Yom Kippur Morning 5769 – Page 1

The Imperfect Life

Yom Kippur Morning 5769
Rabbi Phyllis A. Sommer

The day before Erev Rosh HaShanah, we found lice in my daughter Yael’s, hair. Lice!? In
my house? Never. It couldn’t be. My perfect child, and my perfect home, were suddenly
infested with bugs. And at the age of 19 months old, she was completely uninterested in sitting
still to have her hair nit-picked. It only took me a few moments to consider the options before
taking a scissors to her gorgeous curly locks. And then a clippers to her head. Yes, my daughter
was now completely shaved bald.
And I spent time as I continue to do, gulping back the shame that I feel. The shame that
my child had lice. All the things that went along with it – a feeling of being somehow unclean,
that one of the plagues had literally visited itself on my home. That somehow, my world was
not as perfect as I wanted it to be.
The most difficult part for me, the part that I couldn’t even quite verbalize last week,
was the thought rolling through my head as I snipped away with the scissors: “What will people
think?” Lice can be a secret shame, you can comb through the nits and have no one the wiser.
But my solution was drastic and public. My little girl is out in the world now, with no hair, a
singing, dancing, noisy reminder that we are not the perfect family on the block.
Let me share with you a secret, though.
We never were the perfect family on the block.
There’s no such thing.

We exist in a culture of perfection. Check out the magazines in the supermarket

checkout line. We are one self-help article away from having the perfect hair, perfect body,
perfect relationship. All we need to do is find out how our celebrities did it! They are, of course,
perfect. Television shows create the image of perfection, don’t they? Even when the kids mess
up, or when things don’t go quite right, there’s always that nice neat ending, a pretty bow tied
around the pretty music that wraps up the show. We imagine that our lives might really fall into
these 30 or 60 minute sections. Plan the perfect wedding! A whole industry exists around
making that one day “perfect,” believing somehow that the perfect wedding can set the stage
for a perfect marriage.
But it goes farther than that. The biggest hype of this year’s Olympics was, of course,
Michael Phelps. Would he be “perfect” and win 8 gold medals? Or would he fall flat on his face
and only win, gasp, seven? Imagine what the headlines would have said if Michael Phelps had
only earned a measly 7 Gold Medals at the Olympics. Probably something like, “Not Quite
Perfect,” don’t you think?
How many of our children play pick-up games of soccer or baseball? Not as many as the
kids who try out for “elite” teams, the ones that practice a lot and create formidable athletes. If
our children show promise in dance, music, sports, writing…they are encouraged to “be the
best” and often pushed more and more to choose their “thing” at which they can excel. Even
the National Spelling Bee celebrates the perfection of the child who can spell all the words
correctly. Who remembers what word was spelled wrong? It’s all about what was spelled right.
One mistake cancels out all that was right.
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We live in a world that requires perfection of us each and every day. We can’t trip up –
someone might see! We can’t stop now, we’re aiming to be the best!
The reality is stark and important. I am not perfect. Nor am I perfectible. Not as a
person, not as a parent or partner, and certainly not as a rabbi. Every day, even on my very best
days, I will certainly fall short of someone’s expectations. If not yours, then most likely my own.
This might be an unbearable truth, were it not for the further reality that I’m not the only one.
None of us is perfect, and none of us is perfectible. Not as people, or parents, or partners or
community members. We will all mess up at some point. We will all fail to meet someone’s
expectations. If not someone else’s, then probably our own. We are a community of imperfect
people, and frankly, that is what makes us wonderful.

Once there was a man who carried water every day from a stream to his house. He
carried it in two large pots hung on each end of a pole slung across his neck. He called them his
“wonderful pots.” One pot was perfect. It was always full of water at the end of the long walk
from the stream. The other pot was cracked. It leaked, and always arrived at the house only half
full. One day by the stream it spoke to the man.
"I am ashamed of myself," it said.
"Why?" the man asked.
"Water leaks out the crack in my side all the way back to your house," the pot said.
"Because I'm not perfect, you can't bring home two full pots of water. I'm a failure, just a
cracked pot."
"You should not feel that way." the man said. "You are not a failure. You are a wonderful
pot. And, you can prove it to yourself. As we return to the house today, look carefully alongside
the path. When we get home, tell me what you saw."
All the way home, the cracked pot paid attention to everything he saw.
At home the man asked, "What did you see?"
"Flowers," said the cracked pot. "I saw lots of flowers."
"Yes you did. Aren't they beautiful?"
"Yes," said the pot. "But, once again, half the water I was carrying leaked out. I'm sorry."
"There is no need to be sorry," said the man. "Tell me, did you notice where the flowers
were growing?"
"Well, yes," he said, a little puzzled. "They were only on my side of the path, but not on
the other side. Why is that?"
"For all these years," the man said, "I have planted flower seeds on your side of the
path. Every day as we walked back from the stream..."
"Ohhhhhhhh!" the pot interrupted, shaking with excitement. "I watered the seeds
through the crack in my side, and the seeds sprouted and the flowers bloomed, and..."
“Yes,” said the man. “I noticed your crack, your flaw. But I knew it could be used for
good.”
Life is not about perfection. Ralph Waldo Emerson taught: “There is a crack in
everything God has made.”
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It’s very easy, isn’t it, to find the cracks. In others, and in ourselves. We’re quite good at
it, in fact. Often, we enjoy it in some strange way. If we can point out the cracks in others,
perhaps we will forget the ones in ourselves.
What is the problem with a culture of perfection? Inevitably, we fall short. We are
imperfect beings, in an imperfect world. We’re going to fail when presented with such a task.
And then we’re going to hide it. Cover it up, hope no one notices, sneak around. Or we lash out,
angrily, at those who seem, at least in our own minds, to be perfect.
But as Sharon Morton wisely teaches: there’s always more to the story.
None of us, no matter how we may seem, has the perfect life, the perfect home, the
perfect anything. But we have spent so much time holding ourselves to the standard of
perfection that we can’t see the difference any more. We forget how to open up and share our
problems, because we are so busy being perceived as perfect. If I tell someone about my
imperfect life, maybe they won’t like me any more? If I tell someone about my imperfect
behavior, maybe they won’t want to be my friend? Dr. Brené Brown, who studies these ideas in
Houston, writes: “The quest for perfection is exhausting and unrelenting. We spend too much
precious time and energy managing perception and creating carefully edited versions of
ourselves to show to the world. As hard as we try, we can’t seem to turn off the tapes that fill
our heads with messages like “Never good enough!” and “What will people think?””
And so we hold it all in, we keep ourselves to ourselves, and we miss so many
opportunities for communal support.
Dr. Madeline Levine, in her book The Price of Privilege, reminds us: “Certainly there are
times when people need to perform as well as they can: we’d like our surgeon and airline pilot
and the person driving the car next to us to be interested in optimal performance. But this is
different from chasing perfection. Chasing perfection is a good way to have life pass you by. It
keeps you focused on the future, and out of the moment. It means you miss small pleasures as
you chase larger ones. It means you can’t see the child in front of you because you’re looking
for a child that doesn’t exist. And it means that your own life is stripped of real feeling, love,
and connection as you pound yourself and those around you with fantasies instead of
welcoming realities. The pursuit of perfection is a diversion from the messiness of real life.”
In an interview on NPR last week, Rabbi Sharon Brous mentioned the Matryoshka dolls,
those little Russian wooden dolls that open up onto each other. She spoke of playing with them
at her grandparents’ house, and if you’ve ever seen them, you’ll know, that you open the
largest doll to reveal a smaller doll, open that smaller doll to reveal another one and so on, until
the middle. Rabbi Brous described these dolls as “peel(ing) away layer after layer after layer
and you'd finally come to this tiny little doll in the middle, which… almost didn't even resemble
the biggest doll on the outside anymore because… It's just this tiny, pure essence of doll in the
middle of all of these layers and layers of beautiful paint and gloss.”
These dolls, Rabbi Brous goes on to explain, are the essence of our Holy Days. There is
something “so pure and so good inside of you, inside of all of us, but we can't even see what it
is anymore, because we spend all year kind of papering over it and covering over it either,
because we're too busy, because…our lives and our work are too challenging…or because we're
too ashamed, embarrassed. And so we cover over them, we paper over and layer over it.”
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We spend so much of our time trying to perfect ourselves, painting glossy pretty paper and
paint over our inner layer, that we almost forget what the inner self looks like.
And then, every so often, we have an opportunity to reveal ourselves to someone else.
We share a story, we catch a glimpse into someone else’s life. And we say, as Dr. Brown says in
the title of her book: “I thought it was just me…but it isn’t.” I was amazed when I shared my
story of lice, how many people responded with their own. “I thought it was just me…but it
isn’t.” We can’t be perfect and vulnerable at the same time. We can’t really open up to those
around us until we open our eyes to the people in front of us, real people with varying levels of
talent and ambition and capacity and desire. Real people with cracks, flaws, and even lice.
When we can tell the truth about our own inner Matryoshka doll, when we can peel the
layers of paint and gloss away to reveal our true selves, then we can realize that imperfection is
who we are. When we throw away that myth of perfectibility – that somehow enough paint will
make us perfect – when we forsake that myth and throw it out, we begin to find our real selves.
The writer Anne Lamott writes that “perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor.” Hugh
Prather, author and minister, says that “perfectionism is slow death.” If perfectionism isn’t the
way, then what is our alternative?
Anna Quindlen, one of my favorite writers, said, “The thing that is really hard, and really
amazing, is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of becoming yourself.”
The cracks in each of us, are, as Leonard Cohen famously elaborated, “how the light gets
in.” To allow the light in, to find the cracks in ourselves and others and to not retreat from
them. Let me suggest that Judaism is a religion all about imperfection. The stories we read from
the Torah, are stories of imperfect humans interacting with, yes, I must say it, an imperfect
God. The characters in our biblical stories change and grow, make mistakes and repent, and
God, too, admits flaws and makes changes. Remember, God creates the world and before the
first week is up, sin has entered. Murder follows, and only 10 generations later, God decides to
start over with Noah, only for Noah to become an alcoholic. Later, God starts to regret saving
the Israelites from Egypt and has to be talked out of destroying us by Moses. But the up-side of
all this? The God of the Bible is a God capable of change, development, and adaptation. While
our prayers may idealize God as having perfect power, knowledge and goodness, the God that
inhabits our Torah sets a great example of imperfection, learning, and personal growth.
Judaism opens the doorway to imperfection, and allows us to share it with each other.
Think back to some of the words we read today – ashamnu, bagadnu…we have sinned, we have
transgressed, we have caused evil, we have committed violence, we have stolen, we have
spoken falsely. We, we, we. As Rabbi Brous says, this is “intensely countercultural, because all
of our impulse and all of the norms of society push us to deny and reject responsibility for the
things that we're doing wrong.” Yet here we are, all of us, saying these words, claiming them.
And maybe we walked in here today thinking, “I didn’t do all of those things!” But to say them
together, to own them together, can be so freeing, so liberating. Reading that list of sins and
claiming each of them for us as a group gives us the freedom to feel imperfect! Concealing our
imperfection breeds isolation. Standing together and being vulnerable, no matter how
frightening it may be, invites support and gives us each the opportunity to be supportive. As I
said at the Family Service on Rosh HaShanah, we’re all in this together, we’re all in the same
boat.
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When we can realize that life isn’t about being perfect or even striving for perfection,
we can open our eyes to all the wonder the world has to offer. When we can free ourselves of
the need for perfection and accept ourselves as “good enough,” we gain so much. When we
can remember that life is full of cracks, we begin to heal ourselves.
The heroes of our Torah are full of flaws. The heroes of our history are full of flaws. Each
and every one of us is in very good company when we consider how delightfully imperfect we
are. What would you make of a politician with this track record:
He failed in business at the age of 22.
He ran for the State Legislature at the age of 23—and lost.
He failed at business again at 24.
He had an emotional breakdown at 27.
He ran for State Speaker at the age of 29—and lost.
He ran for local Elector at 31—lost.
He ran for Congress at the age of 34, then again at 39. He lost both times.
He ran for the U.S. Senate at the age of 46—lost again.
He tried for the Vice-Presidential nomination of his party at 47.
He didn’t get it.
Then he ran for the Senate again at 49. But lost.
But then finally, in 1860, at the age of 51, Abraham Lincoln was elected President of the
United States.

Thomas Jefferson taught, “None of us, not one is perfect, and were we to love none
who had imperfections, this world would be a desert.” We are not asked to walk through this
world alone, with the illusion and seduction of perfection. We are not asked to climb a ladder of
perfection, to God or to our loved ones. We are asked to walk through this world and make
sure that the desert that the world could be is kept watered with our tears, our hopes, our love,
our friendship and relationships.
We don’t have to be perfect. We just have to take the time to do the best we can, to live
life as fully as we are able. Life isn’t a game to be won, there aren’t winners and losers. Life is a
garden of beautiful flowers, each individual and beautiful and flawed, all of them coming
together to create remarkable beauty.
May this be for all of us a year filled with newness, change, a year in which we nurture
ourselves and the best that is in us, and may it be a year filled with imperfection – a year in
which we give ourselves the freedom to embrace and find the light that comes in through all
the cracks.
In today’s Torah portion we read: “You stand this day, all of you, before your Eternal
God – the heads of your tribes, your elders and officers, every one in Israel, men, women, and
children and the strangers in your camp – from the one who chops your wood to the one who
draws your water.” Each of us, filled with our imperfections, stand together. May we open our
hearts to each other and share in the journey, and may we be blessed along the perfectly
imperfect way.
With gratitude to the words and writings of Rabbi Leonard Gordon, Stephen Kendrick, Roberta
Finkelstein, Rabbi Michael Feshbach, Jeffrey Symynkywicz, Rabbi Sharon Brous, Dr. Brené Brown, Dr.
Madeline Levine, Rabbi Harold Kushner, Ernest Kurtz and Katherine Ketcham.