“The Tsanzer Rebbe was asked by one of the Hasidim: ‘What does the Rebbe do before praying?’ ‘I pray,’ said he, ‘that I may be able to pray properly.’”
I suffer from BHG Syndrome. That’s Better Homes and Garden Syndrome. Not in the DSM, the mental health manual, it is a quest for perfection for the holidays. It starts with all the photos of Thanksgiving in Better Homes and Gardens. I want the house to look just so. There should be flowers. Big pots of mums. There should be a pot of simmering matzah ball soup. There should be honey glazed carrot coins and brisket. Or apple and honey chiecken or better—both! There should be round challah—and mine should have raisins. There should be a new outfit for the second night and a pomegranate so we can say Shehechianu. And the house should be sparking. Gleaming. Clutterless.
That is how I prepare for my family. And if the pieces are missing, I feel off and holiday does not feel complete. Most holidays I don’t get there.
There is preparation at the synagogue too. Look around you. White linens. Special prayer books. Extra chairs. Silver polished. This year there is new landscaping, a new side walk, new railings. And since last Rosh Hashanah a new accessible bathroom. This is hard physical labor. And it is necessary. None of this happens by itself. All of it takes community.
We began a series of meetings: Paul, Stew, Stephanie, me. In various combinations. Back in May. The congregation and I have been talking about topics since July. People were approached to write and speak and many of you rose to the occasion. The choir began rehearsing in June. Stephanie and I rehearsed. Honors were distributed and accepted. New Year’s Cards and Memorial Books designed. All of these build community too.
And I started preparing. I read books on community. Jewish and otherwise. I started to write. I selected extra readings. And then BHG Syndrome struck.
I want the words to be perfect. The sermons and the readings. I want them to be inspiring. To be meaningful. To be life-changing. To help all of us understand what teshuvah is. To help all of us do teshuvah.
This is where the most important preparation comes. And I am failing. No reading seems appropriate. No sermon is perfect. There must be better words than mine.
In the middle of a panic attack—this is not uncommon for rabbis at this season—it struck me. There are no perfect words. What is meaningful to me this year may not be next year. What is meaningful to you may not be meaningful to me at all. Who am I to choose the readings for you? It is a humbling moment.
One grand lesson of Rosh Hashanah is not that we have to be perfect, but that we are, and
can continue to be, very good. It is sufficient if we strive to achieve our potential. It is only when we fail to be the fullness of who we are that we are held accountable. Rabbi Zusya said: “In the world to come, they will not ask me, “Why were you not Moses?” They will ask me, “Why were you not Zusya?” Talmud
In many native art forms, Intuit, Navaho, Mayan, Turkish and Persian, artists deliberately leave something imperfect. Only G-d is perfect. An intentional flaw is woven in or a bead left out. This is true in Japanese Buddhist temples as well, a friend excitedly informed me.
We have this tradition too. We know this because on Shabbat, the Psalm for the Sabbath ends, My Rock in whom there is no flaw.
There is a story of a king. This king once had a prized jewel, a perfect diamond. So perfect he kept it under wraps and locked away. One day it would be part of his royal crown but not the setting could be achieved with equal perfection. Every morning he would check the diamond to make sure it was still perfect. One morning the king awoke, and in his morning ritual to check the perfection that glinted from every luminous facet, he found a single think crack descending down one facet. His precious diamond was ruined. It was no longer perfect.
He called in all the best jewelers of the entire kingdom, hoping someone could fix it. Nothing could be done. The crack was so deep that any effort to remove it would make it worse. But one craftsman, from a neighboring kingdom thought he could save the diamond. The king laughed. Everyone else had said it was not possible. How could this simple man hope to save it? However, seeing that there was nothing else that could be done, nothing else that could be lost, the king said that the jeweler could spend a single night with the diamond. If he succeeded in fixing the diamond, there would be a great reward. If not, he would be put to death.
The jeweler took the diamond and locked in his room, examined the diamond carefully. It was beautiful, sparkling like the fire of the sun on the surface of the water. But the crack, even though as thin as hair, could not be removed without destroying the diamond further. What could he do? He worked all night and emerged in the morning with the diamond and a look of triumph on his face. The entire royal court, the king, the queen, the ministers, even the jester, gasped. The scratch had not been removed. Instead it had become the stem of a beautiful rose, etched into the diamond, making the diamond even more unique and beautiful. The king embraced the simple jeweler. “Now I have my crown jewel. The diamond was magnificent until now. The best. The most perfect. But it was no different than the other stones. Now I have a unique treasure.”
And then I realize. It is good enough. That much of what the holiday is about is being together in community. This community. Right here. Right now. For better or worse.
Because no community is perfect either. Utopia does not exist. The Puritans tried in Plymouth and their children didn’t quite buy-in. That’s why there is the town of Duxbury. It was a town established for the children of the original settlers. Those children who didn’t quite have the vision of their parents. Didn’t quite have their parents; religious zeal. Needed to sign what was called the Half Way Covenant.
Think of books you have loved. Lord of the Flies proved that Utopian societies don’t last. To Kill a Mockingbird was a great book—and showed us what the unflinching leadership of one man could do. But it looks like there might not be perfection in the newly released prequel, Go Set a Watchman. People’s disappointment in this second, or is the first book has been palpable. We want our heroes to be good. We want our leaders to be good. We want G-d to be good too. It is part of how we make sense of the world.
This is true of our community leaders as well. Rabbi Teutsch who I quoted on Erev Rosh Hashanah teaches:
“Love flows outward. As each person is touched by it, the person passes it on to others in countless little ways and the community benefits. Like a family, a community thrives on love. When love is withheld by a person in authority—a parent or a community leader—all sorts of problems develop, such as interpersonal conflict, jealousy, competition and soul-sapping ennui…..Love expressed by others, while comforting, who doesn’t love you enough….The love of a congregational leader for his or her community members takes many forms: careful listening, a phone call when someone hasn’t been around for a while, drawing somebody in by encouraging her to contribute a particular talent or skill, rearranging a schedule to squeeze in a person with a problem….that doesn’t mean that a community guided by loving leaders will have no problems. Deep disagreements about the direction of a community’s programs, boundaries, its finances or its management will be painful no matter what… but caring commitment can lessen the pain and make reconciliation possible.”
So how do we work to solve issues in the community? By emulating G-d. We are told how to do this in the 13 Attributes of the Divine which we chant as the beautiful words of the Selichot prayers. G-d is merciful and gracious, patient, slow to anger, full of lovingkindness and truth, extending that lovingkindness to the 1000th generation, forgiving transgression, iniquity and sin. So that’s what we need to do. Act slowly, patiently, without rancor. We need to THINK before we speak. That’s an acronym for Think, Is it true? Is it Helpful? Is it Inspiring? Is it Necessary? Is it Kind? It has to be all of those.
When conflicts arise in a congregation, and they will, it is usually because people think they are not being taken seriously enough. We have to find ways to listen more carefully, more patiently. We need to listen to everyone’s ideas, without pigeon holing or stereotyping certain members. Because as last week’s Torah portion confirmed, “We are all in this together—with our whole heart and our whole soul. It is my job as the leader, according to Teutsch, to bolster the community’s collective ego to the point where it achieves that feeling of security, where everyone knows that there is enough love to go around. Such a community exudes strength and attracts people who feel comfortable in a stable, noncompetitive environment. It has the courage to face itself honestly and make things still better.
We’re getting there, but we are not quite there yet. I’m getting there, but I am not quite there yet.
I admit it. I confess. I don’t always think before I speak. So if I have offended anyone, for that I am sorry. The poem a Women of Valor, Ayshet Chayil, says the law of kindness is on her tongue and every week I say, “Still working on that one.” But I try, I do honestly try. So if I have offended, I am sorry.
Every year I find I need to reread a book. How Good Do We Have to Be by Rabbi Harold Kushner. The same Kushner who wrote When Bad Things Happen to Good People. In it he says, “When religion teaches s that one mistake is enough to define us as sinners and put us at risk of losing G-d’s love, as happened to Adam and Eve in the traditional understanding of the story, when religion teaches us that even angry and lustful thoughts are sinful, then we all come to think of ourselves as sinner, because by that definition every one of us does something wrong, probably daily. If nothing short of perfection will permit us to stand before God, then none of us will, because none of us is perfect…..but when religion teaches us that God loves the wounded soul, the chastised soul that has learned something of its own fallibility and its own limitations…then we can come to see our mistakes not as emblems or our unworthiness but as experiences we can learn from.
He talks about baseball. No one expects a hitter to hit 1000 percent. Hitters who are over .300 are considered great. No one expects a team to win all 165 games in a season. But good teams win more than they lose. I have a friend, an Episcopal priest who would say G-d would never allow Cubs-Red Sox World Series because someone would have to win and that would be the end of the world. I think he had it close, but not quite right. I think there could never be a Cubs-WHITE Sox World Series. Because what this rivalry is supposed to teach us is that there is enough love to go around. In this place, in this sacred community, be a Cubs fan, or be a White Sox fan. There is enough love to go around.
Kushner concludes this book saying, “what G-d asked Abraham was not “Be perfect” or “don’t ever make a mistake.” But “Be whole. To be whole before God means to stand before Him with all of our faults as well as all of our virtues and to hear the message of our acceptability. To be whole means to rise beyond the need to be pretend that we are perfect, to rise above the fear that will be rejected for not being perfect.
The message for Rosh Hashanah is simply this. No person is perfect. No community is perfect. We don’t have to be Zusiya. We just have to be the best we can be. Because, only G-d is perfect.