I’d like to share with you the D’var Torah I shared Friday night in advance of Abigail Hamilton’s beautiful Bat Mitzvah celebration this past Shabbat:
There’s a phrase that’s been floating around in the public consciousness lately that has been resonating with me on a number of levels in this season of t’shuvah, of repentance and return, as we approach the Yamim Noraim, the Days of Awe, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. That phrase is “the margin of error.”
Now those of you fellow political junkies (like me), or you scientists (like both parents of our Bat Mitzvah), know the term “margin of error” in a statistical context — the context of the polls of the likely next president of the United States.
For example: say 51% of people say they’re going to vote for the candidate you want to win the race. But, this poll didn’t survey all 150 million people who are going to vote, it only surveyed a percentage of them and so there is a “margin of error” in its results. We could be off by a little bit, the pollsters say. 3%, they say. That is, that 51% could really be anywhere from 54% to 48% — your winning candidate could very much end up the losing one, and the pollsters tell you that. They remind us that we can’t survey the entire population; we can’t get everybody to answer their phones, so this is an approximation. There is a margin of error to be taken into account with respect to this poll result.
And that’s fair. In fact, it’s necessary.
I would argue, we should all be grateful for a little margin of error in our lives.
We all need a margin of error — in our day-to-day activities, in our interactions, in our relationships.
We need people in our lives to give us the benefit of the doubt; to extend some rahamim, the Hebrew word for mercy, compassion; we need people to show us some compassion when we miss the mark.
As many of you know, that is in fact the literal translation of the Hebrew word for sin — het. To sin, in Jewish tradition is not to reveal the fundamental underlying nature of our character. It is to miss the mark. To inevitably need that margin of error. A het, in Jewish tradition, a sin, is to act out of step with what we are capable of, both acknowledging that we are imperfect, and that we need to aim our arrows better and truer next time, that deviation this time serving as a bridge to transformation for the next time.
In the context of relationships, the margin for error can be thought of as the capacity for those relationships to withstand actions that are out of step with someone’s underlying essence. That is, while Judaism has different understandings of why there is brokenness in the world, why there is heartache, it largely believes in the fundamental goodness of people: “Elohai neshamah she natati bi,” Jewish liturgy says. “The soul you have placed within me, My God, she is pure.” We largely believe that people’s underlying essences are good, and the margin of error is how much deviation from that fundamental goodness a relationship can tolerate — because we all deviate to some degree, and so we’re all called upon to give each other some margin for error.
Judaism — life — recognizes that we will all err, we will all miss the mark, and so, it says, God created, t’shuvah — repentance/return: we have an opportunity to return to the source of the deviation, to the misstep we made, to the choice we made that led us to miss the mark, and we take accountability for it — with God, with humanity, with the individual human beings we’ve impacted, and we can work to restore the relationship. T’shuvah says the margin of error is not zero. It invites us to hold space for the capacity to recover and rebuild and strengthen.
Now with human beings, the margin for error is not zero, but neither does it tend to be infinite; or, if I understand statistics correctly, (which I’m not sure that I do), with human beings, the margin for error is not 100%. With fellow human beings, you don’t get to make repeated mistakes, over and over again. We know, through lived experience, that repeated mistakes — or sometimes, one big mistake — can take its toll on those relationships — on trust, on patience, on understanding.
Now, Judaism is encouraging of the resilience of those relationships. Judaism absolutely requires a person who has harmed another person to apologize to that person, but it also encourages a person to do their best to respond with graciousness. “Va’afilu hetzer lo ve’hata lo harbeh, lo yikom ve’lo yitor,” writes Maimonides in the Mishneh Torah, the legal code and foundational text on T’shuvah, “even if someone aggravated and wronged someone else severely, that person should not seek revenge or bear a grudge.”
Still, there is a difference, according to Judaism, between our margin of error with humanity, and our margin of error with Hashem, with the Holy One, with God. As we said, while Judaism calls on us to respond to those who make full and complete t’shuvah, apologizing to us and resolving deep in their hearts to change, proving to us that they have indeed done so, with a forgiving heart — we recognize that’s not always going to happen. Sometimes the relationship cannot withstand either the cumulative or the one-time breakdown in trust. Sometimes, with fellow human beings, we’ve exceeded our margin of error. And so we move on, accepting the rending of the heart, mourning the loss in the relationship, praying that we will do better next time.
With God, it’s different. With God, as the liturgy says, “ad yom moto tekhakeh lo, im yashuv miyad tekabe’lo,” or “you do not desire the end of the one who has erred, rather, that they turn from their path and live. And You wait for them until the day of their death, and if they make t’shuvah, you receive them immediately.” With God, according to Jewish tradition, the margin of error is infinite, is 100%.
There are also traditions which say, we don’t take advantage of this; we don’t say “I’ll misstep and then I’ll just make t’shuvah; I’ll misstep, and I’ll make t’shuvah.” There are some texts which say that that won’t work. But there are other texts which say, with God, the path to reconciliation is always open.
There are two bodies of water in which we purify ourselves, the tradition says. The mikveh, the ritual bath, whose gates are sometimes locked, and the sea, which never is. According to tradition, t’shuvah — repentance and return, reconciliation — is like the sea. Never closed; always open.
We’re celebrating a Bat Mitzvah this Shabbat. Abigail Hamilton will be joining us, repeatedly, on the Bimah. It can be a nerve wracking experience: all eyes on you; you’ve worked hard for this moment. And yet I promised you the margin for error is infinite. There is nothing that happens up here that won’t simply be a celebration of this momentous occasion in your Jewish journey. All of it.
May all of us try to fly our arrows straight and true, and on those occasions when we miss our mark, may our margin of error be a bridge to the Holy One.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi K.
