Divrei Torah/Torah Talks

Earlier this summer I was driving through Belmont, and I came to a red light alongside a church. As I waited at the light, I looked over at the sign in front of the church, which had this quote on it: "God uses people who fail, there is no other kind." Googling this a little later, I found the quote attributed to a 19th c. British pastor, Charles Spurgeon. Apparently he once said: "God uses people who fail, because there aren't any other kind around." 

I have found these words oddly comforting, in these weeks leading up to the High Holydays. It is hard to look around at all that has gone so desperately wrong - whether here in the U.S., in Gaza, the West Bank and Israel, in Ukraine and Sudan, so many places in the world - and not feel a sense of failure. I've been experiencing a sense of personal failure, communal failure, societal failure. A failure to adequately respond to the suffering of those both far and near. A failure to make any difference in affecting the policies of our government. A very personal sense of failure, if I am of honest, of not being able to do all that I have needed to do to better tend to the wellbeing of all of the members of Dorshei Tzedek; perhaps not responding as well as I could as a rabbi in this moment. 

But that sign reminded me that I am not alone in these feelings. "God uses people who fail, because there aren't any other kind around." It is true that we have failed as Jews, as Americans, as human beings. We have not prevented catastrophe. But this failure didn't begin with the last election cycle, or on October 7, 2023, or ten or twenty or 250 years ago. According to our holiest texts, human beings have been a failure since almost the very beginning. As we celebrate Rosh Hashanah, the birthday of the world, we are, according to rabbinic tradition, actually marking the 6th day of Creation — the day on which human beings were made. According to the Torah, that moment of creation was a delight for God, just as every day of Creation had been a delight — with God saying "it is good, it is good, it is very good!" Human beings were the crown of creation, made b'tzelem Elohim, in the image of the Divine. That's how chapter 1 of Genesis comes to an end.

But by chapter 6, God has changed God's mind. Human beings, gifted with free will, have made a massive mess of things. Cain, the first person born of other humans, has murdered his brother. Many generations later, humanity has so filled the earth with violence and corruption that God decides it's time for a reboot, to bring a great Flood and start all over again with a guy named Noah.

But after the Flood comes and sweeps away all of humanity, leaving just Noah and his family and the animals they've rescued, God realizes that constant rebooting is not the answer. The Creator has more insight into human nature by this point, and realizes that there is an inherent capacity in human beings to do harm. And while this yetzer, this tendency or capacity, can't be obliterated, it can hopefully be managed. God realizes, in the words of Pastor Spurgeon, that the only human beings that can be "made use of" are human beings who fail. Because that is the only kind of human being there is. 

This realization launches us, in the Torah, into the stories of our spiritual ancestors – Abraham and Sarah and their descendants – who are a decidedly flawed bunch, as we'll see in our Torah reading tomorrow morning. We don't pretend that our Biblical ancestors were perfect. We wrestle with their failures, their cruelties and their ignorance, because all of those limitations are found in us as well.

Over the course of these holidays, we have a lot of failure to wrestle with. We are at a moment of communal crisis within the Jewish community, a profound spiritual and moral crisis, as we confront the Israeli government's actions in Gaza and the West Bank and the catastrophic devastation there. I will speak tomorrow to the particulars of this crisis and our responsibility; the different ways we are experiencing and the ways in which we might respond. 

And we are of course contending with devastation closer to home, with the dismantling of our democracy here in the U.S., with the attacks on immigrants and trans and genderqueer people, the celebration of white nationalism, the peeling back of protections for the environment, for the vulnerable, for our health. It's an altogether overwhelming amount of human failure to have to reckon with.

So how did our ancestors deal with the reality of failures? In the stories that they told about the creation of humanity, the early rabbis imagined God debating whether to create human beings or not. One midrash imagines God consulting with an angelic parliament of sorts, the malakhei ha-sharet: 

"When the Holy Blessed One decided to make the first person, the ministering angels formed themselves into factions, some of them saying: "Let him be created!" and others saying, "Do not let him be created!" (Gen. R. 8:5)

On the "let them be created" side were the angels of Chesed, Lovingkindness and of Tzedek, Justice. Chesed said: "Let humanity be created, because they will do acts of love," and Tzedek, Justice, said: "Let them be created, for they will do acts of justice." On the other side were Emet, Truth, and Shalom, Peace. Truth said: "Do not let the human be created, because he is all lies," and Shalom said: "Do not let him be created, for he is all strife."

In the end, God throws truth to the ground, leaves the angels to their arguments, and goes ahead and makes the first human being. In this midrash, the rabbis are acknowledging both our limitations and our promise; our ability to enact justice and love, and our capacity for delusion and hatred. The midrash invites us to embrace all of it, to see deeply into our own promise and our own limitations, both individually and collectively. 

Rabbi Shimon, in whose name this teaching about the angels comes down, was doing a creative bit of mis-reading of a Biblical text to make his point. The verse he quotes to support his story about the warring angels is verse 11 from Psalm 85: 

חֶסֶד־וֶאֱמֶ֥ת נִפְגָּ֑שׁוּ צֶ֖דֶק וְשָׁל֣וֹם נָשָֽׁקוּ
Chesed v'emet nifgashu; tzedek v'shalom nashaku

This verse is usually translated: Lovingkindness and Truth meet, Justice and Peace kiss." On the face of it, this verse is saying the exact opposite of the midrashic reading: everything is hunky-dory between lovingkindness and truth, and between justice and peace. But Rabbi Shimon plays with the verbs here — he reads "chesed v'emet nifgashu" – Lovingkindness and Truth meet – as "meet in battle." And he sees in "Justice and peace kiss" a play on the word for kiss – nashaku – which has both the meaning of "come into close contact" and also "go to war." So he appears to be reading this verse as: Lovingkindness and Truth meet in battle; Justice and Peace go to war.

What does Rabbi Shimon's creative mis-reading teach us? It suggests that it would indeed be nice if our values always neatly lined up, if justice and love and peace and truth went hand in hand — if they truly met and kissed. But in real life, it's not so straightforward. We speak what we feel to be the truth, and people we care about experience that as a lack of love. We seek both peace and justice, but sometimes find them at loggerheads. In the midrash, God has to jettison truth, to literally throw it to the ground, to create human beings. Sometimes we choose to jettison something – lovingkindness, perhaps, or peace – to speak our truth, or to remain in relationships that are important to us. Or we choose peace, doing what we can to remain in relationship for the sake of a greater good, even if it feels like we have to compromise some of our other values. The conflicts are real, and there are no easy answers.

But if we go back to the original verse from Psalms, we are invited to remain in relationship with all of our angels — with love and truth, with justice and peace. We may find that we personally tend more strongly to one of these values, to one of these arguing angels over another — justice or peace, truth or lovingkindness. But what would it mean to enter into the fray and to attempt to stay committed to all of these values — to cast none of them to the ground? We desperately need truth; we also desperately need compassion and love. We must work for justice; we must also walk in ways of peace. 

I was listening the other day to a powerful conversation between Peter Beinart and the doctor and writer Gabor Maté, about the difficult conversations they are having with others in the Jewish community about Israel and Gaza. Maté shared this beautiful quote from the spiritual teacher, A.H. Almaas: "Only when compassion is present will people allow themselves to see the truth." 

This is a beautiful example of chesed v'emet nifgashu — truth and lovingkindness meet. It is something that I aspire to — to speak the truth with utmost compassion for those I am speaking about, and for those I am speaking to. To do this, I must also be open to listening with compassion to the truth of others, to their experiences, and to be ready to admit when, and if, I am wrong. Both truth and lovingkindness demand as much. I will explore this pairing of emet and chesed, truth and lovingkindness, in more depth in my talk tomorrow.

What I want to say tonight is that for all of our aptitude for failure, for all the problems that the angels might have with us — our tradition insists that we are not inherently bad. There is no such thing as "original sin" in Judaism. The creation of human beings "b'tzelem Elohim," in the image of the divine, is the Biblical counter-claim to our very real limitations. 

In rabbinic tradition, b'tzelem elohim means that every human life is sacred, and that we must treat every person we meet with dignity and respect. And it also means that we must remember and honor the Godliness within ourselves. In the Talmud we read about a prayer that we are supposed to say every morning: Elohai neshama sh'natah bi, tehora hi — My God, the soul you have given me is pure. Every morning we remind ourselves that we have within us a spark of the divine — a spark that we can defile, that we can corrupt, but that is always there to return to. This is the path of teshuvah, of return — to the wholeness and the divinity that lives within us.

We also read in the Talmud that our first words in the morning should be words of gratitude for waking up: modah ani lefanekha. This blessing ends with the words "rabah emunatecha." "How great is Your faithfulness." We give gratitude for waking up, for being alive, and from this we conclude that God, the universe, still has faith in us. Rabah emunatecha. I am here, today, with all of my flaws and failures, to be made use of.

As we move into this new year, may we have the humility of knowing that we are already failures, and the audacity of knowing that we are made in the image of the Divine. May we find some comfort in the fact that we've already failed, and it's okay. 

And as we move through these holidays, as we engage as a community with hard truths, may we hold ourselves and one another with a lot of love. May we seek truth and justice together. May we aspire to shalom, wholeness, wellbeing, in a time of suffering and grief. And may we do this with the awareness that we have already failed, that we will fail again, and that we are still, each of us, instruments of the divine. May God use us well.

L'shanah tovah tikateivu!
 

Rabbi Toba Spitzer
Erev Rosh Hashanah 5786