Holiness and failure coexist — just ask the Israelites

Deuteronomy 3:23 – 7:11

Here’s the bottom line up front: It is very possible to be very good and very bad all at the same time. Now, a lot of folks can’t imagine such a thing. If you are good then you are good, they will say, but if you are bad there can be absolutely nothing good about you and therefore you should be canceled, defamed and abused, and destroyed with prejudice, glee and delight. Soon enough we will enter the Ten Days of Repentance where we thoughtfully consider our behavior and make honest attempts to become better. So that’s not the vibe today.

If we let folks create Yom Kippur today it would be 45 minutes long. People would spray paint “canceled” on your home, you would have no chance to improve, then we would eat.

It wasn’t always like this. Let’s take a quick look at the opening of Parashat Vaetchanan. We get a bunch of rules for the Israelites. These are the same Israelites who have survived 40 years in the wilderness. Their parents and grandparents witnessed the receiving of Torah at Sinai and yet these children and grandchildren still have to be warned away from idolatry and forgetting Torah entirely.

Can it possibly be that a generation so close to Divine Holiness can still err and sin? In Deuteronomy 4:33 we hear directly, “Has any people heard the voice of a god speaking out of fire as you have and survived?” Answer: no. So surely with such an experience, with direct witnessing (if they were children at the time) or hearing from their parents about God’s realness, you would think that this group of people would be upright, faithful and attentive to God’s law. But they are not. They fail all the time. Not only that, but in Deuteronomy 4:21-22, we are reminded by Moses that he himself — the Great Moses, Moshe Rabbeinu (Moses our teacher) — had a sin so egregious that he is not allowed into the Land of Israel. Even he is not fully good.

There are so many good people, good institutions and good nations that do such good things, and also — this really shouldn’t be a surprise — do terrible and awful things. People, institutions and nations make mistakes. You also will make mistakes. But I don’t think that one mistake, one crime, one or two or even a bunch of terrible choices, should make you subject to cancellation and erasure, or that I should ignore any notion that you, too, are a fellow creation of God. That being said, I also don’t want to make the mistake of putting you on a pedestal. You’re not perfect. You’re not that great. You are you, prone to greatness, prone to sin. That’s how it goes.

I don’t presume people or institutions or nations to be evil simply because I don’t care for them, and I have no need to ignore reality so that I can insist they are perfect. I can demand that people and institutions and nations lean into what is best about them and resist what is wrong. They are to be praised for their positive actions and condemned for their negative actions. Both praise and condemnation can occur at the same time. That’s how it works. It’s not that complicated. It shouldn’t be that complicated. The Torah itself seems to have no problem praising Moses for his greatness and punishing him for his sin. One does not erase the other. Why is this so hard to understand? PJC

Rabbi Larry Freedman is the director of the unified religious school of Beth Shalom, Temple Sinai and Rodef Shalom. This column is a service of the Greater Pittsburgh Jewish Clergy Association.