5787 Kol Nidre: Limitations and Failure Tolerance

Yom Kippur begins with human frailty. We admit that our words fail us. That is, after all, what Kol Nidre is about: vows, promises, commitments. The words we speak about what we will do, who we will become, how we will behave.

And then life happens. We make promises we cannot keep. We declare intentions our actions do not always fulfill. We say we will be more patient, until we lose our patience. We say we will make more time for the people we love, until life gets busy again. We say this year will be different. And sometimes it is. And sometimes it isn't.

So before Yom Kippur asks us to change anything, Kol Nidre begins with an acknowledgment: we are human. There will always be some distance between the person we aspire to be and the person we actually are.

And Judaism says: start there.

I grew up playing Mario. And if you grew up playing those games, you remember how unforgiving they could be. You had a few lives. You missed a jump, fell down a hole, and you tried again. Sometimes you lost all your lives and went all the way back to the beginning.

And then you played again.

You learned something remarkably important: failure was part of the game. You weren't shocked every time you failed. You learned the level. You figured out where to jump, where to slow down, what didn't work. Each failure gave you information for the next attempt. 

I think about that watching my own kids play video games today. So many games are designed so that you can save your progress, add lives, and avoid ever really starting over. We used to encounter failure more often, even in something as simple as play. Maybe we lost something when we stopped practicing it. We began to imagine that if something didn't work, something had gone terribly wrong. That failure was evidence of inadequacy rather than part of the process of becoming better.

Because failure is something we actually have to practice facing.

And Judaism has never been afraid of that.

Yom Kippur may be Judaism's greatest exercise in failure tolerance. We come back every year and confess again. Ashamnu. Bagadnu. We have done wrong. We have betrayed. We have missed the mark. Some of the things we confess this year are things we confessed last year. Some we may confess again next year.

That's not because Yom Kippur doesn't work.

It's because this is how human beings work.

Teshuvah assumes we will wander. You cannot return unless you have wandered. You cannot repair unless something has broken. Failure isn't the opposite of teshuvah. Failure is what makes teshuvah necessary.

But Judaism doesn't only teach us what to do with failure. It teaches us what to do with limitation.

Failure is something that didn't work. A limitation is something we have to work with.

Have you ever seen the size of a rocket? It is massive. Almost incomprehensibly massive.

But many of the individual components that make up rockets are far less massive than you might imagine, in part because there is a wonderfully practical problem engineers have to solve: you have to get them to the launch site.

You can dream about reaching space, but eventually somebody has to ask: how are we going to move this thing?

Historically, major rocket components have traveled by rail. Which means that something designed to reach beyond the earth still has to contend with tunnels, bridges, clearances, and a railroad system built generations before the rocket was ever imagined.

And those trains travel on tracks that, in the United States, are generally four feet, eight and a half inches apart. Four feet, eight and a half inches.

Why?

George Stephenson, one of the pioneers of the modern railroad, was working in a part of England where coal wagonways already existed. Those wagonways were built to roughly that width. So when Stephenson built his railroads, he built upon the dimensions that were already there.

His railroads worked. More tracks were built. More trains needed to connect to them. Compatibility mattered. Eventually that peculiar inherited measurement became a standard used across Britain, America, and much of the world.

Now, there is a wonderful speculation that attempts to trace that measurement even further back. It says those wagonways inherited their dimensions from wagon wheels, which followed ruts in ancient Roman roads, created by Roman chariots, whose width was ultimately determined by the width of the two horses pulling them.

In other words some of the dimensions within which we build rockets today may ultimately be traced to the backside of two horses.

Its historicity is rocky… but  imagine the lesson. We may reach all the way to the stars, launching off a horse’s backside.

 but we have to build that dream through infrastructure we inherited.

The dimensions of where we begin do not determine the limits of where we can go. 

And so it is with us. 

None of us gets a blank canvas either. We inherit circumstances we did not choose. We inherit families and histories. We inherit strengths and limitations. We carry grief and mistakes and parts of ourselves we have spent years trying to change.

And perhaps we have misunderstood what those limitations mean.

We tend to look at them and ask: How do I get beyond this? How do I get rid of this? Who could I become if this weren't part of me?

Time to ask a different question: What can I build from here?

Because sometimes the limitation becomes the architecture. Sometimes the thing that constrains what you can build today becomes part of the foundation for something you could not possibly imagine tomorrow.

The setback may have the ability to become the setup.

Not every setback will. Some things hurt. Some failures leave scars. Some doors close and we would have preferred, deeply, that they remained open. But what happens to us and what we build from it are not the same thing.

A limitation may force us to imagine differently. A failure may teach us something success never could. A closed path may require us to build another one. And sometimes, years later, we discover that the thing we once understood only as an obstacle became part of the architecture of something we could not yet imagine.

that is why Judaism has such an extraordinary tolerance for human failure while simultaneously maintaining extraordinary expectations for human beings.

That's the tension of Yom Kippur.

Judaism knows we will fail, and then asks us to pursue holiness anyway. Judaism knows we will hurt people, and then asks us to pursue forgiveness anyway. Judaism knows the world will remain imperfect, and then commands us: "Tzedek, tzedek tirdof." Justice, justice you shall pursue.

I love that word: pursue.

Torah doesn't say achieve justice. It says pursue it. Move toward it. Reach beyond where you are now.

Maybe that is the measure Judaism gives us. Not whether we ever completely arrive, but what we are willing to pursue. 

We are human, and we pursue the divine. We are imperfect, and we pursue holiness. We fail, and we pursue teshuvah. We hurt one another, and we pursue forgiveness. We encounter a profoundly unfinished world, and we pursue repair.

Judaism’s  extraordinary tolerance for human failure is not because it expects less from us, but because it expects so much from us.

Justice. Compassion. Holiness. Forgiveness. Peace.

These are divine aspirations handed to human beings.

The builders are imperfect.

The blueprint is divine.

Our humanity is not something we have to escape before we can pursue the divine. Our humanity is the only material we have with which to pursue it.

The mistake is believing that our limitations disqualify us from doing divine things. Maybe you will never become infinitely patient. Can you become more patient? Maybe you will never stop making mistakes. Can you become quicker to acknowledge them? Maybe you cannot fix the world. Can you repair your corner of it?

The miracle isn't that we can become limitless. The miracle is what limited humans beings can create.

Take this very room. People beings built this community. Imperfect people. People carrying grief. People who have made mistakes. People who have disappointed others and been disappointed themselves. People who are still figuring things out.

And somehow, together, imperfect people create sacred community. We build families and friendships. We build institutions. We take what is human, finite, flawed and unfinished, and somehow create things that touch the divine.

So tonight, Kol Nidre does not ask you to imagine some perfect version of yourself. It asks you to begin with the person who is actually sitting here. With your strengths and limitations. With your failures. With what you inherited, with what you have broken, with what remains unfinished.

Start there. And build.

Four feet, eight and a half inches might sound like a limitation. Look how far we learned to travel on it.

Holiness isn't overcoming our limitation. Holiness is acknowledging our humanity and still refusing to limit what we pursue.

We will never be perfectly just. Pursue justice. We will never love perfectly. Pursue love.We will never repair everything we have broken. Pursue repair. We will never become divine. Pursue the divine.

Kol Nidre begins by acknowledging that our words will sometimes fail us. May this Yom Kippur remind us that our aspirations never have to. Gmar Chatima Tova.