You will watch your parents die and be buried. You will watch your newborn child emerge in a messy circus of heaving grunts and high-pitched wailing. You will watch your dreams and projects dashed, only to wake the next day and greet the fruits of your failure anew and cobble a life out of them all the same. You will punctuate the cavalcade of events with moments of transcendent meaning that will linger in memory like fading signposts during that final moment: your death.

Navigating that journey without a religious tradition is like trying to cross open country without a path: you can do so, but you’ll do lots of stumbling and very likely lose your way. Trying to get through dense woods—a serious depression, the death of a loved one—without a marked trail requires the most arduous labor for the merest progress. Furthermore, if you tackle these wilds in their raw and uncleared state, you will almost certainly do so alone. Going off-trail means a hard solitary journey, while the marked trail involves communal groups headed in your same direction. What some might describe as a cultural rut—some timeworn lane that limits movement—might just be the only thing that guides you through this daunting wilderness of life whose many paths all end in the same destination.

To DIY your own world of life signifiers, you have to think you can improve on a bar mitzvah as a coming-of-age ritual, on shabbat as a form of digital detox, and as teshuvah as a way to grapple with your guilt (or analogs in other religious traditions). Many do of course, and every trendy San Franciscan has their personal regimen of special diets, meditation schedules, intermittent fasts, escapes to nature, a canon of mimetic culture usually drawn from their online feeds, a smattering of trendy texts that inform their values, and some slew of Netflix shows that serve as cultural touchpoints with others in their cohort.

This is all in keeping with the current liberal project’s moral goal, which is creating lives devoid of any unchosen obligations and absolutely rife with chosen identities of fanciful and recent coinage. The problem is that it’s the unchosen obligations—or the obligations chosen but whose downstream responsibilities cannot be unchosen—that will give us the only real meaning in life. Family, children, our hometowns, our childhoods, our ethnic identity (if we have one), or the chosen-but-undoable commitments—marriage, joining the military, that company we start, religious faith—are the defining obligations where our selves really play out.

If I were to go back and say one thing to my younger self as a warning from the future, it’s this: the eventual cost of optionality in life—all the commitments you don’t make to preserve your ability to instantly change course—is usually not worth the upside that optionality eventually produces. And even when that optionality is rich indeed (and I know a thing or two about the exploding value of literal financial options), your commitment to that remunerative course, fully cognizant of your wider obligations, will serve you better than the anxious FOMO-ing of the hyper-optimizer. Which is a long way of saying that at some point you do have to ‘choose a hill to die on,’ because if you don’t, you won’t really ever have lived at all. Here, I will attempt to lay out why you should also do so, and why I chose the Jewish hill that I did.

-source, from Antonio Garcia Martinez

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