THE GIFT OF FAILURE Second Morning Rosh Hashanah 5771/2010
Sermon given at Temple Beth El of Northern Valley in Closter, NJ last week.
In 1970, Larry Brilliant – a young man with a medical degree and an eccentric resume - was in an ashram following the teaching of a Hindu Guru. That day in 1970, his guru called him in and gave him an assignment: to to Delhi and eradicate smallpox. when your guru speaks, you listen. So he takes the bus 17 hours to Delhi and goes to the Health Ministry in full garb – long hair, long robes. You get the picture. And he announces: I’m here to eradicate smallpox.
Turned away, he takes the bus back to the ashram. In a few weeks, the guru sends him back to try again. And again. And Again. Each time he adjusts a bit. Cuts his hair; puts on western clothes. The 15th time – Larry runs into a U.S. worker at from the World Health Organization who just happens to be visiting, and is in charge of smallpox eradication. He hires him to go out in the field. Larry takes the job as a UN medical officer. He helps organize the 1500 workers going door to door monthly over a two year period. They find the cases, inoculate all who came in contact, check back each month, and devise new techniques for tracking pandemics. By 1975 the last case of smallpox is recorded in Bangladesh. In 1980, the WHO officially declares that smallpox has been eradicated.
A great accomplishment. But I share this story because at first, Larry Brilliant failed.
He failed not once, but 14 times.
As we pray together during these ten days from Rosh Hashanah through Yom Kippur, I sincerely believe that the year ahead can be a good year if we are more reflective, more attuned to the connections in the universe, and more loving toward others.
And, if we seek out opportunities to fail.
Some of you might be thinking – are you crazy Rabbi? I have enough failure in my life, and you want me to look for more?
Yes. I do.
Our Torah is filled with great role models of failure. Abraham failed to make peace between Sarah and Hagar. Jacob failed to teach his sons to love each other, causing Joseph to be sold into slavery. Moses failed 9 times to convince the Pharoah to let the Israelites go, and he failed to keep the Israelites from backsliding into idolatry and selfishness and despair during their 40 years in the wilderness. King David failed morally when he took Bathsheba as his wife. Most of the prophets failed to convince the kings and the common Israelites to be loyal to God and God’s laws.
Our Torah does not hide the failures: it includes them as part of our history.
So this Rosh Hashanah, I am inviting you to embrace failure. Or, as Mark Frauenfelder, the author of Made By Hand puts it: have The Courage to Screw Up.
In Mark’s book on the Do It Yourself movement in the United States, he opens with a chapter entitled just that: The Courage to Screw Up. He explains that most people loathe failure so much, they avoid trying things that require pushing past their current abilities.
How true this is, and we know where much of it comes from. In our educational system, mistakes are negative – points are taken off for errors. We are judged and graded by how close we come to perfection. This continues in our relationships when we have friends or relatives who keep a list of our past errors and don’t let them go. And it happens in our worklife – when mistakes are taken as black marks on our personnel files, instead of being treated as opportunities to learn and be better at our jobs.
in response to this learned avoidance of failure, when we start to do something new, and it begins to go wrong, most people give up rather than keep at it.
We’ve all seen children who get frustrated when they first start to learn a sport. They say things like “I’ll never be able to do it. “ “It’s too hard.” and sometimes: “I give up.” Adults have these feelings too, but we are more likely to hide them or to figure out how to avoid something that seems too difficult. For example, I don’t like going to group exercise classes. I know I will make mistakes in front of other people. And that will make me feel foolish and incompetent. So, I either take a class where everyone is a beginner and the teacher invites mistakes, or I exercise alone. The truth is that no one cares about my mistakes in the gym – and the only way the others manage to move so smoothly through the routines is that they made mistakes and learned from them. There is no shortcut.
Mistakes are not only inevitable, but a necessary part of learning and skill building. Brain research shows that making mistakes is one of the best ways to learn. When we do something wrong – we pay attention to it, we think it over, we analyze it: and out of that we learn.
Tom Jennings, the brilliant inventor in the realm of the internet and computers, wrote in Make Magazine: “Mistakes are synonymous with learning. it is true that Deep experience helps avoid problems, but mainly it gives you mental tools with which to solve inevitable problems when they come up.”
Rosh Hashanah is a time to take out our mental toolbox, rummage around, and see what new items have shown up; What mistakes have morphed into life lessons, and which ones do we still need examine.
If we leave the toolbox locked up on the shelf, we miss an opportunity. As Mark met with a variety of do it yourselfers – the kind that build cigar box guitars, or welded hand-made devices onto their espresso machines, or designed their own chicken coops, or grew their own food – he discovered that, as he puts it: “The Best folks honor their mistakes – not hide them.” They even take pride in showing off their mistakes and what they learned from them.
The best folks honor their mistakes. Not hide them, honor them.
This is a great message, a message we truly need to hear, right here at Temple Beth El this year. It’s been a year challenging, painful, frustrating, and difficult times for our temple community. Temple life was anything but perfect in the first months of the past Jewish year. We failed to be the kind of congregation we want to be. And then we had a choice: to learn from our conflicts or to shove them aside and just hope all would return to some new normal.
Rabbi Larry Kushner teaches that people will easily tell you what you’ve done right. It’s harder to get them to tell you about your Chaseyr – what you lack. The best friends are not those who sweep your faults under the rug, but who hold up a mirror and sit by your side as you see the truth of who you are. They are not interested in merely making you feel better, they want you to be better.
I am proud of this Temple – of the members, the lay leaders, and the staff – for their willingness to join me in recent months in looking together at our individual and communal weaknesses, our frailties, even our failures. Instead of focusing on who is right and who is wrong, we came to ask: what can we learn? How can this experience give us the mental tools to face whatever challenges come next? How can we be a better temple – a better rabbi – a better board? Now, looking forward to 5771, we have faith that it will be a year of moving forward, for we have new tools in our temple toolbox.
The best folks honor their mistakes. In our personal lives, we need this lesson as well. I would like to suggest that we do three things this coming week so that we transform our mistakes of the past year into blessings.
First. Make a list of your mistakes. Focus on a few that bring up the most disappointment in yourself. Ask yourself: what have I learned from that? What would I not know about myself if I had not made that mistake? How have I begun to use my new knowledge of myself in my relationship with others or with the world? How am I better today, or how will I be better in the coming year, because of that mistake?
Second. We can sit down with someone who is close to us and who we trust, and ask them to help us reflect on our failures. It needs to be someone who we truly believe wants us to be our best. And we can be that trusted reflective partner to others. Such friends or loved ones or counselors can help us find our blind spots. They can also encourage us, cheer us on as we make difficult changes, and not let us give up on ourselves.
Third, we can go out and take risks and make some more mistakes.
We will all fail. If we fail and do not reflect and learn, then the failure was wasted on us. That is why the best gift we can give ourselves in life is the gift of failure.
We are entering aseret y’mei teshuvah – the ten days of repentance. This holy period in the Jewish year would not exist if it were not for human failure. There would be no teshuvah, no returning to our best selves, if we were already there – in a state of perfection. Today is not about praying to be perfect. It is about honoring our imperfections so that we can wrestle with them, understand them, and transform them.
Many years ago, I wrote a sermon about my son’s baseball card collection. I contrasted the way cards are valued by dealers - the card with no dents or creases has the highest value - with the way we are valued by God. When God looks us over, our dents and creases and worn places make us more – not less – valuable. We only grow from our flaws, not our perfections.
Of course, there are different consequences to different failures. If I try fail to take care of a house plant and it dies, there is no morality involved. If I fail another human being, Judaism is clear that we must make address the relationship with apology and even reparation. We will talk more about that at Kol Nidre. I am not suggesting this morning that we should purposely fail, but that we should accept that failure will be our lot.
This summer several of us studied the Untaneh Tokef prayer together from the new book – Who Shall Live and Who Shall Die edited by Dr. Lawrence Hoffman. Most of the contributors to the essays in that volume rejected the idea of a God that counts up our sins and decides our fate. Rather, they emphasized the human reality reflected in the prayer: that we are mortal, that our individual lives are full of unpredictability and lack of personal control, and that we can be better human beings through repentance (reconciliation with others), through prayer (connecting to the highest values and ideals that Torah and God ask of us), and through Tzedaka, nourishing our lovingkindness. There would be no needs for teshuva, tefila and tzedaka if there were no human failings. The question is – will we add the tools of Judaism to our toolbox of how to improve after our failings, or will we give in and give up on ever changing. The two worst responses to failure would be either to despair of the human condition, or to become complacent about it. Judaism asks us not merely to have faith in God, but to have faith in God’s creation: us.
I heard Dr. Rachel Remen explain it this way in a talk this past year: Failures teach there is life beyond failure: the seed of a new and different life.
Especially On Rosh Hashanah, we plant the seed of a new and different life. the Chassidic teacher, Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev, taught that there is always another step, another rung to climb on the ladder of becoming. We would all like to be a Tzaddik – a completely righteous person, without faults. But is that possible?
Judaism’s goal is not inner peace; it is about climbing that ladder. Rosh Hashanah is the pause to look down from the heights, to steady ourselves, to catch our breath, and to gather the courage to climb even higher.
The story is told of a student who asked his rebbe, “How will I know when I’ve reached the level of a tzaddik?” The rebbe answered, “As long as you keep asking that question, you are there. When you stop asking, thinking you reached it, then you have not.”
Let me leave you with a closing thought from the poet, Antonio Machado, which seems tailor-made for Rosh Hashanah, the day of apples and honey. He wrote:
Last night as I was sleeping
I dreamt—marvelous error!—
that I had a beehive
here inside my heart.
And the golden bees
were making white combs
and sweet honey
from my old failures.
Dear God, accept our accomplishments and our failures from the year that has ended. In the months to come, send us your gifts of health, happiness, love, support, self-awareness and courage. None of us will be spared challenges in the year ahead. Help us do our best to engage in them and learn from them. Grant us the courage to embrace the gift of failure, so that we may continue to grow into the human beings you meant us to be.
Amen.
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