In the Fire

Last week, a fellow boxer, Rav Ezra, gave a Dvar Torah about fire: about becoming spiritual firefighters. You put out one fire, and another one is right behind it.

He said, “Wouldn’t it be nice to put out the fire and then just get to live? I honestly do not know what that would be like. I don’t think that’s in my spiritual DNA.”

It made me wonder: do we really want a life of simply being?

When I was competing, “just being” sounded like the dream. Training camp was relentless: conditioning, sparring, finding sparring partners, recovering from sparring, managing exhaustion, sore muscles, hunger, dieting, early bedtimes, healthy food, work, and then training again. Work, train. Work, train.

There were plenty of moments when I thought: I’m done. I just want to live.

And then the fight would come and then end. Maybe I would rest for a day. But soon enough, I was eager again—to train, to improve, to find the next fight. I would voluntarily walk right back into the very life I had wanted a break from.

Now that I am retired from competition, I am closer to the place I thought I wanted. I am not preparing for a fight. I am not getting in the ring. In some ways, I am simply being.

Yet I find myself looking for fires.

Some are worthwhile: work, learning, community, religious life, personal growth. Others may be less worthwhile. But the pull is there—the urge to find another problem to solve, another challenge to meet, another fire to fight.

The irony is that, in boxing, the fire was not the fight. The fire was the training. It was the endless preparation: the physical pain, fatigue, hunger, discipline, nerves, anticipation, excitement, and fear. It was the walk to the ring, when all the uncertainty gets closer to reality.

But once the bell rang, something changed.

The fight became the being.

There was no room for distraction. No room to think about tomorrow, regret yesterday, or worry about everything outside the ropes. There were only three minutes, the person in front of you, your breath, your body, and the training you had trusted yourself to do.

Rav Ezra quotes the famous boxing trainer Teddy Atlas, who says in the corner during a fight, “We are firemen… The heat doesn’t bother us. We live in the heat, we train in the heat. It tells us that we’re ready, we’re at home, where we’re supposed to be.”

Maybe that is the shift. We train in the fire for so long that, when the moment arrives, we are no longer merely fighting it. We become one with it. We are not trying to escape the flames or even control every part of them. We are present inside them.

Maybe being is not the absence of struggle.

Maybe being is what happens when we are so fully present in the fire that, for a moment, there is no separation between ourselves, the challenge, and the work in front of us.

To read Rabbi Ezra Balser’s Dvar Torah, click here