Soulmaxxing

You Are Not a Project. You Are a Revelation

Tonight I want to talk about a word that is currently all over the internet, mostly in corners of the internet you probably wish did not exist.

The word is ‘maxxing.’

If you are under forty, you probably already know what I mean. If you are over forty, let me explain. There is a subculture, predominantly young men, organized around the idea of optimization. Of taking every variable in your life and pushing it to its theoretical ceiling. There is looksmaxxing, which is optimizing your physical appearance, like your jawline (I saw an influential TikToker talk about using meth for that “desired” hollow-cheek look). posture, skincare, and height, if you can manage it. There is statusmaxxing, moneymaxxing, brainmaxxing, charismaxxing. There is, I am not making this up, mewingmaxxing, which involves repositioning your tongue against the roof of your mouth in order to restructure your facial bones over time. These are grown, men.

Now, before you dismiss all of this as the province of lost young men in dark rooms, I want to say something that might surprise you. The impulse underneath it is not crazy. The impulse is: I want to be more than I am. I want to stop drifting. I want to become someone.

That impulse is deeply human. It is, in fact, deeply Jewish.

Because underneath all of it, underneath the optimization and the cold showers and the dominance hierarchies and the endless self-improvement content, there is a hunger that is real and that is sacred. The hunger to be more than you are. The hunger to stop drifting and become someone. That hunger is not pathological. That hunger is the soul, knocking.

The tragedy is not the wanting. The tragedy is that nobody taught them what they were actually hungry for.

The poet Rumi wrote: I have lived on the lip of insanity, wanting to know reasons, knocking on a door. It opens. I have been knocking from the inside.

That is the whole manosphere in four lines. Knocking frantically on the outside of a door that opens from within. Building a better exterior for a house whose interior they have never visited. Maxxing the facade while the rooms inside sit empty and dark.

This week, we read the final double portion of the book of Leviticus. Behar and Bechukotai. And right at the opening, before the grand machinery of the Jubilee, before the blessings and the rebukes, the Torah gives us something quieter. Something that I think is the most countercultural idea in this entire portion.

The shemitah.

Every seven years, God commands, the land rests. You do not plant. You do not prune. You do not harvest. The field that has defined your identity as a farmer, that has been the source of your livelihood, your status, and your sense of control over your life, just sits there. Open to whoever needs it. You cannot fence it off. You cannot call it yours. For one full year, the earth breathes.

And God’s reason for this is not economic, though the rabbis note the ecological wisdom. The reason is theological. Shabbat laHashem, the Torah calls it. A Shabbat for God. The land needs to remember who it belongs to. And so, the Sfat Emet (the commentator) teaches, so do you.

Because here is what the shemitah is really saying. You are not what you produce. Your worth is not your output. The field does not become worthless when it rests. It does not lose its identity when it stops performing. It becomes, in the resting, more fully itself. It returns to something essential that the constant cycle of planting and harvesting had covered over.

The Sfat Emet goes further. He teaches that the shemitah is not just about the land. It is a map of the inner life. Every seven years, you are given permission; in fact, you are given a commandment to stop producing yourself. To let the constructed self go fallow. To find out what is actually there when the performance stops.

What is there, the tradition says, is a neshamah. A soul. A portion of the divine, planted in you before you had any say in the matter, waiting with extraordinary patience for you to finally stop optimizing long enough to notice it.

So in the spirit of innovation and maybe some tongue in cheek, I want to introduce you to a NEW concept.

Soulmaxxing.

I know how that sounds. I am a rabbi in a recovery community using internet slang to talk about Leviticus. But I think the frame is exactly right, and it is exactly what this generation needs to hear in a language it can actually receive.

Soulmaxxing is not the optimization of the soul. That framing is already wrong, and I want to reject it before it takes root. You do not optimize a portion of God. You cannot push the neshamah toward its theoretical ceiling by working harder on it. That is just maxxing with a spiritual veneer, and we have enough of that already.

Soulmaxxing, properly understood, is the ancient Jewish practice of building a life spacious enough to hold everything you actually are.

It is not addition. It is excavation.

much like an artist, a sculptor does not build the statue. He removes everything that is not the statue. As Michelangelo said, he saw the angel in the marble and carved until the angel was free. He did not create David. David was already there, imprisoned in the stone, waiting for someone with enough courage and enough patience to take away everything that was not him. So is soulmaxing

The shemitah does not improve the land. It reveals it. It removes the accumulated weight of seven years of production and lets the earth show you what it is made of. What grows there when nothing is forced. What emerges when the field is finally, blessedly, left alone.

I have sat with enough people in this building to know what happens when a human being is finally, blessedly, left alone with themselves for the first time. Not alone in the isolating, addictive sense. Alone in the shemitah sense. When the using stops, when the performing stops, when the relentless self-construction stops, and someone sits in the sudden quiet and asks for the first time: who is actually here?

What they find, every single time, underneath the wreckage and the defense mechanisms and the identities they built to survive, is something they did not expect. Something tender. Something that was never destroyed by what happened to it. Something that has been waiting. a fertile ground…

The great Hasidic master Rabbi Simcha Bunim of Peshischa taught that every person should carry two pieces of paper, one in each pocket. On one: bishvili nivra ha’olam. For my sake the world was created. On the other: v’anochi afar v’efer. And I am but dust and ashes. The whole spiritual life lives in the tension between those two truths. You are cosmically significant and cosmically humbled. You are a soul of infinite worth and a creature of radical dependence.

Soulmaxxing is learning to live in that tension without collapsing into either grandiosity or self-erasure.

The manosphere only knows the first pocket. It has abolished the second. And a person with only one pocket is always, eventually, going to lose something essential.

But here is what I also want to say to the people in this room who live almost entirely in the second pocket. Who have made a theology out of their own unworthiness. Who walk around with the dust and ashes but have lost or never held the piece of paper that says the world was created for you. That you, specifically you, with your specific history and your specific wounds and your specific unrepeatable soul, matter to the fabric of existence in a way that cannot be replaced.

You need both pockets. That is not a metaphor. That is the instruction.

I have long taken a teaching in Talmud that teaches: That one who comes to purify themselves has to be assisted as a foundation to my own theology, here and beyond. The motion has to start with you. But you are not doing it alone. And the motion is not toward an optimized version of yourself. It is toward clarity. Toward the uncovering of what was always there..

So let me ask you a question that matters tonight.

What field in your life has not been allowed to rest? What part of yourself has been in constant production for so long that you have forgotten what it looks like when it is simply, quietly, itself?

Maybe it is your creativity. Buried under years of being told it was not practical. Maybe it is your tenderness, which you armored over because tenderness got you hurt. Maybe it is your relationship with prayer, or with stillness, or with the people you love but cannot seem to reach across the distance you built to protect yourself. Maybe it is the person you were before the thing that changed everything, the one you have been grieving without admitting you were grieving.

The shemitah does not ask you to become someone new. It asks you to let what is already there breathe.

And Bechukotai, the portion that closes this book, makes a promise that I want you to hold. Even after everything. Even after the full weight of the tochecha, the rebuke, all the consequences of abandonment and distance and the life lived for the self alone, God says: I will remember my covenant. The covenant does not expire. The relationship does not foreclose. The field can always, always be allowed to rest and to return.

Here is what I see when I look at this room.

I see people who have been doing the hardest version of Soulmaxxing there is. Not the kind that comes with a podcast and a morning routine (although you know, I think a night and morning routine is very important), the kind that comes through fire. The kind where you lost everything and had to find out, in the rubble, what was actually you and what was the addiction and what was the wound and what was the wall you built around the wound so carefully you forgot it was not your real face.

That is excavation. That is the shemitah of the self. And it is the most serious spiritual work a human being can do.

You did not find yourself by becoming more. You found yourself by stopping, observing, breathing, examining, facing yourself, and learning . By letting the field rest. By sitting in the silence long enough to hear what was growing there without your help.

Modern life and the manosphere will tell you that you are behind. You need to catch up. In fact, when we look at our phones first thing in the morning, we already feel we need to catch up on email or the news. It’s such a bad habit (yes, sleep with your phone in the other room and give yourself at least 30 minutes before you look at it)

The work of becoming yourself is not a race against other people who are more optimized than you. It’s taking the time to face yourself and your soul.

So here are a few things I want you to think about for this week…

Stop curating your life and start living it. Every minute you spend arranging how your life looks to other people is a minute you are not actually in it. Put the phone down. Eat the meal. Have the conversation. The documentation is not the experience. The map is not the territory.

Let something be hard without fixing it immediately. Sit in the discomfort long enough to hear what it is trying to tell you. The instinct to immediately medicate, distract, optimize, or resolve is the instinct that keeps the stone uncarved. David is in the discomfort. Stay.

Keep one promise nobody else knows about. Not for your reputation. Not for your recovery chip. For your soul, which is paying very close attention to whether you are becoming someone you can trust when the audience is gone.

Find the thing you stopped doing when life got serious and do it again. The thing you loved at twelve before anyone told you it was not practical. That thing knew something about you that your adult self has been trying to argue away ever since.

Pray even when it feels like talking to the ceiling. Especially then. The prayer that costs you something is the one that changes something.

Ask better questions before bed than you asked this morning. Not did I win today. Not was I productive. Ask: was I honest? Was I present? Did I give something real to someone who needed it? Did I notice anything beautiful? The questions you end the day with are the ones that shape the person you wake up as.

Rest without feeling you need to earn it. This is the shemitah in miniature. Take one hour this week that is not justified by productivity, recovery work, self-improvement, or any other category of usefulness. Just exist in it. Notice what comes up when you are not performing anything. That is the field breathing.

Grieve what you actually lost. Not the sanitized version. Not the one that makes you look resilient at a meeting. The real loss, with its real weight. The soul cannot metabolize what the ego refuses to acknowledge. Unexpressed grief does not dissolve. It calcifies. And calcified grief is just a stone that David is still trapped inside.

You cannot maxxx your way to a meaningful life. But you can work towards it and then one faithful shemitah at a time, rest your way into finding out who you actually are.

The door is already open.

You have been knocking from the inside.

Stop knocking. Walk through. Maybe you are already there….

Shabbat shalom.