Faith and failure are not mutually exclusive.
In the second half of this week’s double Torah portion, Nitzavim-Vayelech, God calls us to faith
and courage: “Be strong and brave. Do
not fear or be dismayed, for the Eternal your God goes with you.”
What comforting words!
We feel our spirits lift as the Holy One esentially tells us: “You can
do it. You will be taken care of and
supported. You are not alone.”
And yet, just a few verses later, God says to Moses:
“Behold, you are about to die and this nation will rise up and stray after the
deities of the nations of the land into which they are coming. And they will forsake Me and violate My
covenant which I made with them.” How
fatalistic! God may be with us, yet we
are doomed to miss the mark.
At first glance, this seems like a profoundly confused,
mixed message: Go forth with courage—and then you’ll fail?
Yet upon reflection, this is the paradoxical truth at the
heart of our human experience, especially in this fall holy day season. As Rosh Hashanah approaches, we conduct our
spiritual inventory and commit to making positive changes in the year ahead—even
though we know that we will frequently fall short of our ideals and
expectations. We need both sides of this
equation: realism about our inevitable shortcomings and the moral fortitude to
keep on trying to transform ourselves.
As Samuel Beckett famously wrote: “Ever tried. Ever failed.
No matter. Try again. Fail again.
Fail better.”
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L’shanah Tovah—May we all fail better in the coming new
year.
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