Take the Shot

My first game on varsity, we got destroyed.

I was a sophomore. There was no JV hockey in the MYHSHL (iykyk) yeshiva league world yet, so I was on varsity by default. Not a flex, just the math of a small program. We lost 2-0, but the score did not tell the story. They had something like sixty shots on goal. We had ten. It was not a hockey game. It was a clinic, and we were the students.

At our next practice, our coach was furious. Not because we lost. He was furious because we had barely shot the puck. We had been waiting all night for the perfect setup, the perfect angle, the perfect moment. We were hesitant, especially going forward. The puck stayed on our stick when it should have been flying toward the net.

And he quoted Wayne Gretzky at us. It was the first time I heard it.

“You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.”

It sounded, at the time, like a sports cliché. It is not. It is a theology of human hesitation. So much of life is lost not through failure, but through preemptive surrender. Not because we tried and fell short, but because we decided, in advance, not to begin.

I have been thinking about that game lately because of a man in Megillas Rut who never took his shot.

In the final scenes of the megillah, Boaz goes to the city gate to settle the matter of redemption. There is a closer relative with first rights to redeem the field and marry Rut. Boaz calls him over.

The Torah introduces him with a phrase that effectively means: anonymous.

Ploni Almoni.

The Gemara in Bava Basra tells us he actually had a name: Tov. Good.

That is what makes the story unsettling.

He was not wicked. He was not cruel. He committed no obvious moral crime. He simply declined.

“Pen ashchis es nachalasi”: I may compromise my own inheritance.

And that was that.

What did he do that was so bad that he lost his name? That his name becomes synonymous with anonymous, forever? He passed on marrying her. So what? Plenty of people pass.

Here is what I think the megillah is telling us. He did not pass on marrying her. He passed on meeting her.

You are not meant to marry every person you date. Sometimes the answer is no, and that is fair. But he never tried. He never took Rut out for a cup of coffee. Never sat with her in a hotel lobby. Never gave the possibility a chance to become real.

And he could not have known what he was walking away from. Nobody at that gate knew that Rut would be the great-great-grandmother of Malchus Beis Dovid. He could not have done his due diligence and concluded that he was passing up the line of Dovid Hamelech.

The only way to know was to try.

Maybe this is why his name is Tov. He was good. Not evil. Not cruel. Good. Adequate. Perfectly decent. And that is exactly what the megillah is naming. Because Tanach is telling us something most of us would rather not hear: that mere adequacy, in the moment a person is called to rise, is itself the failure.

And that is often how we make our worst decisions.

What feels impossible from far away often becomes human once we move closer. Relationships, opportunities, commitments, spiritual growth: many things look unreasonable when viewed theoretically. But proximity changes perception. Encounter changes obligation.

Ploni Almoni never got close enough to discover what he was walking away from.

That is part of what makes Shavuos so confronting.

We celebrate the incredible truth that Hashem gave us His Torah. Finite human beings were invited into a special relationship with the Divine.

And yet when it comes to learning and engaging with this special gift so many of us disqualify ourselves before opening the sefer.

I am not a learner. I can’t learn. My Hebrew is too weak. Gemara isn’t for me. I tried once. I’m not built for this. I do chessed instead.

Maybe some of those feelings are sincere.

But sincerity does not make them true.

Sometimes they are simply our version of pen ashchis es nachalasi: the internal logic we use to protect ourselves from the vulnerability of trying.

Because trying creates risk.

If I never begin, I never have to discover my limitations. I never have to find out where my ceiling is.

But I also never discover my possibilities.

And like Ploni Almoni, I never get to discover what I was walking away from. He could not see the line of Dovid from where he stood. We cannot see, from where we stand, what one chapter of Gemara or one chavrusa might open in us. The only way forward is to come closer.

Jewish history is shaped not only by the wickedness we avoid, but by the courage we fail to summon.

This Shavuos, don’t be Ploni Almoni. Don’t be the person at the gate who walked away because the math looked wrong. The math always looks wrong from the outside. The line of Dovid was hiding in plain sight, waiting for someone willing to lean in and find out.

Pick one piece of the chag you have already decided is not for you. The all-night learning. A shiur whose topic you tell yourself is over your head. A chavrusa you have been meaning to call. A masechta you cracked open once and closed. Walk through the gate.

Hashem is not asking us to be Boaz. He is asking us to not be Ploni Almoni. That is much smaller. And, as it turns out, much harder.

Take the shot.