Sermons

Yom Kippur 5772 Morning Service:
The Danger of Perfection

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Yom Kippur is the day for confessing one's sins, so I have a confession: Last year I got drawn into the TV reality show, "The Bachelorette." I was embarrassed, and my husband Don made fun of me mercilessly every time he saw me watching it, but I turned on the TV one day when "The Bachelorette" was on and I got hooked. I watched every one of those two-hour episodes, and I even watched the one-hour "After the Final Rose" special.

Of course, my "confession" is tongue-in-cheek. The truth is I am not sorry. Of course I recognized all the melodramatic ways the audience was manipulated – the dramatic pauses, the coming attractions, the tearful interviews "behind the scenes" – but I had just finished five years of rabbinical school and "The Bachelorette" was exactly the break I needed from the intensity and intellectual rigor of school.

There was, however, one thing that really bothered me about "The Bachelorette." In the final weeks, one of the two remaining bachelors kept saying how happy he was that he had found his "perfect girl." He was not very articulate about why she was perfect, but that didn’t stop him from repeating it over and over, and it irritated me. Finally, I realized that aside from being trite, it was simply not true. There is no "perfect girl." A show like "The Bachelorette" is fun, mindless entertainment, but it is also dangerous because it presents a romantic ideal that is impossible to attain.

Although it is called a "reality show," it has no basis in reality. There is no perfect girl and there is no perfect relationship. In any relationship, no matter how good, there will be anger and disappointment and misunderstanding, because people are not perfect. We make mistakes. We hurt others. At times we can be in inconsiderate, self-centered, careless, impatient, and judgmental.

Contrast this TV version of "reality" with my own parents' relationship. About a year before my mother died, my father announced that he had decided, after 55 years of marriage, that my mother's virtues outweighed her flaws. (With some prodding, he conceded that this was probably also true of his children.) This is the real truth of any human relationship. We are all deeply flawed. There are no fairy tales or Hollywood endings. My mother was not an easy person. She was bossy, critical, controlling, and she had perfected the guilt-trip to a fine art. But she was also full of life, spirit, and determination. She had a passion for art and beauty. She loved deeply, gave generously, was an excellent listener, and had a flair for style that was dazzling.

When my father announced, as if it was a revelation, that her virtues outweighed her flaws, I understood something very important that had eluded me – love is not being blind to person’s flaws or thinking that she or he is perfect. It is knowing, intimately, painfully, how flawed another person is, and realizing that their flaws are not nearly as important as their virtues.

One of my teachers in rabbinical school tells a similar story. On the day of her wedding, her mother said to my teacher's new husband: You are the best possible son-in-law I could imagine. My teacher's husband was pleased and honored and repeated the compliment to a friend. But like in a game of telephone, it didn't come out exactly the same. He said: My mother-in-law just told me that I am her ideal son-in-law. His mother-in-law overheard him and immediately clarified: I didn't say you are my ideal son-in-law. I said you were the best I could imagine.

When I have told these stories, sometimes people shake their heads, as if my father or my teacher’s mother were being harsh or unkind. But I think it is exactly the opposite. Perfection is unattainable. To hold up that ideal either for ourselves or others is dangerous.

Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen, a physician, psychotherapist, and author of two wonderful books of essays, writes: Wholeness lies beyond perfection. Dr. Remen believes that the pursuit of perfection has become a major addiction of our time and describes herself as a "recovering perfectionist." Before I began recovering, I experienced that I and everyone else was always falling short, that who we were and what we did was never quite good enough. I sat in judgment on life itself. Perfectionism is the belief that life is broken.
Dr. Remen explained that she was trained as a perfectionist by her father. When she was a child and brought home a score of 98 on exam, he invariably responded, "What happened to the other two points?"

It wasn't until years later that she learned that those two points don't matter. She says: They are not secret to living a life worth remembering. They don't make you lovable. Or whole. She learned this lesson when her driver's license came up for renewal and she spent days memorizing the rules of the road. Her boyfriend tried to persuade her to go out for a walk or to a party or to go out dancing, but she told him she couldn't take the time. Of course she got 100 percent on the test, and when she triumphantly announced her success to her boyfriend, he looked at her with great tenderness and said: "My love, why would you want to do that?"

At that moment, she realized that she had spent days seeking perfection on a test she only needed to pass in order to drive. She understood that it was not about driving, not even about grades. It was about needing approval. She had learned as a child that she needed to be perfect to deserve approval from her father and even from herself.

Dr. Remen says: Few perfectionists can tell the difference between love and approval. Perfectionism is so widespread in this culture that we actually have had to invent another word for love. "Unconditional love," we say. Yet, all love is unconditional. Anything else is just approval.

The Torah tells us: V’ahavta l’reiacha kamokha – You shall love your fellow human being as yourself. And surely this is the kind of love the Torah meant: a clear-sighted love that recognizes that not one human being in the history of the world has ever been perfect, yet every single one of us is deserving of love.

On Yom Kippur we are asked to recognize and accept human imperfection. We are asked to examine the flaws in ourselves and in others honestly and realistically. And we will continue to do this every year because no matter how sincerely we commit ourselves to do better, we will still make mistakes, we will still hurt others – intentionally and accidentally – because we are human.

So, we come back year after year and we acknowledge our failings and the failings of others and then we weigh those failings against what is good and caring and generous and well-meaning in ourselves and others, and we tip the balance in favor of those virtues. And we call this forgiveness.

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