Walking is one of the best-evidenced, most accessible and lowest-risk interventions for extending healthy life. The threshold is low, the gains are real and even modest increases in daily steps appear to meaningfully shift mortality risk.
A 2024 umbrella review of multiple meta-analyses, published in Science Direct, found that a few thousand steps a day measurably changes the trajectory of a life. Modern medicine has, in its own idiom, rediscovered something Judaism has never forgotten: that the body in motion is not incidental to the soul's condition, but bound up with it.
Judaism has long affirmed the power of walking and movement itself carries spiritual weight. The Three Regalim — Pesach, Shavuot and Succot are literally "foot festivals," which historically demanded physical pilgrimage to Jerusalem. The Torah's central narrative is itself a journey on foot, from Egyptian bondage through the wilderness toward the Promised Land.
Halachah treats walking itself as a legal category worth regulating,capping how far one may walk from home on Shabbat through the techum boundary, and constructing eruvin to extend or adjust those limits –precisely because where and how we walk is never merely physical, but covenantal.
As the New Year approaches, the sanctity of walking takes on a different register. Rosh Hashanah and the Aseret Yemei Teshuvah are saturated with the language and choreography of walking – not walking as exercise, but as avodah, spiritual labour performed with the feet. There are four key calls to walk embedded in this season, each disclosing something different about what it means to move toward renewal.
The custom of Tashlich asks us to step outside the interior world of thought and walk physically to a river, sea or any body of flowing water to cast off our sins. Traditionally, it is carried out on the afternoon of the first day of Rosh Hashanah (or the second, if as this year the first falls on Shabbat).
It would have been easier, theologically, simply to recite the verses from Micah, ”You will cast all our sins into the depths of the sea”,while seated. Judaism insists instead on the walk itself. Teshuvah, this custom teaches, is not merely a change of mind but one enacted in space, with the body, through the ordinary act of putting one foot in front of the other until we arrive somewhere we were not before. The walk to the water therefore rehearses a larger truth: repentance that stays seated has not yet truly begun.
Cheshbon hanefesh, the accounting of the soul that dominates Ellul and the Days of Awe, is the second reference to the power of walking at this time of year. It is often pictured as a solitary walk: the mussar (ethics) master pacing alone at dusk, turning over the year's ledger. This is close to Rebbe Nachman of Breslov’s practice of hitbodedut, in which a person walks alone in a field and speaks their reckoning aloud.
Walking moves thought along at its own pace, in a way that sitting still cannot. It draws the mind outward, giving it a rhythm and a horizon rather than a closed room to circle in. The walk becomes the form the accounting takes, not incidental to the reflection but its natural vehicle. The great medieval philosopher, Moses Maimonides, himself observed that a troubled soul benefits first from the body's motion, before it can benefit from argument.
The third reference to walking’s spiritual importance forms the Torah reading on Rosh Hashanah; the Akedah. Perhaps no walk in the entire Hebrew Bible is more haunting than the three days Abraham journeys toward Mount Moriah, with his son, Isaac, beside him, the outcome utterly unresolved. This is a walk conducted entirely in faith, one whose meaning cannot be settled until the very last moment on the mountain.
The story lingers on the duration deliberately – three days, because the extended walk itself is the test just as much as the Akedah’s climax. Every Rosh Hashanah, when we read this story, we are in some sense re-enacting that journey: walking into a new year whose contents are sealed and judgment unknown, carrying with us both dread and trust in roughly equal measure. The walk to Moriah is the walk every person makes into an unwritten year — one foot in submission and the other in hope.
The final description of walking as a spiritual act at this time of year is one that gathers all the others into itself: hithalech lefanai, "walk before Me," the charge given to Abraham early on in the Book of Genesis and the phrase that echoes through the central image of the Unetaneh Tokef prayer. These are indeed the liturgy's most searing lines – “who shall live, who shall die, who by fire, who by water” – and they arrive within a framework that is fundamentally about walking: standing, as the Talmud says, like sheep passing beneath the shepherd's staff, one by one, in motion, being counted as we go.
To walk before God is not to arrive at a fixed spiritual location and remain there; it is to be perpetually underway, under scrutiny, in relationship precisely because one has not stopped moving.
Taken together, these four walks describe teshuvah's full anatomy: an outward walk that enacts change, an inward walk that reckons with the self, a walk toward the unknown sustained by faith and lastly a walk lived permanently in the presence of the One who judges.
Science tells us that walking extends the years of a life. The machzor tells us something more demanding: that how we walk,where we walk, why we walk and before whom we walk determines just what those years are for.
Simon Eder is co-editor of Nothing so Whole as a Broken Heart
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