Better by Mistake
Erev Yom Kippur 5772 / 7 October 2011
Rabbi Daniel Cotzin Burg, Beth Am
I recently read about a young mother driving her son home from kindergarten. “What did you learn today?” she asked. “Nothing,” said the son. “Nothing?” replied the mother surprised. “No,” he said. “My teacher said you learn by making mistakes, and I didn’t make any today.” The story comes from a new book by New York Times columnist Alina Tugend. The book is called Better by Mistake and it details the ways in which mistakes, big and small, actually improve the lives of both those who commit the errors and, also perhaps, those of us who find ourselves on the receiving end.
Yom Kippur is, of course, all about mistakes: the ones we’ve made and the ones that (perhaps, finally, after years and years) we’ve been able to scratch off our list of habitual failings. In each of the prayers – Ashamnu, Al Chet – the lengthy cantorial pieces chronicling our many sins, the Mahzor seems fairly straightforward about the purpose of Yom Kippur: fail less. This all seems straightforward, that is, until we examine the prayer that we recited just a little while ago, the prayer which is so profoundly interwoven with the fabric of Yom Kippur that we often refer to these evening services as simply: Kol Nidre. But, unlike Viddui, Kol Nidre is not about the sins for which we are sorry, the ones that we’ve already committed …miyom kippurim zeh ad yom kippurim haba aleinu l’tova… from THIS Yom Kippur until the NEXT. Kol Nidre is about vows and sins, the mistakes we have yet to make and, it seems, which we are sufficiently convinced that we will make despite our best intentions.
Ask yourself, how many of us really believe that Yom Kippur demands perfection? That would be a tall order, and yet we often think of Yom Kippur as a reboot, a chance to start fresh, to start over. The calendar’s most sacred day, though, is not about starting over, it’s about starting well, not about avoiding mistakes, but about making better ones and learning from the ones we’ve already made. Yom Kippur is not about living a perfect life, but a righteous one. In a word, it’s about experience.
Remember Chesley Sullenberger III, the captain of USAir flight 1549, the hero of the “Miracle on the Hudson?” In the days that followed the incident what became apparent, in addition to his admirable humility, was his ability to stay focused and to respond quickly to the crisis as it unfolded. But Sully was a hero on January 15, 2009, not because he was lucky or talented. Rather, he drew on decades of experience from thousands of flight - and countless mistakes - his own and those of others and that he and his crew studied in preparation for such an eventuality. In fact, as Tugend details in her book, the goal of aviation safety is not to eliminate error, but to manage it (pg. 145-6). And to do so, pilots, flight attendants, ground crews and more need to collaborate and learn from the mistakes of others. Paraphrasing Emerson, Captain Sully once said: “we simply can’t live long enough to make all the mistakes ourselves.”
But we don’t like mistakes, do we. American culture scorns error unless we’re watching Dr. Phil and voyeuristically scoffing at the shortcomings of others. Tugend points out that corporations are so discouraging of human error that many companies are plagued with underreporting of mistakes. One problem is that people confuse minor errors with major ones, what Bill Gore of Gore-Tex calls above-the-line mistakes vs. below-the-line ones. In the process, we catastrophize every misstep which, of course, makes us less productive in the long-run. We become so focused on the minor errors that we lose sight of the real dangers, the below-the-line mistakes.
While putting my thoughts together for this talk, I spoke with a Beth Am member who is VP of Operations at Under Armour. He recalls a terrible phone call he received in the middle of the night back in 2006. It seems that an employee had somehow managed to erase all the data from Under Armour’s server – customer lists, product information and invoices – including the backup. It took some doing, but he and others managed to salvage most of the information from another server. He tells me that the company learned two valuable lessons from the experience. First, they needed to develop a better strategy for crisis management, and second (and perhaps more important) they needed to address the issue of business continuity, how to work better and more effectively as a team so that problems of this magnitude could be avoided in the first place. Like Sully’s crew, the present-day Under Armour is better prepared because they’ve learned from previous errors and now boast a nimbler and savvier work force.
In a way, Yom Kippur is the quality control of Jewish living, a reminder that our mistakes should be instructive. But what do we do with those big sins, the ones that we ought to be embarrassed about? Can those somehow be considered positive? Consider the worst sin in our people’s history: the Golden Calf. One really couldn’t script it better, the tragic events worthy of a borscht-belt routine! After all that God does for us: rescuing us from Egypt, parting the Sea, bringing us to Mount Sinai, what do our ancestors do? They build an idol and proclaim, “This is your god, O Israel, who brought you out of the land of Egypt!” (Ex. 32:4). In Jewish tradition, this incident is the very archetype of sin, so bad that Moses, in anger, erases the data from the server, he breaks the sh’nei luchot ha’brit. So what happened? After they’re punished, some quite severely, those who remain are told to build the Mishkan or Tabernacle, a sanctuary for God. The problem is that the Torah’s sequence of events is strange: Though the building of the Mishkan commences AFTER all this, the instructions for it, the blueprints if you will, are actually given BEFORE the Golden Calf incident. If we read the Torah’s narrative chronologically, the greatest sin in our history may have been a dark moment in the experience of Jewish worship, but it is bump on the way, an interruption of a process that had already been set in motion. Once the perpetrators were dealt with appropriately, we could return to business as usual.
Our Sages, though, read the story differently. Ein mukdam u’meuchar baTorah – so goes a principal of rabbinic exegesis – the Torah’s chronology may not be accurate. In fact Rashi claims that even the instructions for the Mishkan come after the Golden Calf. The midrash puts it this way: And on that very day, God told [Moses], “Let them make me a sanctuary…” – so that all of the nations may know that the Golden Calf has been atoned…. Said God, “Let the gold of the Mishkan come and atone for the gold of the Golden Calf….” (Tanhuma, Teruma 8). And what was the day on which God gave these instructions? Yom Kippur. The first Day of Atonement, then, comes to aid in the first great reconciliation, a chance to move on from our Nation’s first great mistake.
And because the sin was so great, we as a people were able to confront the very real challenge of faith in an uncertain world. In other words, the relationship endures precisely because it was violated – faithlessness gives way to fidelity. One of my favorite Yom Kippur images comes from a folk tradition. We’re taught that when a person is created, he or she is tied to God with a string. When a person sins, the string breaks. But if s/he repents during the Days of Awe, the angel Gabriel comes down and makes a knot in the string and the person is connected to God once again. Because every Jew sins from time to time, our strings are all riddled with knots. The irony, though, is that a string with knots is shorter than a string without. Repentance, in a very real way, brings us closer to God.
To be clear, no one – certainly not your rabbi – is suggesting that we ought to be intentionally sinning just to draw nearer to our Creator. Think of it more as an internal dialogue between two competing aspects of ourselves. Have you ever asked why we weren’t created perfect, why human beings are so good at being fallible? It seems that God created us not only with the capacity to make mistakes, but with the drive and temperament to do so. There’s a wonderful teaching that ascribes equal value to the yetzer hara, our evil inclination as it does to the yetzer hatov, our tendency to do good. The midrash says, “Were if not for the yetzer hara, no man would build a house, get married, or have children.” (Gen. Raba 9:7). The tension between our two inclinations leads to many of life’s greatest achievements and even to our most meaningful relationships. In Freudian terms, successful t’shuvah means harnessing the superego to check the ego and the id. Given the reality that we all sin, the task is to grow, to ascend if you will, to learn between this Yom Kippur and the next - mi’Yom Kippurim zeh ad Yom Kippurim haba so that haba aleinu l’tov - so that next Yom Kippur will come to us for good.
You may have noticed that I’ve been conflating two terms this evening: “sin” and “mistake.” You might argue that they are not the same, and sometimes this is true. The sins of murder, or abuse, or profound deceit are not mistakes or benign errors. They are sins and the process of atoning from such a chilul Hashem, such a desecration of God’s name, is not what I am grappling with here today. But our tradition does suggest that many, if not most, of the sins we commit are, in fact, mistakes. The term in Hebrew is cheit as in “al cheit sh’chatanu lifanecha, for the sin we have committed before you…” but, the word cheit does not mean flagrant disobedience. It’s an archer’s term. It means to shoot for a target and miss, to miss the mark. The presumption is that there is a part of us that always knows the righteous path, let’s call it a soul or spark of God’s presence. Like those antique cars at Disneyland, we may veer to the right or the left, but our divine neshama jolts us back, keeps us on track, or at least reminds us when we have gone too far astray.
Think of an example from your own life, a time when looking back you know you could have done better. Now ask yourself, if you really think about it, didn’t you know? Even as the words were coming out of your mouth, or the ice cream was going into your mouth… If you were silent when you should have spoken… If you were unkind or cruel or just thoughtless, wasn’t there a moment when you could have made a different choice, when your aim could have been truer? This is cheit. And the truth is, even the big sins are often understood in this fashion; there are other Hebrew terms for sin, but the sin of the Golden Calf is “Cheit haEgel.” And God’s response, what educators or parenting experts might call a “natural consequence,” is to assign the Israelites a building task. Rashi says, “Let them make Me a house for holiness – that is, not a sacred object, but a space in which holiness is potential.” Let the gold of the Mishkan come and atone for the gold of the Golden Calf…whereas the calf was solid gold, pure idolatry, the Tabernacle is a vessel, a golden receptacle for the best of human potential.
So what is our role in this? Both the Mishkan and the Beit Hamikdash are long gone. How do we, in our lives, in our time, become better through our mistakes? Two weeks ago, Reneé Feller led a wonderful session at Beth Am in preparation for these Yamim Noraim. She posed an intriguing question which I would like to share with you this evening. She asked us to consider what it might be like to be the High Priest. We often think of that role as inaccessible, even beyond human, but the Cohein Gadol was a person like anyone else. What if we were to think of Yom Kippur as a job interview? Each of us is seeking a position and, magically, there are as many jobs as there are qualified applicants. What would you put on your resumé? What would you say in the interview? Perhaps we might imagine the High Priest as a pilot attempting to safely land a plane filled with the entire Jewish people. If you were that pilot, would you be ready? Have you trained for this moment? Are you prepared to make the tough decisions? How will you react when confronted with the Holy of Holies, the inner sanctum of the Mishkan? Will you draw on your experiences, your mistakes, to ensure the best possible outcome?
This may sound intimidating, but the truth is the task of the Jewish archer is even more difficult than this. The Cohein Gadol knew that Yom Kippur was approaching; he had been x-ing out days on his calendar for quite some time. But we never know when we’ll be confronted with our past choices, when we’ll have to draw on our life experiences to move ourselves and our communities forward. In Pirkei Avot (2:15) Rabbi Eliezer says: “’Repent one day before your death.’ His disciples asked him, ‘But can one truly know which day one will die?’ He answered them. ‘Then you must repent each and every day because you never know if it will be your last’” (Avot D’Rabbi Natan 15). The late great Steve Jobs said presciently in 2005, “Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered…. Because almost everything - all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.” Captain Sully put it this way: “We need to try to do the right thing every time… because we never know what moment in our lives we’ll be judged on.” Yom Kippur holds up the specter of death – reminds us that our lives are finite, and through it we see each day as a precious gift. Living a righteous life is being open to life’s lessons at every moment. And imperfection, even brokenness, can lead to much good.
Long ago, in a town in Israel, there lived a water bearer who owned two large pots, each of which hung from the end of a pole which he carried across his neck. One pot had a crack in it, though, so that after the long walk from the stream, the broken pot arrived only half full. Feeling ashamed of its imperfection, the blemished pot spoke to the water bearer one day by the stream. “Would that I could be like your other pot, fully sound and complete so that I would not leak water all the way back to your house!” The bearer replied, “have you not seen that there are flowers on your side of the path, but not on the other? Indeed, I planted seeds there knowing full well that you would drip on them! It is your imperfection that has allowed these beautiful flowers to bloom.”
My friends, this year, let’s add a new “Al cheit” to our list. “Al cheit sh’chatanu l’fanecha, for the sin we committed when we confused perfection with righteousness, and when we forgot to learn from our failings.” This coming year, between this Yom Kippur and the next, let’s commit ourselves not only to failing less, but failing differently, failing better. We are, all of us, riddled with knots, the result of our many errors. But we should not forget that those same mistakes can bind us to God. The Mishkan may have been designed to atone for the sin of the Golden Calf, but it goes beyond that. Our Sages explain that it was nothing less than a physical manifestation of the formative impulse – a way for the Jewish people to continue the ongoing act of creation. Our ancestors sinned, yes, but through their error and the repentance that followed, they merited the construction of God’s house. May we, each of us, merit the same. All of us have cracks and imperfections, and we often tread the same path over and over again. But if we pay attention, perhaps we will come to notice beauty flowering on the road before us, a sign that we might just be on the right path after all.