A version of this sermon was delivered at Temple B'nai Torah - A Reform Congregation, on Erev Rosh HaShanah 5781, Friday, September 18, 2020.
In the world of international soccer, there is no more beloved team than Barcelona. They are record breaking in terms of their achievements, holding more records than I have time to list this evening. They are the fourth most valuable sports team in the world, and my nephew Myles can often be seen sporting their kit, though that is more my brother’s influence. Apparently, Myles is more of an Arsenal fan. Barcelona’s success is known worldwide, and other football clubs know what it means to come up against them.
Last year, Barça as they are known, met with Liverpool in the Champions’ League semi-final. These games are played on aggregate scores, which means that two games are played, one at each home stadium, and at the end, the team with the most goals wins. Well the first leg of the semi-final saw Liverpool lose 0-3 at Barcelona. And then Liverpool lost its two star players to injury before the second match in Liverpool. In response to these difficult odds… In recognition of the longshot his team had been at the outset, and the even longer shot they had become, Liverpool head coach Jurgen Klopp had some words of wisdom for his team, who would need to score 4 goals in 90 minutes. He told his team his plan: “Just try. And, if we can do it, wonderful. And if not, then fail in the most beautiful way.”
Fail in the most beautiful way. A powerful statement and a difficult concept. With these words, Klopp gave his players permission to not achieve success. He gave them the opportunity to take all the pressure off the result and instead focus on the method. Try hard, he told the team. Try as hard as you can. If you fail, let it at least be an effort worthy of a defeat playing the beautiful game.
The notion of failure, of not achieving our goals, has been on our minds so much these last months. So many of us have faced disappointment after disappointment. Many of us feel like we can’t seem to succeed at everything that was put on our plates. Some of us feel like we haven’t succeeded at anything. Many of us have had to juggle so much out of the ordinary, and then when things don’t go perfectly, or even well, or even mediocre, we judge ourselves for the failure.
Failure is a part of success. And so in this new year, as unknown challenges and pressures will mount around us, let us all take a cue from Coach Klopp: try, and if it cannot be, let us fail in the most beautiful way. Let us put our efforts into our goals, but if and when they don’t pan out, let us all at least be able to say we tried beautifully and failed beautifully. Because at the core, that’s what Coach Klopp was telling his team, that if the effort is beautiful, then the failure ought to be seen as something beautiful as well.
Our tradition has something to say about failure, and it starts at the very top! Today as we celebrate Rosh HaShanah, we rejoice with blasts of the horn the anniversary of God’s creation. Hayom Harat Olam, we intone at our Shofar service. “This is the day of the world’s birth!” Yet we know that while we celebrate today, 5781 years ago, things didn’t go so smoothly.
Adam and Eve can’t be trusted not to eat of the fruit. The Evil Inclination goads the snake into causing trouble and mischief. The first humans break the rules, and Eden, the paradise created for humanity’s every need, is lost forever. Generation after generation of humanity show God that this grand project of creation, this crowning achievement of existence for which God contracted in order to make space, has only come to evil. There is too much wickedness on the earth for God to abide.
“The Eternal saw how great was man’s wickedness on earth, and how every plan devised by his mind was nothing but evil all the time. And the Eternal regretted that They had made man on earth, and God’s heart was saddened. The Eternal said, “I will blot out from the earth the men whom I created—men together with beasts, creeping things, and birds of the sky; for I regret that I made them.”[1]
God’s heart was saddened and filled with regret. What powerful emotions from God. The sadness of the failure, the regret over the outcome. All leading to a rash decision.
We know what God does next. God sends the flood, to wipe clean the earth of its wickedness. “For in seven days’ time I will make it rain upon the earth, forty days and forty nights, and I will blot out from the earth all existence that I created.”[2] God throws in the divine towel. God decides that the project is too far gone, not even worth reforming, and that it’s time to start over. God doesn’t give up on creation, God starts again. Sometimes, it just doesn’t work. Better to cut your losses and move on, right? Sometimes, sure.
Nothing is impossible for God, and yet God still accepts that the first go around at creation was a failure. God tried all that God could and still came up a little short.
So, if God fails, what hope do we have? Well, that’s not quite the point. If God fails, why on earth should any of us believe that we’re not also going to make mistakes, that we’re not also going to put all our effort into something and come up short!? But, when that happens, we have to remember that God failed beautifully. When God describes the creation, over and over again, God says it was good, even very good! But even things that start out good, don’t always end the same way.
How many of us created pandemic and quarantine goals, like color-coded schedules for our kids, and gardens of vegetables to tend? How many of us put together a list of all we wanted to accomplish now that we had some additional time around the house? How many of us made it past a few weeks? Probably some, and that’s great. But a lot of us, and I include myself in this, especially if you were to see the state of my garden, just couldn’t keep it up. Screen time went up for everyone. Pants became optional. The weight of everything we have been dealing with got to us. The unexpected stresses of being home all the time and changing all our routines was too much to allow for our creations to flourish. The weight of the reality around us was for some of us too much to hold onto while also aiming for these goals. But we tried. If we failed, we did so beautifully because we tried and aimed for success.
Now, we know that a reboot is how God responds to failure, but is that the best way? To wipe clean and start over from scratch, eliminating all good with all bad? Even God recognizes that this is not the ideal turn of events. Once God starts over, God reminds us that never again will God destroy the earth. One of the first things Noah does once out of the Ark is build an altar to God. Then we read, “The Eternal smelled the pleasing odor [of Noah’s sacrifice], and the Eternal said to Themself: “Never again will I doom the earth because of man, since the devisings of man’s mind are evil from his youth; nor will I ever again destroy every living being, as I have done.”[3] An interesting turn of phrase here in the Hebrew, which, when describing God’s inner monologue says: Vayomer Adonai el libo: God spoke to God’s heart. After reading of God’s sad heart before the flood, we now read that God speaks to God’s heart, to comfort it, to make a promise. God speaks to the heart of things and decides that even if things get bad again, God won’t seek to destroy and start over.
So, if the first example of responding to failure, shaking the etch-a-sketch clean, is less than ideal, what then?
To find another answer, we need to look closer to our own metaphysical realm as humans and think about Moses. His story is marked with a series of difficulties and setbacks, and yes, failures in a beautiful way, though we don’t often consider them that way when we look at the totality of his life and achievements.
But let’s take Moses’s most famous accomplishment, freeing the people from Egypt. Did he succeed? Sure, just check the haggadah! But before he succeeded, he failed. Fully 11 times God sends Moses to Pharaoh in order to demand the people’s release. Once with the staff and snakes and then 10 more times, once before each plague. 11 times. Plague after plague, with the power of God behind him, and each time, he comes home to Tziporah and his neighbors with nothing to show for it.
“Are we free yet, Moses?”
“No, not yet.
But God’s cooking up something great for tomorrow!”
“Whatever you say, Moses…How ‘bout now?”
“Well, actually, now we have to make bricks
without straw.”
“Oh, well, thanks so much, Moses! Some redeemer you turned out to be!”
Each time, Moses does what he is asked and
sends a wave of destruction against Egypt.
Frogs, fleas, locusts, darkness, flaming hail, over and over, each time
the answer ultimately, no. Finally,
after the 10th plague, Pharaoh relents. Moses has achieved success! And then, just as they are about to taste
freedom, Pharaoh’s mind and heart change, and he pursues the Israelites to the
Sea of Reeds. 11 times Moses sought
freedom for the people. 11 times he
failed. 11 times Moses came before the Pharaoh. 11 times the people are disappointed.
Moses shows us the power of failing
beautifully. He does all he can with
each attempt, and when it doesn’t work, he tries again. Each time, he learns more and more about the
power of failure. And each time he comes
back stronger. Remember he didn’t even
want to talk to Pharaoh to begin with!
“Was it for want of graves in Egypt that you
brought us to die in the wilderness? What have you done to us, taking us out of
Egypt? Is this not the very thing we
told you in Egypt, saying, ‘Let us be, and we will serve the Egyptians, for it
is better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the wilderness?”[4] God may have hardened Pharaoh’s heart; the
people blame Moses for the failure.
But Moses doesn’t give up. He tries again. As we read in Proverbs, “Seven times the
righteous falls, and yet gets up.”[5] He trusts in God, and he knows that if he has
failed, he has done so beautifully, and he is willing to do so again. It would take a miracle for the people to
survive this! Moses, bolstered by his
previous attempts knows that God will come back again, tells the people not to
fear, even before God tells Moses to part the waters. And finally, Moses succeeds in freeing the
people from Pharaoh’s grip. Only took
him 12 tries!
Moses not only learns as he goes, he learns
about the importance of failure and learning from mistakes. Only a few months later, as the Israelites
are at the foot of Mt. Sinai, and Moses is up above talking to God, Moses and
God experience a failure together as the people revolt against God, Moses, and
Aaron, building the Golden Calf.
God recognizes what’s going on. “They have been quick to turn aside from the
way that I enjoined upon them. They have made themselves a molten calf and
bowed low to it and sacrificed to it, saying: ‘This is your god, O Israel, who
brought you out of the land of Egypt!’”[6]
God sees this as a failure. The people have turned aside from me, God
says. They have acted basely, God tells
Moses. True to form, God has a
suggestion about what to do next. “Now,
let Me be, that My anger may blaze forth against them and that I may destroy
them, and make of you a great nation.”
Moses, however, has learned what it means to
pick up and try again. It is only in trying
again that the failure can truly be beautiful.
“But Moses implored the Eternal his God, saying, “Let not Your anger, O Eternal
One, blaze forth against Your people, whom You delivered from the land of Egypt
with great power and with a mighty hand.
Let not the Egyptians say, ‘It was with evil intent that He delivered
them, only to kill them off in the mountains and annihilate them from the face
of the earth.’ Turn from Your blazing anger, and renounce the plan to punish
Your people… And the Eternal renounced the punishment God had planned to bring
upon God’s people.”[7]
In response, Moses heads down the mountain
with the tablets of the Ten Commandments, and upon seeing the ruckus down
below, in anger and frustration after having defended the people, he smashes
the tablets and punishes the people. Moses
has failed again, this time in bringing the word of God to the Israelites.
Ultimately, Moses will need to go back up to
reinscribe a new set of tablets. But
when the time comes to place the tablets in the Golden Ark, whose cherub’s
wings serve as the shelter of God’s presence amidst the people, both the broken
set and the whole set are placed alongside each other for the journey ahead. We learn from our failures when we bring them
with us. We learn from our failures when
we build on what was and try again. And
when we do all of that, we fail beautifully because we did not give up and we
did not give in.
It took a lot of miracles for the Israelites
to escape to freedom. It also would have
taken something akin to a miracle for Liverpool to score four goals in 90
minutes in order to beat the powerful Barcelona. And yet, that’s exactly what happened. Barcelona was defeated. Because Liverpool was given the freedom to
fail, but to do so with integrity of effort and gumption, they succeeded. Because they allowed themselves the freedom
to not achieve everything ahead of them, they in fact accomplished more than
anyone thought they could. Liverpool
didn’t cower and run away. They didn’t lose
faith. Instead, they accepted that it
might not go their way and continued to play hard.
We have to imagine that Moses, somewhere
around the 6th plague, had a sense that each time he went to
Pharaoh, he was going to be rejected.
And yet, he did not flee from potential failure. He did not lose faith. Instead he faced it head on and ultimately
succeeded.
This year 5781 begins as there is so much
uncertainty around us. Can I tell you
something that is certain? We will all
fail at something in the year ahead. We
will all have plans that go sideways and opportunities that we miss, and goals
we won’t score. But, if we make a
commitment to ourselves tonight, that each challenge we face will be with the understanding
that if we must fail, we ought to do it beautifully, well then, maybe we just
cut ourselves a little slack. And maybe
the failures of the year ahead may lead us not to despondency for what we did
not achieve, but to pride in how we did not achieve it, pride in our
beautiful failures. And then to the
realization that we can try again.
Here’s to a year of beautiful failures!
Shanah Tovah!
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