This summer, once again, I got lost. I was driving into Jerusalem from the Galilee with a friend and, instead of taking the exit on the right I turned to the left and followed the road until we found ourselves in a Palestinian village. My instincts told me to keep going straight, that the road would take me right into the Old City. Wrong again. We drove on until we came to the end of the road, and hit right up against the Security Barrier. We were stuck on the wrong side of the wall. That’s when I realized that we would never get through and that we weren’t safe. The onset of fear took all my attention away from the anger I felt at myself for getting lost in the first place. I made a sharp U-turn and we backtracked as fast as we could.
Later, as I thought about this misadventure, I realized that I get lost all the time. I have a sharply honed instinct for taking the wrong turn. What startled me about this realization is how long I have not wanted to admit to myself how frequently I am lost, and how many mistakes I have made. Like looking in the mirror and seeing a big blemish bulging from your face, the instinct is to turn away, not to look, to hide, to run, anything but admit the truth.
That’s the way it is with us – so often we won’t admit the truth about ourselves. Because the truth hurts. In the soft recesses of the unconscious where truth lives, there is a gnawing ache. We are flawed. We are imperfect. And we hate to admit it. We meet our failings with blame and excuses, afraid to tell ourselves the truth. It’s like the three yeshiva students who were caught in the bathroom smoking on shabbos. The first said, “I didn’t do anything wrong. I forgot today is shabbos.” The second said, “I forgot that smoking on shabbos is forbidden.” “I also forgot,” said the third. “I forgot to lock the bathroom door.”
Some of us seem to accept imperfection as part of life. We do the best we can. We fall down and get up again. We take the wrong turn, so we turn around and retrace our steps. But sometimes our imperfection fills us with a great shame, as if we were seen from behind with our pants pulled down, and our faces are red and blushing and we want nothing more than to hide, like Jonah, whose story we will read [tomorrow afternoon] [later this afternoon]. Jonah, who goes down to the seashore, down to the bowels of a ship bound for the ends of the earth, and who ultimately gets thrown down into the depths of the sea, all to escape the face of God, the One who always knows the truth and reflects it back to us whether we like it or not.
Ernst Becker, the author of The Denial of Death, offers this vivid formulation of the human dilemma. He says, “Man is a god who defecates.” In our own minds we are meant to be perfect: perfect skin, perfect hair, perfect life. Shamed by our grossness, we search out product to cover the flaws. But how do you cover up your inner flaws, your real imperfection? The shame of imperfection is debilitating. It can lead to overwhelming sadness, to the darkness of the soul – what Kierkegaard called “the sickness unto death” -- and sometimes, to tragedy. There is not even a big fish to come and save us.
What if we could have the courage to be imperfect? After all, we aren’t really God! God is shlemut – wholeness; we are not. To be human is to have a haunting sense of incompleteness, imperfection. This is the essential character of human life: to be always, inevitably incomplete, making mistakes, taking the wrong turns. Our ancient Jewish wisdom insists this is not failure! It is simply the true reflection of what it means to be human. In the Image of God, we must be free, free to choose, free to make mistakes, free to fail. The mishnah speaks of one who sins, and sins again. There is no suggestion, no expectation that we will not sin. It is a given. We all sin. We all take the wrong road. The problem is never with our imperfection. The problem is with our self-deception, the belief that somehow we should be more perfect and less human than we are.
What if we could have the courage to be imperfect, if we had “a vision of life in which imperfection could be endured?” On Yom Kippur we cry out “Ashamnu, bagadnu – we have sinned, we have rebelled.” This is not a dogmatic statement about the wickedness of human nature but a howl of pain, a cry for help from the One who knows the secrets of the heart. Yet at the same time, paradoxically, it is a cry of relief to finally speak the truth: we have sinned, we are imperfect, we can live with the truth, it is not so terrible, we can almost feel joy bubbling up from our empty, fasting bellies because we are not perfect, we are not complete. We are human, unfinished; and if we are unfinished, that means we are still growing. There is hope for us to change. I want to learn to chant Ashamnu with this sense of relief.
The Hasidic master Rabbi David of Lelov said it this way: “A man cannot be redeemed until he recognizes the flaws in his soul and tries to mend them. A nation cannot be redeemed until it recognizes the flaws in its soul and tries to mend them. Whoever permits no recognition of his flaws, be it man or nation, permits no redemption. We can be redeemed only to the extent to which we recognize ourselves.” What a relief it must be to end the denial, to stop running and to recognize ourselves in all our glorious imperfection.
When we have the courage to be imperfect we can appreciate Yom Kippur as a time to face our sins honestly while accepting ourselves as we are – neither saint nor sinner, but as a beinoni – a simple human being. Often people will come see me seeking comfort, but then spend their time with me describing the imperfections of others. They, and I with them, we can’t seem to see beyond how others have angered us, disappointed us and hurt us. We often hang on the blemishes of others as a way of hiding from our own. It was wise of the Ba’al Shem Tov to teach us that when we see an ugly trait in another person, we need to consider why the Holy One would should us this flaw unless it was meant as a mirror in which to see into our own souls.
What if we could have the courage to be imperfect? We might gaze, hesitatingly at first, at the flaws and the wounds we carry, trace their contours, feel their rawness, and, unafraid, come to know them as guides and as teachers. Just as the loss of a loved one leaves us feeling lonely and bereft, teaches Rabbi Joseph Soloveichik, the recognition of our sins can awaken in us a deep longing to overcome alienation and to regain closeness with God. Surprisingly, our wrong turns may be the road back to the right path.
The 19th century Hasidic sage Reb Tzaddok HaCohen of Lublin opens the door to an even deeper possibility for our spiritual growth. He writes, “By the very quality in which one is lacking or wounded, by that very quality one finds one’s unique strength or gift.” You probably remember the story of Adam and Eve. Although Western culture insists that it was an apple tree that led Adam and Eve into temptation and sin, the midrash tells us it was a fig tree, since Adam and Eve ultimately clothe themselves with leaves from the fig tree. Reb Tzaddok teaches that the very thing that caused Adam and Eve’s downfall, in this rabbinic retelling, would lead them to their eventual redemption in the form of a fig leaf to heal their shame. This is why, he says, the one who sins and repents is closer to God than one who never sins at all. He explains it this way: Imagine that each person is attached to God by a string. When you sin, you cut the string. Then God makes a knot and ties it up again, making the string a little shorter. Again and again our sins cut the string, and with each new knot God keeps drawing us closer and closer.
Our Hasidic masters teach that the parts of ourselves that give us the most difficulty, what Jungians would call our shadow -- also contain the seeds of our greatest personal growth. By accepting them and exploring them, they can become the source of our awakening and the deepening of our wisdom. In facing our mistakes, we can repeatedly practice forgiveness, love and compassion. One poet of the soul put it this way:
How does a part of the world leave the world?
How does wetness leave water?
No matter how fast you run, your shadow keeps up.
What hurts you blesses you.
Darkness is your candle.
I could explain this, but it will break
The glass cover on your heart, and there’s
No fixing that.
You must have shadow and light, both.
Some months ago I challenged the Tuesday evening Kabbalah study community to go on a twenty-one day complaining fast. We agreed not complain for twenty-one days and if we caught ourselves complaining, we’d begin counting the days over again from the beginning. A lot of people said, “No complaining! We can’t do that. We’re Jews! Complaining is our natural state.” But I began working on this practice during the summer, going five days, then two days, then one day, then twelve days, then eighteen days, each time failing miserably to stop a complaint from pouring out of my mouth. When I got back to work I found myself complaining every day – in the throes of family and work there’s so much to complain about, after all. I became completely dejected and reported my failure back to the group. But they had greater wisdom than me. One member of the group told me that the power of the practice was not in never complaining but in the awareness of how often we complain, conscious of the moment of complaint, learning from the moment and having the courage to start again.
Forgiveness is the harvest of the courage to be imperfect. We watch ourselves once again make the wrong turn; we smile at our imperfection, and make the U-turn. Each mistake is an opportunity to learn from the moment and to start over again.
What courage it would take to see that, by accepting our own failings, they become the means by which we discover our greatest gifts. The experience of our most private hurt becomes the seed of deep compassion for others who suffer. The loneliness of childhood is revealed to be the source of our grown-up self-sufficiency. Anger may hold the secret of resiliency. Our most difficult flaws might, if we name them, inspire us to a passion for virtue. And all of this, says Reb Tzaddok, can only happen when we courageously and lovingly embrace the al chets of our life. Not the liturgical al chet, an alphabetical acrostic meant to encompass all human flaws, but our own personal al chet, the imperfections we have the courage to name and to embrace.
Of all the teachings of the Ba’al Shem Tov, this one has meant the most to me over the years. He says, “There are times when the Holy Blessed One, with great compassion, leads you to a place you had no intention of going, by a road you had no intention of traveling, so that there, on that road and in that place, you might find the Sparks of the Divine.” The wrong turns we make in life are a gift, a tree of life laden with ripe meaning and learning for our lives. It is so easy to become angry or ashamed at our mistakes that we miss the heart-opening gift that accompanies our imperfections. Yet God awaits us in those moments, if we only knew where to look. God is waiting for us in the wrong turn, at the end of the road, when we’re stuck at the wall and if, for just a second we can peek at God’s face we will see in it our own reflection and the meaning of this moment.
Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev once said that it is so much better to stand in judgment before God than to judge oneself because God is capable of true forgiveness, out of love, while we often find it impossible to forgive ourselves for our failings. I think what he means to say is that God knows us in all our beauty and imperfection, while we lack the courage to know the truth.
We will recite the al chet ten times over the next 24 hours. Perhaps we might use that time to glimpse the face of God, lovingly turned towards ours, and see there the reflection of the truth. Maybe, as we sing ashamnu over and over again, our hearts will finally break open and we will come to see ourselves as God sees us, and love ourselves as God loves us. We are glorious, and we are flawed. We are shadow, and we are light. With the courage to be imperfect comes the courage to embrace ourselves with forgiveness. We might even learn to offer this same gift of forgiveness to others.
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