“Yes,” I replied. “It was.”
“Why did you not tell us earlier? Yesterday was such a difficult conversation,” my daughter said.
“I waited a long time for the right moment.”
Yesterday was difficult.
But I have thought about yesterday’s conversation every day for months.
Each day, I told myself: not yet.
I paused myself.
I waited.
“You are such amazing daughters,” I said. “I am so proud of you. I try to help you in any way I can. Sometimes the hardest thing about being a father is not what I do. It is what I do not do.”
There are moments when doing nothing is not avoidance. It is discipline. It is love refusing to force a moment before it is ready.
The sages teach tzimtzum: contraction, the act of making space. God withdraws so the world can breathe. Absence is not a void; it is the cradle where presence can be born. I have come to believe that love is often measured not by how much we fill a moment, but by how gently we step back so another soul can step forward.
You can see this everywhere once you begin to look. A parent pauses before correcting a child, and the child discovers courage. A teacher leaves a question hanging, and a student finds her own voice. In the boardroom, silence after a pitch sometimes allows the best idea to surface without being muscled by volume or title. Presence can be born from absence.
Grief taught me tzimtzum most honestly. When a chair is empty at the table, we learn to set a place in the heart. We do not get over absence—we grow around it.
There is one Torah story that always returns to me: the Binding of Isaac.
The power of that moment is not the drama of the mountain. It is the space inside it.
God could have made Abraham’s path obvious. God could have surrounded him with certainty so complete that choice disappeared. But that would not be faith. That would be coercion.
Instead, God creates space, an uncomfortable and excruciating space, where Abraham must choose. In that space, something new is born: not obedience as reflex, but faith as decision. The first true faith is not forced. It emerges from the room God makes for a human being to step forward freely.
Tzimtzum is what makes relationship possible. Without space there is only pressure, even when it is wrapped in love.
Shabbat is a weekly reminder of this truth. We stop doing so that being can return.
And the desert teaches it too. No clutter, no cover—just enough emptiness to hear what cannot be heard anywhere else.
Absence is not abandonment. It is a gift of trust.
As I sat with my daughters after that difficult conversation, I understood something I could not have said earlier: I did not wait to avoid the hard thing. I waited so the hard thing could be held with love.
P.S. I woke up this morning to an email from Lucy: “I’ve been thinking a lot about our conversation and your advice… if you want to write a few more thoughts, I’d value them. Love, Lucy.”
Empty chair, full heart—
in what we choose not to hold,
blessing learns to land.
