The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life

In living out a commitment, each party understands the fickleness of feelings, so they bind their future selves to specific obligations. Spouses love each other, but they bind themselves down with a legal, public, and often religious marriage commitment, to limit their future choices for those times when they get on each other’s nerves.

That meant doing what she could to care for her own people, to help the teenage girls who were now being rounded up. She was determined not to hate her oppressors, not to relieve her fear through hatred. She lectured herself to never hate the wickedness of others but to first hate the evil within herself.

If I had to capture the core of my Jewish experience, it would be this: Eighteen people sitting around a Shabbat dinner table, all of them talking at once, all of them following all eighteen conversations that are simultaneously crossing the table, all of them correcting the eighteen wrong things that other people have just said.

Cellphones are banned (“Be in the now,” Kathy says). About a third of the way through the meal, we go around the table and each person says something they are grateful for, something nobody knows about them, or some other piece of information about their life at that moment.

“What greater thing is there for two human souls,” George Eliot wrote in Adam Bede, “than to feel that they are joined for life—to strengthen each other in all labor, to rest on each other in all sorrow, to minister to each other in all pain, to be one with each other in silent unspeakable memories at the moment of last parting?”

Frankl realized that a psychiatrist in a concentration camp has a responsibility to study suffering and reduce suffering. “It did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us,” he realized.

Our natural enthusiasm trains us to be people pleasers, to say yes to other people. But if you aren’t saying a permanent no to anything, giving anything up, then you probably aren’t diving into anything fully. A life of commitment means saying a thousand noes for the sake of a few precious yeses.

For example, when you are considering quitting your job, apply the 10-10-10 rule. How will this decision feel in 10 minutes, 10 months, and 10 years? That will help you put the short-term emotional pain of any decision in the context of long-term consequences.

In the end, people in an enduring marriage achieve metis. That’s the Greek word for a kind of practical wisdom, an intuitive awareness of how things are, how things go together, and how things will never go together.

In his great book On Love, Stendhal once described a salt mine near Salzburg, Austria. The miners would stick small, leafless branches down into the salt mines and leave them there for a time. When they would retrieve them, the branches would be covered with a shining layer of diamond-like crystals that shimmered in the light. Stendhal said that en