You Cannot Climb for the Clap

On Accountability and the Work Nobody Can Do for You

In my head, I am an extremely productive person. I have learned everything I set out to learn, gotten fit, and become a calmer, more disciplined human being. Unfortunately, my actual life did not get the memo.

That is one of the dangers of keeping everything private. The dream remains beautiful because reality never gets a vote.

There is a concept called hischayvus. The closest English word is probably accountability, though even that does not capture it fully. It means putting something outside yourself. A commitment that once lived only in your head becomes real enough that someone else can ask about it later.

“How is it going?”

“Did you finish it?”

“What happened with that project?”

Suddenly, the personal idea that was once carried internally has a life of its own. Now you or I will feel responsible to do something with it.

There is something very powerful about this. Anyone who has ever tried to create something, or even to work on himself, knows how easy it is to stay in your own head, even for years on end. A dream can feel alive because it has not yet been tested. A project can remain beautiful because it has not yet met the slow, ordinary effort required to build it.

When someone reacts and says that something mattered to him, it moves you. The work starts to move beyond the idea in your head.

At least, that is how it is supposed to work. In my own life, I have noticed something strange. Sometimes, when I say out loud that I am going to do something, whether it is to learn more seriously, eat better, wake up earlier, or be more present with my children, the declaration itself seems to work against me.

I do not know exactly why that happens. Maybe it creates pressure too early or drains the private energy of the goal. Maybe saying the thing gives me the small satisfaction of movement before I have actually moved. But there are times when sharing the commitment does not strengthen it. It weakens it.

My brother, Rabbi Sender Haber, pointed out that the Piaseczna Rebbe says something similar. Sometimes an idea begins as something spiritual, private, and untouched. The moment you say it out loud, it enters the physical world. That can be necessary, because nothing gets built if it never leaves the mind. While at the same time, it can also lower the idea before it has had space to develop.

Then I tell myself that I should have kept it private. I should have just done the thing and let the work become real on its own. But that has its own problem, because when everything stays private, it often stays vague. The goal remains protected, but it also remains unfinished.

That is the strange catch-22 of accountability. Saying it out loud can distort the work, but keeping it hidden can allow it to disappear.

My writing became the place where I felt both sides of this most clearly. For a long time, accountability helped me write. I tried to put something out each week. It was a serious challenge for me, but it was good. It forced me to pay attention to the world around me and to take the ideas floating around in my head and bring them into the parashah. It gave me a rhythm, and sometimes the rhythm itself did a lot of the work. There were weeks when inspiration came early, and there were weeks when, try as I might, I could not connect with anything.

A mentor once told me not to force it. If nothing was resonating, I let there be some space between the words. Still, I knew people were reading. I felt it when someone told me he was reading the pieces at the Shabbos table, or when people showed me in concrete ways that the writing meant something to them. That meant a tremendous amount to me, and it still does. I do not take it lightly when someone gives attention to something I wrote, especially because I tend to write long pieces in a world that is afraid to ask anyone to sit with anything for too long.

That kind of appreciation creates its own hischayvus. When you realize that your words matter to someone, you want to keep showing up. An idea is no longer just yours. Once it reaches someone else, it becomes shared property.

Once people are reading, something can shift. It may no longer be only, “What am I trying to understand?” or “What needs to be said?” It can become, “What do people expect from me?” or “What do I need to put out next?”

The work may still look the same from the outside. It may still be consistent, useful, and appreciated. Yet inside, something starts to feel different. The original impulse gets weaker.

I saw an idea recently that stayed with me. There are two reasons a person can climb a mountain. He can climb because the mountain matters. The challenge itself means something. He wants to know what the climb will demand from him and what it will do to him. Or he can climb so that when he reaches the top, he can turn around and wave to everyone below.

There is a world of difference between climbing because the mountain matters and climbing because we want people to look up and clap. Applause is beautiful and meaningful when people notice and care, but we cannot climb solely for the clap.

Working in publishing, I have seen another version of this. One thing we often tell young, idealistic authors is to be careful about writing a book too early, before they have lived with the ideas long enough. Young people often have a clarity and energy that older people have learned to bury under layers of sophistication. However, a book is not a fleeting thought. It has a longer shelf life than a mood. Sometimes a person can write something at twenty-five that he will regret at forty-five because it belonged to a mountain he no longer believes was his to climb.

Robin Sharma writes about the danger of spending a life climbing mountain after mountain, only to realize at the end that they were the wrong ones. The deeper question is not only where we are climbing, but why. A person can do everything right and still realize that he gave his best energy to something that was never truly his.

Often, seeking the clap changes the climb itself. It changes the way you climb and even what you are able to learn from it.

Writing, or creating anything lasting, is sometimes a way of sharing what we know. Often, it is also the way something becomes understood in the first place. It is where a vague feeling becomes a sentence, or where we realize that a thought should remain a thought and not be put to paper. It is where you may realize that the idea that you thought you had understood, is asking more of you than you first imagined.

Rick Rubin makes this point in The Creative Act. We tend to think the artist’s work is the finished product, while the deeper work is a way of being in the world. Yes, what we produce matters, as it is the tangible result of our learning. However, that is not the whole story. Writing itself is also a way of learning something more deeply. Sometimes the private struggle to understand something changes you more than sharing it ever could.

Recently, I began working on a different kind of project. It is harder, slower, and less immediate. It does not fit neatly into a weekly rhythm or a quick finished piece. It requires more thought, more patience, and probably more time than my usual writing. So I find myself facing the same question again.

Should a project like that remain private until it is done? Should it be worked on slowly and brought out only when it is complete? Or should it be shared piece by piece, letting people come along for the unfinished parts too?

Part of the answer is that the work often reveals itself only after it begins. Most things cannot be understood before the work begins. Sometimes the project reveals itself only after enough time has been spent with it. It begins with one intention, and then the material pushes back. It may ask for more time than expected. It may demand a different direction than the one imagined at the beginning.

The upside of sharing is that it gets you moving. It forces you to stop thinking only about the work and actually create something. It keeps the project from becoming one more beautiful thing buried in the cemetery of good intentions. Anyone who has a folder full of unfinished ideas knows exactly how easily that happens. There are books that never became books, essays that never became essays, and projects that remained eternally “in development,” which is often just a professional-sounding way of saying that nobody forced them to exist.

The downside is that sharing creates pressure. It can turn an inner process into a performance. It can make the question shift from “What am I trying to understand?” to “What comes next?” Once that happens, the work may still be consistent and useful, but something inside it can start to thin out.

There is a difference between accountability and dependence. Rick Rubin writes that rules are not good or bad in themselves. There are only rules that serve the work and rules that do not. That feels right to me. A deadline, a chavrusa, a public commitment, or a self-imposed obligation is a tool. It can make us show up when we would rather drift. It can also push the work toward something it was never meant to become.

In yeshivah, this is part of the genius and the frustration of a chavrusa. In theory, it is easier to learn alone. Alone, a person can move at his own pace, follow his own mind, and organize the sugya according to the way his brain works. A chavrusa disrupts that. Another person is sitting across from you, asking questions you did not ask, getting stuck on things you thought were obvious, and pushing you into places you may not have gone on your own. It can feel limiting and inefficient. It can also force the learning to become more honest, because once an idea has to survive another person’s question, it becomes clear very quickly whether the idea actually holds.

I thought about this recently because of a friend who asked me how my writing was going. I admire him because he has built a serious, balanced life between work and Torah. He carries real responsibilities. He shows up for his work, his learning, and the community. He keeps demanding things from himself without turning his life into a public production. Along with everything else on his plate, he learns eight daf a day.

He told me that the first time he set out to finish Shas in a year, he told people. He created the hischayvus. People knew about it. They encouraged him. They asked him how it was going. Knowing that people would check in helped him keep going.

But once he finished, something shifted. He no longer felt the same need to tell the world. The first time, the public commitment helped him prove to himself that it was possible. After that, the proof lived inside him. He had climbed the mountain once, and now he knew the mountain could be climbed.

That, to me, is a healthy form of hischayvus. It begins outside, but if it is working properly, it slowly becomes internal. The goal is not to need an audience forever. The goal is to use the commitment long enough to discover that you no longer need to rely on it.

Because sometimes the obligation becomes a crutch. We begin to rely on being watched, asked, needed, or expected. The public commitment that once helped us move can slowly replace the inner reason we started moving in the first place. We confuse output with honesty, consistency with authenticity.

There is an opposite danger too. A person can say, “I only want to create when it comes from within,” and that can be deeply true. It can also be an elegant way to hide. We are very good at disguising avoidance as authenticity. “I am waiting until it feels real” can mean exactly that. It can also mean that I am afraid to be tested by the work.

There is also a point where trying too hard to be sincere becomes its own performance. You start watching yourself for purity instead of doing the work. You ask whether the feeling is pure enough, deep enough, honest enough, and before long the search for sincerity becomes another way not to begin. Sometimes sincerity does not come from staring at yourself. It comes from entering the process and letting it strip away what is false.

This does not happen only in writing. It happens in marriage, work, religious life, and growth. Whenever another person, system, obligation, or deadline is involved, it becomes very easy to locate the pressure outside ourselves. A spouse becomes the reason for feeling limited. The job becomes the reason there is no room to breathe. The audience becomes the reason the work feels trapped by expectations. Responsibilities become the explanation for why everything still feels stuck.

Sometimes there is truth in that. Life is not lived in a vacuum, and other people do affect us. Marriage and parenting, perhaps more than almost anything else, bring a person face-to-face with himself. The people closest to us do not meet only the version of us that exists in our minds. They meet the version that shows up under pressure, when we are tired, disappointed, needed, or exposed. That is part of the strength of marriage and family life. They do not allow us as individuals to remain theoretical for long.

There is a reason the side mirror says, “Objects in the mirror are closer than they appear.” Some things look as if they are behind us because they belong to the past, but they are still much closer than we realize. Old fears and old ways of protecting ourselves do not always disappear just because life has moved on. Sometimes they are right there in the mirror, affecting how we see what is happening now.

At the same time, there is a point where blaming the conditions becomes its own prison. The obstacles may be real and heavy. A difficult relationship, a demanding job, or a responsibility that keeps taking more than expected can leave a serious mark on a life. However, if those conditions become the whole explanation for why we are stuck, then we have handed them too much power.

There is a certain moment of adulthood when a person realizes that even if the conditions are not fair, the work is still his. To think that everything is his fault is childish in the other direction. The reason is simpler: blame does not build anything. Blame may explain the wound, but it does not climb the mountain. At some point, the question becomes: What can I still take responsibility for, even here, now, and with the capacity I actually have?

There are also moments when all the outside pressure falls away, and a person is left alone with himself. Then the question gets much harder. Without the person to blame, without the audience to impress, without the deadline to resent, without the pressure to fight against, what remains? What do you actually want? What are you actually willing to build? What work are you willing to do when nobody is clapping along?

That is where the real climb begins.

There is another piece here too. Not every desire to be seen is the same as climbing for the clap. A person does not need an audience for every good thing he does, but he does need, at least sometimes, to know that the good he is trying to do is not invisible. We need to be human, too.

The goal is not to choose between obligation and authenticity. The goal is to hold them in the right proportion. Enough hischayvus to keep moving, but not so much that the obligation becomes the whole engine. Enough accountability to keep the work honest, but enough space to keep it alive. Enough public commitment to prevent the project from disappearing, but enough privacy to make sure it still belongs to the one doing it. Some things need to be spoken aloud so they can become real, and some things need to be protected long enough to become real from the inside.

There is no clean formula for this. Each person has to keep asking whether accountability is making the work more honest or turning it into another performance. Sometimes hischayvus saves a person from himself. It gives direction to vague desire and forces a dream into the world. But sometimes the same accountability becomes a way of avoiding the deeper question: Am I climbing because the mountain is mine to climb, or because I want to be seen at the summit? The answer will not always be flattering. That is probably why the question matters.

The hope is to climb because the mountain matters. If others are there along the way, if they encourage, read, respond, notice, or clap, that is a gift. A real gift. Still, it cannot be the reason for the climb.

The climb has to do something to you.

Otherwise, you reached the top and missed the mountain.