The Tahini Lesson for My Weekly Friday Cooking

Every Friday, I stand at my kitchen counter and make tahini from scratch. It’s a simple ritual — tahini paste, garlic, lemon, and water — but it teaches me something profound every single time.

Here’s what happens: the moment I start adding water to the thick tahini paste and begin to stir, it gets harder. Thicker. More resistant. The paste seizes up, clumps together, and becomes almost impossible to work with. If I didn’t know better, I would stop right there. I would think I had done something wrong. I would think I had ruined it.

But I’ve made this enough times to know the secret: you have to keep going.

Because somewhere in the middle — after you’ve pushed through the resistance, after you’ve kept stirring even when it felt like it was only getting worse — something shifts. The mixture begins to loosen. It softens. It flows. And by the time you’ve added all the water, what was once a stiff, seized-up paste has transformed into a silky, smooth, beautiful dressing.

The tahini had to get worse before it could get better.

I think healing works the same way.

There are moments in life — in grief, in therapy, in recovery, in any kind of real inner work — where things feel like they’re getting harder, not easier. You started the process. You showed up. You added the water. And somehow, you feel worse than when you began.

That is the moment most people stop.

They think: This isn’t working. I must be doing something wrong. Maybe I’m not cut out for this. Maybe it’s better to just leave it alone.

But what if that thickening, that resistance, that sense of things getting harder — what if that’s not a sign that something is wrong? What if it’s actually a sign that something is happening?

Tahini paste, on its own, is stable. It sits in its jar, unmoved, unchanged. It doesn’t resist because nothing is asking it to transform. The moment you introduce water — the moment you invite change — it pushes back. It contracts before it can expand. It tightens before it can flow.

That is the nature of transformation.

When we begin to heal — truly heal — we disturb something that has been sitting still for a long time. Old wounds surface. Old patterns rear their heads. What was neatly tucked away suddenly feels raw and exposed. And we stand there, stirring, wondering why we feel worse than before we started.

This is not failure. This is the thickening. This is the moment the process is working.

The resistance is not the destination. It is the passage.

You don’t stop adding water just because it gets thick. You keep going — steadily, patiently, faithfully — trusting that what feels like resistance is actually integration. The water isn’t ruining the tahini. It is becoming part of it. And the paste isn’t fighting the water. It is, slowly, making room for it.

This is what healing looks like from the inside. It looks like things getting harder. It looks like confusion, and tears, and wondering if you’ve made a mistake by opening this up at all. But you haven’t. You’re just in the middle of the pour — right at that thick, resistant, seemingly hopeless moment — right before everything begins to flow.

So if you are somewhere in your own process right now — in a conversation, in a season of life, in therapy, in prayer, in grief — and it feels like things are only getting harder, let me offer you what my Friday kitchen teaches me every week:

Keep stirring. You’re not at the end. You’re in the middle.

The smoothness is coming. The flow is coming. You just have to stay with it long enough to get through the thickening.

Shabbat Shalom. 🕯️

P.S.

Where in your life is the water making things harder before they get easier? If you want help navigating that — I’m here. Let’s work together.