Of all the rabbinic midrashim told about the giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai – the revelation we celebrate today on Shavuot – my favorite, without question, imagines the arguments taking place in heaven just before God delivers the Ten Commandments to Israel. The rabbis picture the scene unfolding behind the celestial curtain as Moses ascended to the heavens to receive the Torah. The angels protested before God, “Master of the Universe, do not give the Torah to mortals. They will never live up to it. Give the Torah to us. We are angels.”
God turned to Moses: “Moses, how do you answer them?”
Moses replied by turning to the angels themselves. “The Torah says, ‘Lo tirzach, you shall not commit murder.’ Does that apply to you?”
“No,” answered the angels. “We are angels. We don’t commit murder.”
“The Torah,” Moses continued, “says, ‘Lo tignov, you shall not steal.’ Does that apply to you?”
Again they answered, “No. We are angels. We do not steal.”
And so Moses continued, commandment by commandment, showing the angels that the Torah could not possibly have been intended for perfect heavenly beings untouched by temptation, ego, or desire. Eventually, the angels relented, and Moses brought the Torah down to earth and gave it to the imperfect Israelites at the base of the mountain.
Sweet as the story is, embedded in it is a profound insight about God, humanity, and the relationship between the two. Angels, being angels, do not need Torah. They are perfect. Human beings, by contrast, were created “a little lower than the angels.” We are gloriously, stubbornly, and painfully, imperfect. One might imagine that Shavuot commemorates the moment when Israel, having achieved some exalted spiritual state, was rewarded with God’s greatest gift, the Torah. A perfect gift bestowed upon a perfect people. It is an understandable thought. But it misses the point entirely. The Torah was not given because we are angels. The Torah was given precisely because we are not. Our imperfections are not a bug in the system. They are the reason for the system – why the Torah was given to humanity in the first place.
It is a point made explicit in another rabbinic comment, one made about the Genesis account of creation. Each day of creation is numbered simply: yom rishon, yom sheni, yom shlishi, a first day, a second day, a third day. Only the sixth day, the day when human beings are created, bears a definite article: yom ha-shishi, the sixth day. Why the difference? The special designation? Rashi explains that the additional letter hey of ha-shishi points toward another “sixth day,” namely, the sixth day of the month of Sivan, the date of our present holiday of Shavuot, the day of the giving of the Torah. Creation itself, teaches the midrash, has been awaiting Sinai. Torah and humanity have been linked from the very beginning.
Not a perfect humanity. A human humanity. A flawed humanity. A humanity capable of selfishness and failure, betrayal and sin, but also of growth, repair, forgiveness, and love. Which is precisely why Torah was needed in the first place. As the rabbis teach: Lo nitnu ha-mitzvot ela l’tzaref bahem et ha-briyot, the mitzvot were given solely in order to refine humanity.” There is no covenant more exalted, no relationship more sacred or enduring, than the one we celebrate today – a covenant that is not contingent on perfection, but just the opposite. A covenant that presumes imperfection and nevertheless still insists on relationship.
Creation itself is never described as perfect, only as tov, good. Sometimes very good, but never flawless or finished. There is certainly nothing wrong, and perhaps everything right, in striving for growth and excellence, in seeking to become the best version of ourselves. But an insistence upon perfection is bound not only to be forever elusive, but to become spiritually self-defeating. Perfectionism has a way of leaving us perpetually disappointed – in ourselves, in others, and in the world as it actually is. There is danger, as the saying goes, of making the perfect the enemy of the good.
Just this past week, there was a moment on my calendar that I had anticipated for quite some time – planned carefully, looked forward to deeply. It did not unfold as I had imagined. At first, I found myself deeply frustrated by the gap between expectation and reality. But then I took a breath, loosened my grip on my fantasy of perfection, made room in my heart for imperfection, and moved on. As I reflect on this moment and similar ones, I know it to be not merely a coping mechanism but a spiritual discipline. A way of moving through the world. A way of keeping both my sanity and humanity. Doing that which God does. Recognizing the good without insisting on the perfect.
And when it comes to the spiritual discipline of relinquishing perfection, the deepest test is in our relationships. Spouses, children, parents, siblings, friends, communities – none of these relationships endure because they are perfect. They endure because we learn to make room for the imperfections in one another and ourselves. The disappointments. The limitations. The inevitable places where human beings fall short. Relationships endure because we forgive. They endure because unlike the moral purity tests so rampant in our culture today, we do not reduce a human being to a single deed, a single failing, a single moment. We do not treat people as irredeemable.
Judaism takes human agency with utmost seriousness. Our choices matter. We are accountable for what we do. As Jews, our belief in human responsibility sits at the very core of who we are. But Judaism also understands something equally important: sometimes we get it right, and sometimes we get it wrong. And all of us are only ever privy to one side – our own. None of us know, truly know, the inner life of another, nor do they know ours. Which is precisely why our tradition insists on taking the larger view of a person’s being, why we always look to the totality of a relationship. It is why we believe in teshuvah, repentance. It is why we are commanded to judge others with the same measure of grace and understanding we would hope to receive ourselves. God does not expect perfection in relationships. Neither should we.
Just this past week, I learned, with deep sadness, of two siblings, both with so much life ahead of them, yet unable to move beyond their hurt. Just this past week, I found myself inspired by a long-married couple who, despite setbacks and disappointments, remain determined to keep working on their marriage. I do not know how either story will turn out. But I know that both my sorrow and my admiration emerge from the same truth: relationship – and all the more so covenantal relationship – is not contingent upon perfection. It is precisely because we are imperfect, because every one of us carries wounds and flaws and failures, that for love, family, friendship, and covenant to endure, we must cultivate the spiritual capacity to seek understanding, to forgive, to repair, and still to remain in relationship.
And here at Yizkor, what is true for the living holds all the more so for those who dwell in our hearts. Gratitude, appreciation, tenderness, and love – these are among the sacred ingredients of remembrance. As per the love, so too the loss. And for those remembering loved ones taken too soon, or taken recently, even more so. The grief and the tears are heartfelt and real. We remember them. We miss them. And we are grateful for them.
And yet we also know that for some, the task of remembrance comes intermixed with complexity – with ambivalence, with unresolved feelings, with memories that are not entirely simple. Judaism resists hagiographic remembrance. Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, Jacob, Rachel, and Leah – our patriarchs and matriarchs – are remembered with reverence, but they are never sanitized, idealized, or sentimentalized at the expense of honesty. The Torah tells the truth about them because the Torah understands something essential: our love, our gratitude, and our bonds of memory do not depend upon perfection. Our relationship with those we remember endures precisely in the knowledge that they, like us, were only human. They had fears, foibles, blind spots, rough edges, and more.
And so, in these sacred moments, we strive to remember them not as angels, but as human beings, in their humanity, their frailty, their complexity, their strengths and shortcomings alike. Not to love them less, but just the opposite: to love them more fully. More generously. To remember them with honesty, compassion, and forgiveness. In other words, to remember them as we ourselves would want someday to be remembered.
I have long believed that the mourning rituals we observe – Kaddish, yahrzeit, Yizkor and others – function not only as expressions of our obligations to those we have lost, but also as an unspoken insight to how we ourselves hope one day to be mourned and remembered. As with ritual, so too memory: we remember others as we ourselves would hope to be remembered – with love, understanding, gratitude, and grace, and with allowance for the fullness of their humanity and our own.
Flawed? How could they not have been? We all are. We are not angels. The strength of our deepest bonds lies in their ability to endure through disappointment, frailty, and imperfection. At Yizkor, those bonds do not diminish. They deepen. They grow more tender with every passing year, every yahrzeit, every Yizkor – for as long as we live and for as long as the memories of those we love continue to dwell in our hearts.