a promise and a child who would continue his legacy and receive his reward. And then G-d said, no.
Somehow Avraham found it within himself and stepped up to this impossible challenge. As the Medrash Tanchuma relates: “G-d,” Avraham said, “I do not understand what You want from me. But my relationship with You is not limited to what I can understand. I am willing to accept it.” That was bittul at its finest.
And for the thousands of years that followed, his descendants encountered realities they could neither understand nor control, and somehow continued to say: “I don’t understand You, Hashem, but I will not abandon You.”
But in 2026, precisely because we have so much and precisely because we understand so much, when we face those walls, we can too easily sidestep them, avoiding bittul entirely.
We are educated enough to ask penetrating theological questions – why would you do this to me, G-d? It doesn’t make any sense. And instead of engaging G-d, we walk away from Him.
We all have friends who have given up on religion or have created their own version of Judaism when Judaism stopped conforming to their feelings. Instead of grappling with our tradition, we allow our observance to slip.
We are psychologically-savvy enough to diagnose every family member and friend – they’re all crazy, I’m the only rational one, I can’t give in to them, they don’t know what they’re talking about. When we face a wall in a relationship, we ask ourselves, why should I give in? Why should I accept? And we sever countless relationships.
Today, we come face to face with the challenging walls of life and too often we refuse to budge; we are too strong, too bright, too sophisticated for bittul.
Only that bittul, at least in Judaism, was never about weakness. Hineni, Avraham declared. “Here I am!” I am not a pushover. I have stood up to great kings, debated the greatest thinkers, I am the most influential man in history. Bittul is not negation, it is an expression of strength. I choose to submit, I choose to accept, I choose to love.
It is a scary world out there; I wish I could tell you that it will all be good. It’s not looking like it. As individuals, we are going to face hardships in the year ahead. It is inevitable. And when we do, I hope we can ask ourselves two simple questions:
What do I need to do? What do I need to accept?
I hope to do a lot this year, to change a lot, to push a lot. But when I’ve done what I can and I reach that wall, I want to be able to stop pushing and say:
I don’t understand, I don’t even approve, but I’ve tried my utmost, and I will stop demanding that life conform to my plan.
I now know that it is not a wall before me, it is You, G-d. And I choose to accept that You are the One in control.
Yes, we have a lot to pray for this year, but let’s add one prayer to our list; that we are able to be at peace even when we don’t get what we want, that we can remain devout even when G-d seems so hard to connect with, that we can be calm even when the world around us spins so fast, that we can hold on to relationships and love even when we don’t understand.
I hope and pray that I, and all of us, can take this life-changing idea of bittul to heart this year, and learn to live with faith, with inner peace, and with joy.
Even on a Sunday.