A part of the ‘On Second Thought‘ series

By: Ezra Nadav

---

I’ve spent most of my life gathering knowledge, storing it, curating it, offering it to others in the hope it will matter.

In classrooms and consultations, workshops and webinars, I’ve been praised for clarity, for insight, for translating the complex into the digestible. It’s a skill I’ve honed over decades, part love of language, part coping mechanism. Knowing things was how I stayed safe. Being useful was how I stayed seen.

But lately, I’ve begun to feel the weight of knowing too much and integrating too little.

There’s a quiet arrogance that can hide inside mastery, a subtle self-deception that confuses being informed with being formed. It’s possible to articulate a value without embodying it, to teach humility without practicing surrender, to speak of justice while still clinging to control. And in that gap, between what we know and who we are, the soul begins to ache.

Somewhere along the way, I forgot that learning is supposed to change you.

I don’t mean adding more ideas or adjusting your worldview. I mean that deep, unnameable transformation that comes not from hearing something new, but from hearing something again, and this time, realizing it’s about you. The kind of shift that can’t be documented in a slide deck or proven in a peer-reviewed journal. The kind that happens in silence, or heartbreak, or prayer. The kind that interrupts the very frameworks you once felt fluent in.

In Jewish tradition, there’s a reverence for limmud, study. But not study for its own sake. Study as a sacred act, a way to refine the self, a way to turn over words like stones until something holy is exposed underneath. There’s a line in Pirkei Avot that has followed me this month, gently tugging:

“One whose deeds exceed their wisdom, their wisdom will endure.

But one whose wisdom exceeds their deeds, they are like a tree with many branches but few roots. The wind will come and uproot them.”

Pirkei Avot 3:17

It is not an anti-intellectual warning. It is a wisdom about weight-bearing structures. Knowing is not enough. If our knowledge outpaces our ability to live it, to root it in practice, in patience, in presence, then it becomes brittle. It performs well, but it does not hold.

And maybe that’s what I’ve been experiencing. A kind of spiritual brittleness. Not burnout in the usual sense, but a disconnection from the part of me that learns slowly, quietly, not to teach, not to lead, not to present, but simply to understand.

There’s something exhausting about always being the one who knows, about always being ready with a quote, a framework, a reference, a response. The mind can race so far ahead that the heart forgets to follow. And in that race, the spiritual life becomes ornamental, a poetic flair added to an otherwise well-oiled system of certainty.

So I’ve started unlearning the instinct to lead with insight.

I’m trying to let presence replace precision. I’m trying to resist the urge to be impressive, and instead be available, to myself, to others, to whatever is unfolding. I’m learning to say “I don’t know” not as a disclaimer, but as a doorway to something deeper.

I’m learning that the questions that shape us most are not the ones we answer, they’re the ones we carry. The ones we sit beside. The ones that interrupt us mid-sentence and gently ask: But are you living this?

Because I can talk about humility and still be defensive.

I can teach compassion and still withdraw when I feel misunderstood.

I can recite the tenets of justice and still choose comfort.

And I can quote sacred texts without ever actually letting them confront me.

And that’s the real risk, that knowledge becomes not a path to God, but a shield from God. That our fluency makes us tone-deaf to wonder. That we become so good at explaining meaning that we forget how to experience it.

So on second thought…

I am not what I know.

I am what I notice.

I am what I return to.

I am what I make room for.

And maybe, I am most myself, most whole, most true, not when I am speaking, but when I am listening.

Not when I am certain, but when I am soft.

Not when I know more, but when I finally let go of needing to.

---

Shalom Aleichem

---