by LEIBY BURNHAM | August 28, 2026 6:55 pm
In 1983, shopping center developer Westfield Australia wanted a creative way to showcase two of their premier properties. They decided to make a highly publicized race from one to the other. This was not an easy 5K with a DJ blasting music the whole way and free donuts, coffee, and a shiny medal at the end for all the runners. One shopping center was in Sydney and the other was in Melbourne. Westfield decided to create one of the most brutal ultramarathons in the world, and build the hype around it. It would be about 544 miles, almost 21 regular marathons in a row, run on hard pavement, through rolling countryside and at times steep highway grades, through autumn days and very cold nights. Much of the running would be done with normal highway traffic whizzing by you at 70 MPH.
The inaugural Sydney-to-Melbourne Ultramarathon was for extraordinary runners. You don’t sign up for a Ultramarathon on a whim, they are for elite endurance athletes who spend years training their bodies to keep moving long after every normal cell in the human body would have filed a formal complaint and then gone on strike and shut down. And indeed, the first year only attracted 10 registrants.
Tony Rafferty, 44, had previously set a world record for running continuously for fifty hours. Another competitor, John Connellan, 28, could run a marathon in about two hours and thirty-five minutes. Even today, with running shoes that are light years ahead of what they had in 1983, that is a time achieved by less than 1% of runners. The 10 registrants were elite athletes with support teams including coaches, nutrition specialists, and medical staff. They had carefully planned strategies, pacing teams, specialized equipment, and years of experience making the human body do what it clearly was not designed to do.
And then there was #11, Cliff Young, who according to several accounts showed up to register on the day of the race. He was not like all the others.
Cliff was sixty-one years old and lived on a potato and cattle farm in Beech Forest, Victoria. He was thin, wiry, lived with his mother and brother, and looked like a man who had wandered over from a farm auction looking for the livestock tent. He had spent most of his life working the family farm and was locally famous for running around the wet hills near his property in clumsy rubber Wellington boots chasing cattle who wandered away.
To be fair, Cliff was not quite the total athletic newbie that later versions of the story sometimes make him out to be. He had already run the Melbourne Marathon several times, so he was not a sixty-one-year-old who woke up one morning, put down his pitchfork, and said, “I think I’ll run 544 miles this week.” But he was still a complete outsider compared with the professional endurance runners lined up against him.
When Westfield executives learned that a sixty-one-year-old farmer planned to join the event, they were worried that their race would end with an elderly man dying somewhere on the Hume Highway, which is generally considered bad advertising. He was older than the average runner by close to 15 years and had no support team. Only after some further investigation and consideration, they let him register.
April 27, 1983, the racers lined up for the starting gun, under heavy media coverage and great fanfare. The professional runners looked like professional runners. Cliff looked like Cliff. He showed up in long pants and workmanlike clothing, looking like he might be there for the starting ceremony and then go repair a fence. He was even wearing his rubber boots; that was what he ran in on the farm, but a kind spectator gave him a pair of sneakers.
The gun went off, and the elite runners took off. Cliff shuffled along behind them. Even his running form was straight up weird. No long elegant stride, no graceful floating gait, no technical foot placement that would cause coaches to nod thoughtfully and whisper, “At least he has good biomechanics.” He barely seemed to lift his feet off the ground. His knees stayed low, his body leaned forward, and he moved with a strange little lope that looked as if he was permanently late for something but not sufficiently concerned to break into an actual run. Spectators called it the Cliff Young Shuffle.
By the end of the first day he was well behind the pack, which surprised absolutely no one. The professionals had a strategy: run hard during the day, stop at night, sleep several hours, wake up refreshed and begin again. There was even something of a gentleman’s agreement among the competitors that they would sleep until dawn.
But Cliff must not have gotten the memo. He woke up shortly after two in the morning and just started running. By the time anyone realized what had happened, Cliff had opened a lead of roughly thirty kilometers. At this point Cliff did what great innovators do when they stumble onto a revolutionary strategy: he doubled down on his edge.
He dramatically cut down his sleeping time and simply kept shuffling. Every day he be shuffling. While the other runners slept, Cliff was loping along. While they rested, treated injuries, ate meals, and talked with their coaches about new strategies to deal with the sixty-one-year-old potato farmer who had apparently decided that sleep was optional, Cliff kept shuffling. He was not necessarily faster than the others in the traditional sense; he simply spent far more time moving forward. His strange little gait was also remarkably economical. It did not look impressive, but it conserved energy and kept his body moving hour after hour after hour.
The race became a national obsession. Television crews followed Cliff’s progress and crowds began gathering along the route. The old farmer everyone assumed would finish somewhere near the back was now leading some of the greatest endurance athletes in Australia, and the gap kept growing. Cliff lost toenails, injured his shoulder after a fall and was exhausted beyond anything most of us would experience outside of traveling internationally with small children.
He just kept shuffling.
Five days, fifteen hours and four minutes after leaving Sydney, Cliff Young arrived in Melbourne. He was not only the clear winner, his nearest competitor was roughly fifty kilometers behind him. Half of the other elite competitors didn’t even finish the race, but the sixty-one-year-old farmer with the funny shuffle beat the professional field by almost ten hours to win one of the most grueling races in the world.
Australia went crazy. Cliff became a national hero almost overnight. His strange gait became famous, runners studied variations of it, and he went down in history as one of the greatest underdog victors in sports history.
Cliff seemed almost embarrassed by the attention. He had won $10,000 in prize money, enough to buy two new cars at the time, yet he felt the other runners had worked just as hard as he had. So he split the winnings with the rest of the runners. Despite executing one of the most astonishing victories in endurance-sports history, he apparently concluded that everyone deserved something because, after all, they too had all done a lot of running.
The Cliff Young story is usually told as a lesson about perseverance, and obviously there is plenty of perseverance packed into 544 miles of shuffling. But there is another part of the story that is even more fascinating. Cliff did not look like the person who was supposed to win, or even race, an ultramarathon. He did not run like the person who was supposed to win. His life story was not a twenty-year progression leading toward the moment where everyone finally said, “Of course Cliff Young won the Sydney-to-Melbourne Ultramarathon. This is what he has been working on his entire life.”
Before the race, if you asked someone, “Who is Cliff Young?” the answer would have been simple: he is a sixty-one-year-old farmer from Beech Forest. Five days later, another answer was equally true: he was an ultramarathon champion and a national hero. He showed up on April 27, 1983, and became extraordinary in one moment.
We have a habit of confusing our history with our identity. We tell ourselves things like: I’m just not an on-time kind of person. I can’t connect with prayer. I’m impatient. Charity is not my thing. I’m not that guy who gets involved in communal events. I can’t do diets. I’m just not good at relationships. This means that we take the biography of the person we have been until today and quietly decide that it’s a legal contract binding us to be that same person tomorrow.
Rosh Hashanah comes along every year to tell us that this is simply not true.
The name itself is unusual. We call it Rosh Hashanah—the head of the year, not New Year’s Day, not the beginning of the year or the first day of the year. The head of the year. The head is where everything a person does ultimately emanates from. The hand moves because the brain sent the instruction, the feet go somewhere because the brain decided on a destination, the head contains the direction and intention from which everything we do proceeds. Rosh Hashanah is the head of the year because everything we do in the coming year is formed there.
Rav Eliyahu Dessler, citing his rebbe Rav Tzvi Hirsch Broide of Kelm, (Michtav M’Eliyahu, Vol. II, pg 21) explains that the Jewish calendar is not simply a series of anniversaries. We travel through time, returning each year to the same spiritual “stations” and the unique spiritual opportunity embedded in them.
On Pesach we do not merely commemorate the Exodus from Egypt; the power of liberation returns, giving us an opportunity to leave our own constraints and limitations. On Shavuos we do not merely remember that our ancestors received the Torah; we stand again at Sinai with the opportunity to make our own enthusiastic declaration of Naaseh V’nishma—we will do and we will listen.
And Rosh Hashanah is the station of human creation. Our Sages teach that Adam HaRishon, the first human being, was created on Rosh Hashanah. That’s what it means when we say in our Rosh Hashanah prayers, “Today is the birthday of the world,” the birthday of humanity in the world. Vayikra Rabbah describes that first day almost hour by hour: Hashem gathered Adam’s earth, formed him, breathed a soul into him, placed him in Gan Eden, commanded him, judged him after his sin and ultimately allowed him to emerge from judgment. Rosh Hashanah was quite literally the day a human being came into existence.
This means that Rosh Hashanah is not when we simply remember the moment of mankind’s creation, but when we return to the spiritual power embedded in that original day. It is the day for creating people. It is the day when we can create ourselves anew.
Rosh Hashanah is the first day of the Ten Days of Teshuvah, which seems strange, because the davening doesn’t seem to talk a lot about repentance. But Teshuva is more than saying I’m sorry, it’s about changing who we are. As Maimonides says (Laws of Repentance 2:4) among the paths of repentance is for a person to change his name, as if to declare, “I am another person. I am not the same person who committed those deeds.” That is an extraordinary way to describe repentance. It’s not simply saying, “I am essentially the same person but I promise to behave somewhat better.” He is describing a person who can undergo such profound internal change that he can truthfully say, “That person you knew? I am not him anymore.”
Of course, our past matters. We are accountable for what we did, we need to repair what we damaged, and Yom Kippur will be all about dealing with that. But our past does not get veto power over our future identity. That is something we only have one day in the year to build, and that is Rosh Hashanah. We don’t need to be elite athletes to show up at the starting line of the great race. We don’t need to have the impressive past, the great track record, or the support team. We need to show up on Rosh Hashanah and declare our intention to run the biggest race. We need to show up, even in the wrong clothing, the wrong boots, the wrong gait, and say, “This year, Hashem, I am Yours. I’ll run as much as You want me to run, I’ll sleep as little as You need me to sleep, and the rest of the time, I’ll be loping along, inexperienced as I am, with the gait of a newbie, but the heart of a champion. This year, every day, I’ll be shuffling.”
Cliff Young crossed the finish line in Melbourne and instantly transformed from a potato farmer to national hero. But the transformation did not begin when he reached Melbourne; Melbourne was simply when everyone else finally noticed it. The transformation began when Cliff showed up out of nowhere, signed up for the race, and walked up to the starting line.
Rosh Hashanah is our starting line.
In exactly two weeks, we will return to the day on which Adam was created, the day on which the spiritual power of human creation enters the world again. The next two weeks should not only be spent asking ourselves what habit we want to improve. Let’s ask something far bigger: Who do I want to create?
As what kind of Jew will we be as we enter 5787? What kind of spouse? What kind of parent? What kind of friend? What kind of community member?
Maybe the answer feels radically different from the person we have been until now. Good. Cliff Young did not look much like an ultramarathon champion either. We do not need a history of being something in order to begin becoming it. We need to show up and sign up. We need to decide that this is the person we will be when the starting gun of 5787 goes off, and then we need to start moving. It may not be elegant. It may not look impressive. It may feel less like a sprint and more like a strange little shuffle.
But we will shuffle anyway. We’ll shuffle our way all the way to 5788, and G-d will be at our side every step of the way. And when next year comes to a close, and we have a year where we look back and we’re a hero in our own eyes, in the eyes of our children and spouses, family and friends, community members and Rabbis, we’ll know that it was because we showed up to Head of the Year, the place from which it all emanates, and said, “Sign me up.”
May we all be blessed with a 5787 filled with shuffling.
Parsha Dvar Torah
This week’s parsha, Ki Savo, begins with the laws of bikkurim, the offering of the first fruit. When a farmer would see the first of his fruit beginning to bloom, he would tie a ribbon around it. When the fruit would finally be ready to eat, the farmer would take the first fruits of the seven species and bring them to the Temple. (The seven species with which Israel is blessed are; wheat, barley, grapes, pomegranates, figs, dates, and olives.) At the Temple, he would thank G-d for the land he was given, and say a special prayer detailing how the Jewish people got to Israel. H would then give the basket of fruit to the Kohen.
What we need to understand is how this beautiful mitzvah landed where it did, directly after the portion about Amalek, the Jewish people’s archenemy. Last week’s portion ended with the commandment to remember the insidious attack Amalek launched against the Jews as they were coming out of Egypt. Amalek’s attack was not just against the physical nation, but against the spirituality which the Jews represent. The nations of the world, hearing of the miracles of the Exodus, truly feared G-d and respected His people. Amalek attacked the Jews, knowing they would lose, but hoping that they would at least show the rest of the world that G-d Chosen Nation was fallible just like everyone else. How does a mitzvah like bikkurim juxtapose itself to this heinous nation’s attack?
If we look at the verses describing battle with Amalek, we see an interesting verb being used. “Remember what Amalek did to you on the way when you were going out of Egypt. When they chanced upon you on the way, and they struck at you who were hindmost, all the feeble ones at your rear, and you were exhausted and wearied, and they had no fear of G-d.” (Deut 25:17-18). Here is my question to you: if you were to see long columns of soldiers armed to the teeth, and heading directly towards you, would you call that an army “that chanced upon you?” NO! They didn’t chance on anyone, they came out with full intent to attack! So why does the Torah describe this attack as one in which Amalek chanced upon the Jews?
The answer is that this verb describes the essence of Amalek. Amalek is the nation that wants to deny the validity of G-d and the implications of a world with a G-d. To Amalek, everything that happens in the world is random, by chance, and not predestined by G-d. No G-d created the world, no G-d has a guiding hand that plays a role in current events, and no G-d has any knowledge of right and wrong which He would impart to people. Even when one nation attacks another, it is just happenstance, not anything done as part of a design or plan. When the Torah commands us to remember Amalek, it doesn’t only mean we should remember the battle, but that we should focus on our distance from their message, their raison d’etre.
The mitzvah of bikkurim is one that helps us achieve an attitude that is the polar opposite of the Amalek worldview. After working on his field for an entire season, day in and day out, a farmer could very well feel that the success of his crops belongs wholly to his hard work. The mitzvah of bikkurim reminds us that no matter how much work we put into our field, ultimately, it is G-d that blesses us with bounty. (The modern day equivalence of Bikkurim would be taking the first few dollars of every paycheck and giving it to charity. Even though we worked hard for that paycheck, this act would demonstrate that, ultimately, we believe our success is from G-d!)
While Amalek says that everything is random, we say everything is divinely inspired. We use our bikkurim to combat his worldview! May G-d rebuild the Temple speedily in our days, so that we can once again bring bikkurim!!
Parsha Summary
This week’s Parsha begins with the mitzvah of bikurim, the offering of the first fruit. When a farmer would notice the first of his crops begin to bloom (specifically the seven fruits with which Israel is praised; wheat, barley, grape, pomegranates, figs, olives, and dates), he would tie a string around it. When they would mature, he would bring them to Jerusalem and give it to the Kohen in the Temple. He would say a paragraph describing the Jewish people’s history of difficulties, and would then go on to enumerate his blessings – the fact that he is bringing his crops to the Temple, in his land, undisturbed by the world.
This mitzvah was meant to underscore the elation a Jew should feel at this juncture. At a time when we might be most tempted to take full credit for something (when our crops finally grow in after months of hard work), this mitzvah helps us recognize that our bounty is a gift from G-d.
The next portion deals with the confession of the tithes. We are not always so up to date on our required tithes, so, once every three years, there is a commandment to take any tithes that we were supposed to have distributed already, and GET THEM OUT! This is done on Erev Pesach, after the three years are over. After making sure that all our tithes are distributed to the proper destinations, (some go to the Levite, some to the poor, and some to yourself to be eaten in Jerusalem), you confess to G-d, saying that you have taken care of all your obligations, and asking G-d to He look down with favor onto His nation and bless us with continued largess and beneficiation.
It is at this point that Moshe tells the Jews that G-d has chosen us to be His treasured Chosen People. When we walk in the path G-d has set for us, that designation will be recognized by the whole world. (I think you can figure out the flip side of that coin. So if you are wondering how to stem Anti-Semitism, or how to bolster the world opinion of Israel and the Jews, don’t go marching in Washington. March down the corridors of self-introspection, and see what you can do to help the world understand that we are the Chosen Nation!)
After that, Moshe tells the people that when they enter Israel, they should proceed directly to two mountains called Mount Gerizim and Mount Eival There, six tribes should ascend each of the mountains, leaving the elder Levites in the valley along with the Ark of G-d. The Levites should then face Mount Gerizim and proclaim a blessing (e.g. Blessed is he who judges the widow, orphan, and poor person with righteousness), to which all the Jews should answer with a thundering Amen! Then, the Levites should face Mount Eival, and give the inverse of the blessing in the form of a curse (e.g. Cursed is he who perverts the judgment of the widow, the orphan or the poor), and everyone should answer Amen!
Most of the 12 blessings and curses dealt with matters that could be done secretly (moving a boundary in the middle of the night, giving someone bad advice, forbidden sexual relations, and so forth). This was the Jews’ way of saying, as they established their homeland, that they as a society abhor furtive and underhanded crimes.
The last portion of this Parsha contains the strongest admonition Moshe ever gave the Jews. In it, he detailed for them the incredible blessing that they can bring to themselves if they keep the Torah, but also the terrible destruction that will come as a result of us cutting ourselves from our Source. In it, we find something fascinating. Moshe says that all the hardships we encounter will be come upon us, “Since you did not serve Ad-noy, your G-d, with joy and goodheartedness” (Deut. 28:47). It is clear that G-d doesn’t want us to simply serve Him – this is not Wal-Mart – G-d wants us to serve Him with joy and goodheartedness! He wants us to be enthused by the practices we keep, He wants us to be elated in our prayers, and ecstatic to be in His service!
So, I’m going to sign off, because I am sure there is somewhere you have to ecstatically rush off to!
Quote of the Week: Honesty is the first chapter in the book or wisdom. ~ Thomas Jefferson
Random Fact of the Week: A tree planted near a streetlight will keep its leaves longer into the fall than other trees.
Funny Line of the Week: When someone tells you that nothing is impossible, ask him to dribble a football.
Have a Peachy Shabbos,
R’ Leiby Burnham
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