OUR PERSISTENT FAILURES
Milton Steinberg, Yom Kippur Sermon – a classic
Of the Hasidic Saint, Levi Yitzhak of Berditchev, it is related that once, during the solemn period between New Year and the Day of Atonement, he stood at the door of his house, dull, lifeless, altogether out of tune with the season, lethargic under all calls to penitence.
And as he stood so, a cobbler came by, looking for work. Spying the rabbi he called:
Have you nothing that needs mending?
Have I nothing that needs mending? Levi Yitzhak echoed reflectively. Then his heart contracted within him and he wept.
He wept for his sins, for all those things in his soul and life that needed mending, the scuffed places, the split seams' the rundown edges, the holes, of which, being a saint and hence an expert on the state of souls, he was well aware.
Only, why, instead of weeping, did he not do with his soul as he would with his shoes? Why did he not get busy at once making the necessary repairs?
Do you not suppose he had tried to do just that, not once but many times? How often had he not said to himself concerning something defective in himself or his circumstances: this cannot go on, I will not allow it. But though he meant what he said, though he swore to it, whatever it was which needed mending too often proved stronger than his will or ability to mend it. Therefore he wept, not so much for his failings, as for the failure of his efforts to right them.
Well might he weep over this tragedy of his moral life, the repeated defeat of his will to better things, and well would we do to weep with him—we whose souls are shabbier than his, whose resolutions to repair them are less frequent, less earnest, less passionate, whose failures are more nearly total.
What the sins and deficiencies of that saint may have been which he was always trying to right but never quite succeeding I cannot imagine. Perhaps when he had been young he had known illicit desires. Perhaps later his mind wandered at times when he prayed. Perhaps once when he preached he had been more interested in the plaudits of men than in the cause of God. Perhaps at times he found himself proud of his repute or self-complacent over his virtues.
But as for us, we exhibit among us virtually every sin and deficiency in the book except perhaps for a few of the most flagrant and violent. There is scarcely a line in the confession, aside from those dealing with crimes like murder, which does not strike home with somebody. What is more, every one of us has his own special vices and inadequacies.
How then shall I deal with this theme relevantly to all of us at one time, seeing that though we are all offenders our offenses are different? Let me select one or two or three fairly common human weaknesses and order my argument about these; if I strike one man's special deformities he need only attend to what I say; and if I miss another's peculiar weakness, let him make the necessary adaptations to his own situation.
This then is the question before us: What shall we do about the persistent failure of all our attempts at self improvement?
What of those among us who are creatures of envy, who cannot look on the good fortune of another without being stabbed to the quick with jealousy, and uttering some malicious and derogatory remark; who, every time they so respond, despise themselves and resolve next time to keep their feelings under control, or if not their feelings then at least their tongues?

And what of those whose failing is a trigger like temper, a flaring of irritability at the least provocation, who are at such moments burdens to their husbands or wives, monsters to their children, terrors to their employees, who have sworn seven times seventy to restrain themselves under the next provocation, and they have not done so?
And what of those who want to be generous but cannot, who skimp on their contributions to charity, always giving less than they can afford, as little as they can get away with, and yet not happy when they have their way, knowing as they do that a man, if he is to respect himself, must at least on occasion throw calculation to the winds and act recklessly? Wherefore they are forever promising themselves, and with utmost earnestness, that it will be different Still the same sorry story of scheming, dodging, crawling.
All these are assembled here on this Day of Atonement—the envy-ridden, the trigger-tempered, the ungenerous, and with them the hateful, the proud, the lusting, and the lying, the attention-demanding and the cowardly, the arrogant and the cringing—and who not else? each aware not only of the peculiar blemishes of his soul but even more painfully of the failure of his so many attempts to rectify them. And our mood, now that I have reminded each of you of his own private deformities and defeats— what else can it be but grim? And then, into our unhappiness comes the Yom Kippur message—for all the world like some gay chatterbox into a house of mourning. For though this day be solemn, its point is as blithe as can be conceived; it asserts brightly that there is not a scuffed place in our lives we cannot mend. But we know or think we know otherwise. And so, if we are cynical we smile wearily to hear this day's message; if resigned, we simply disregard it; if still aching with our disappointments we wince, salt is being poured on our wounds. But whether it be one or the other, we sit here, some for the purpose of seeing and being seen, some out of filial piety, others out of Jewish loyalty, but all too few out of a living faith in what this day represents.
How can we ignore the urgency in the problem of our persistent failures? The seriousness, the meaningfulness, the vindication of the Yom Kippur observance in which we are now engaged depend on whether we can resolve this problem. But, greater and more important, the hopefulness of our entire lives is involved. For how shall men live joyously if they are forever to be the prisoners of what they have always been, if the crooked in them can never be made straight, if our past is forever to be a morgue for the corpses of good intentions, a charnel house in which our hopes for better things rot noisomely?
Well, what shall we do with our persistent and repeated failures?
Since it was Levi Yitzhak who raised the issue to begin with, let us consider how he himself dealt with it.
It is said that in his latter years he adopted the following practice. Each night on retiring he would review his day and say of whatever was evil in it—
"I shall not do so again."
Having said this, he would continue his soliloquy.
"But so you promised last night and the night before."
"Ah yes," he would answer himself, "but tonight I am in earnest."
A naive, perhaps even a pointless anecdote, and not, it would seem at first glance, very hopeful, nor at all consistent with the man's reputation for wisdom. Well, if Levi Yitzhak cannot help us, we shall have to get along without him. Let us see what devices we can invent for ourselves, what counsels aside from Levi Yitzhak's are available to us.

There is first of all the advice offered by the realists amon g us, by the realist in each of us. It consists in the plain proposition that if we cannot adjust our conduct to our ideals then we might do well to adjust our ideals to our conduct.
Perhaps, says the realist, the trouble with our lives is that we are excessively idealistic. Having first see our goals too high for our reach, shall we then be dismayed when inevitably we fall short of them? A little more practicality, if you please. Put your goals a little lower, where they will be within your reach, and then you will reach them.
Which sounds at first like pure reasonableness, but only until one examines the proposal a little more closely.
For, in the first place, if we are typically human we have already lowered our sights without waiting for anyone to suggest it to us. Our difficulty is not that we insist on some ideal maximum but that having compromised on a minimum we fail even of that.
Our man of envy, for example, is not bothered by the fact that he is not constantly full of love and benevolence for everyone—which he no longer expects of himself—but that he is always alive with jealousy.
The dilemma of our skimping contributor is not that he does not give away all that he has but that he cannot bring himself to give away even as much as he can well afford.
The proposal of the realist, in other words, turns out in the end to be irrelevant, inapplicable, unworkable, in brief, unrealistic.
And it is dangerous too. For in effect it means that every time we fail we shall lower our standards. But having done that once we are likely to do it again and again with each failure, until in the end we are left with none at all.
No, there is no exit from our dilemma by this device of compromising our ideals. The realist unable to help us falls silent; whereupon another voice sounds in our ears, that of the cynic in our midst, within our own hearts.
Give it up, it bids us, this whole striving after wind, for that is what ideals are, not only unattainables, but delusions and, even worse, sources of discontent and bitterness within us, forever awakening hungers that cannot be satisfied. Give it up and have peace at last.
But if we do so, we ask the cynic, by what and for what shall we live? A ship can drift rudderless, sail less, compass less, until it founders. But we are no inanimate things to be swept now here now there by the chance winds of mood and circumstance. We have feelings, hopes, fears, preferences. Besides, decisions are required of us. If we give up all ideals, on what basis shall we make decisions?
Well then, the cynic concedes, perhaps you will need some guiding principles, some goals; you will almost certainly want to be free from pain and insecurity; you will want to enjoy life's pleasures. Allow yourself then such minimal purposes, but only such.
But in that case, how are we better off than before? Again we have ideals, except that now we call them guiding principles and goals. The only difference wrought by the cynic's cynicism is that if we follow his advice, our goals will be shabbier than otherwise, we shall have set our hearts on tawdry, selfish purposes and shall be as much in danger of missing these as better purposes. Assuredly, if one must gamble against defeat in any case, he may as well play for higher, more honorable stakes.
Besides, can we really follow the cynic's counsel? Can we, no matter how we try, actually give up the most cherished of human values, truth, goodness, beauty, love? Will they not continue to haunt us? Es redt sich so, this business of renouncing ideals. Actually, against all will and reason they continue to haunt men, even the most cynical of men. What then is the sense of a policy which proceeds from an impossible first premise, which calls on men to do that of which, try as they will, they are not capable?
But now we are in a bad way indeed. We have worked ourselves into a position in which there are only three possible courses of action and none of these is tenable. We cannot achieve our ideals; we cannot compromise them; we cannot surrender them. Then what else remains?
Though it probably would not occur to us, there is still another proposed solution of our problem to be considered, that advanced by Paul, Augustine, Calvin, Luther, by the main Christian tradition. For it is just from a judgment of despair over man's moral plight that essential Christianity springs. Man, Christianity teaches, is under the obligation to do God's will which, since it is Gd's will, he may neither repudiate or tamper with. But man, being man, is necessarily sinful and cannot do God's will as is required of him. Therefore he would be altogether lost and damned, were it not that God took on flesh in the shape of Jesus Christ who, being God and free from sin, can fulfill the law, and who, by becoming human and dying on behalf of men, redeems them from the damnation to which they are otherwise predestined.
Need I, a rabbi, say here in a synagogue on Kol Nidre night, that whatever its value to Christians this doctrine is no solution for us who are Jews?
I pass over the fact that is totally unacceptable to the Jewish spirit not only because it assumes that a man once existed who was also God, but also because it affirms the dogma of vicarious atonement, the thesis that one man's sinfulness can be purged by the actions of someone else, a position against which Judaism has always held that though men can help one another morally, each man must in the end save his own soul. I pass over this and other similar considerations. This is neither the time nor place to engage in theological controversy. Besides the issue before us is one of practice not theory. But it is just here in practice that the classic Christian doctrine breaks down. For suppose, for argument's sake, that our jealousy-ridden brother accepts it. I am a sinful creature, he confesses on his knees, unable to redeem myself from my vice of envy. But God so loved me that he sent his only begotten son to die on the cross that his blood might redeem me.
Having spoken so, he rises again to his feet. And lo, his original problem is with him as pressingly as before. What is he to do with himself and the envy that surges up in him when good fortune again befalls someone round about him?
Now we are in an even worse dilemma than before. Having considered and rejected the proposal that we moderate our ideals; having considered and rejected the proposal that we surrender them altogether, we finally considered the proposal that we depend on someone else to achieve them for us, only to be compelled to reject that also. But this ends the list of possible proposals—that is— except for the proposal of Levi Yitzhak, which seemed so trivial that we simply brushed it aside. Perhaps now we would be well advised to return to it. After all the man does enjoy a great reputation for wisdom. Besides, since we are at the end of our own resources, what do we stand to lose?
What is it then which Levi Yitzhak used to do when he considered his failings? He resolved not to fail again! And what, when he remembered other pledges made to this effect and broken? He did not play the realist and seek to reduce his commitments, nor the cynic and surrender them, nor the Christian and look about for someone else to fulfill them for him. Instead he stood by his ideals full and uncompromised and pledged to attain them, resolutely, hopefully, as though it were for the first time, as though he had never resolved it before only to be defeated.
So once, so again, so a hundred times, a thousand, a myriad, an infinity of times.
But to what end or purpose? Can any good come out of multiplying failures?
Yes, Levi Yitzhak would say, many things.
In the first place it is better to fail in some good cause than to succeed in an evil one. For so at least the honor of man is salvaged, his moral integrity is preserved.
On this point Levi Yitzhak, the medieval Jew, would have agreed wholeheartedly with the modern Jew, Louis Untermeyer, when he prayed:
God, give me the heart to fight—and lose.
Besides, Levi Yitzhak would continue, even if we achieve nothing positive by our constant struggle, think what we avert.
Our niggardly contributor may never get around to that generosity he has so often promised; but had he quit making promises he would by now be skimping more shamefully than ever.
Our trigger-tempered brother still breaks out in temper tantrums, but can you imagine how much more frequent and savage they would be had he come to accept them without protest?
At the least and worst then, our striving on in the teeth of all our failures, if it does not make us better, may keep us from becoming worse.
But there is something more that may be won.
Speaking recently of the miracle of Israel reborn, I said that spirit, if only it continue to press long enough against the wall of confining circumstance, must in the end break through to fulfillment. So it was with the people of Israel which after seventy-nine generations of failure won its victory on the eightieth. Are we to suppose it is much different with man's inner life?
Here in the depths of man's heart burns a moral will, and hedging it in are all the barriers thrown up by indolence and evil habit. For the individual spirit these walls inside him may be as formidable as the walls of outer circumstance for a group, and he has a shorter time to work out his destiny. But the walls within like the walls without are creatures of time and subject to change. If then only the pressure of spirit continues, any next moment may bring what has so long been denied—a breakthrough.
The man of quick anger may for once, perhaps under the wildest provocation, prove gentle, patient, forbearing.
And he who has never before succeeded in being truly generous may achieve a self-forgetfulness, a reckless abandon on behalf of some cause beyond himself.
For one who effects such a break-through of the spirit the rabbis had a special name. They called him "he who acquires eternity in one flash." They tell of one such, an executioner who in all his life had never disclosed the faintest trace of compassion but in whom pity surged once so suddenly and assertively that he gave up his life to ease the suffering of Rabbi Hananyah ben Teradyon who lay before him on the rack.
Another such was Nathan d'Zuzitha, a sensualist who had never denied himself anything, until the day when in an explosion of latent decency he renounced the woman whom he desired so fiercely that there was no alternative to her but his death.
These are admittedly melodramatic episodes which the rabbis have recorded and handed down, but who does not know from his own experience of less spectacular instances of the pent-up spirit erupting, of cowards carrying off acts of unexpected heroism; of the hateful overflowing, even if briefly, with love, of the callused displaying compassion.

A break-through then is always possible, and once it has occurred two things are forever after different. In the first place, both in his own eyes and in the eyes of others, he who has engineered the break-through takes on a new guise. He has ceased to be the always irritable or cruel or calculating—he is now the sometimes patient, or merciful, or selfless.
What is more, if one break-through can be made, then a second or third, a tenth or hundredth is possible. Indeed, with each penetration, the breach becomes wider and wider until it is a broad avenue through which the spirit marches effortlessly. But when that has happened, and on a sufficiently important trait, do you know what has become of our struggler? He has turned into a saint.
For the saint is not different in natural endowment from you or me. He too is by nature irritable and lustful and prideful and selfish and calculating. What sets him apart from the rest of men is that he has pierced the wall of base instinct and evil practice so often and so mightily that getting through has become a habit with him.
But even if not, even if the outcome is nothing—no saintliness, no breakthroughs, perhaps not even such a negative gain as preventing some other evil—even then Levi Yitzhak would insist on his program of unrelenting effort.
For to him the good for which he strove and from which he fell short was not a matter of his preference. It was, to be sure, an objective which he had selected and set up for himself, but it was also and more fundamentally a commandment of his God; an order from his master on high, which, being a faithful servant, he had no choice but to obey.
But this is the bedrock not alone of Levi Yitzhak's position b ut of our own as well as all other religious people. Even of those of us who insist that they are irreligious.
Why, in fact, do we keep reasserting our ideals despite all our failures? In part because our sense of dignity as human beings allows nothing else, in part because we recognize that so we obviate other evils, in part because we hope for a break-through, even that succession of breakthroughs which is saintliness, but most of all because the ideal will not let us go. Justice, mercy, truth, tolerance, generosity, selflessness are for us as for Levi Yitzhak not matters of choice but inescapable, uncompromisable mandates which we can no more escape than Jonah could when he fled to Tarshish or Francis Thompson when he sought to elude the Hound of Heaven If we are religiously minded, we talk about divine commandments; if secularly, about ethical imperatives. In all cases we are pointing to the same thing: the greatest wonder exhibited by man: that as a magnetic needle is drawn northward so he is drawn, inexorably, to the good, the true, and the beautiful. The secularists among you may account for this as you please. To me as a religionist the explanation seems very clear. This drive of man toward the good, what is it but the propulsion of God pushing relentlessly against us as we push against circumstance, so that all our separate pushings become in the end individualized fragments of the infinite push of the Divine.
What then shall we do about our failures?
What but keep on trying?
And if you ask why, I can give you many reasons. But in the end there is only one. We have no choice in the matter. God allows us none.

We have followed Levi Yitzhak, and he has proved a dependable guide. Is it possible that he can give us not only guidance for our thought and action but solace for our defeats as well, that he can say something which shall ease the pain and shame of our failures?
Yes, that too.
To be sure, we need not turn to him. Other, earlier rabbis have also spoken words of comfort on that score.
Is it not written:
"Not thine to finish the work, but neither art thou free to desist from it?"
Is it not written further:
"Alike are he who achieves much and he who achieves little, if but the hearts of the two be equally directed to the service of heaven?"
And Levi Yitzhak who has said so many things surpassingly well has spoken exquisitely on this also.
Speaking of the palm branches of Succoth, the festival next after the Day of Atonement, and interpreting them, like the ancient rabbis, as palms of victory; noting also that all Jews were commanded to take them in hand, and not the saintly Jews only, or the learned, Levi Yitzhak commented as follows:
It is as when a king sends forth his army to battle and to one commander gives great forces against a weak enemy so that he prevails easily, but to another slight forces against a mighty foe, so that he wins no engagements and is fortunate not to be overthrown in battle altogether. Now when the two commanders return home one is cheered by the multitude and the other ignored. Not so the king He distributes the palms to all his army equally, but m kits heart he cherishes one or the other not as does the multitude according to victories and defeats, but by what to him is of greater account than these, the sturdiness and devotion with which each man has fought on his behalf.
Therefore is it commanded on Succoth, the festival after Yom Kippur, that each man, and not only the learned and pious, shall take in hand the palm branch of the Lulav. For when he does so, each man knows in his own heart— and knows also that God knows—whether he has so fought as to deserve to carry the emblem of victory of his God.