How Good Do We Have to Be?
This sermon was delivered on Yom Kippur 5787 / 2026.
How good do we have to be? It’s the title of a book that the late, great Rabbi Harold Kushner wrote. And it’s also a question behind much of the High Holy Days. Throughout the High Holy Days, and especially throughout Yom Kippur, we go through an accounting of the past year. We’re called upon to reflect and consider, to answer and atone, and to commit to a better year ahead. But in order to do that, we need clearly definable goals - isn’t that what they say? You can’t make a change without a clearly defineable goal? And if the goal is perfection, well…good luck. So how good do we have to be?
It is actually a remarkably hard question to answer. Set the bar too high, and it’s an impossible standard. There’s nothing to repent for, nothing to atone for, nothing done wrong by not achieving the impossible. And while we may not have to atone for not being perfect, we probably have to atone for many of the ways in which we’re not. The time we snapped, the time we hurt, the time we weren’t sensitive, the time we overlooked, the time we didn’t put enough effort in, and on and on and on. On the other hand, if we set the bar too low, then it feels like we’re encouraging mediocrity or excusing bad behavior. There’s a bit of moral hazard that comes along with it, the “soft bigotry of low expectations.”
The Torah does hold us to a standard, even as we sometimes don’t live up to it. Later today, in our afternoon service, Carole Liebman will read in the Torah from Parashat Kedoshim, as she’s done for many years. That section begins by saying, “You shall be holy, for I, the Eternal, your God am holy.” It then goes on to list many mitzvot, including ones that are at the core of our tradition. Love your neighbor as yourself. Revere your parents. To be honest, to pay a hired worker on time, to observe Shabbat, to judge fairly, without bias or favoritism, to not place a stumbling block before the blind, and rabbinic teachings read that expansively so that the take away is not to take advantage of a person, to care for the poor, especially the stranger, widow and orphan, and so on. So when the question is how good do we have to be? The very section of the Torah that we’ll be learning from later today…well, it’s got a list for us. And Yom Kippur itself assumes the standard is quite high, which is why we’re called to answer for so much.
And yet…we’re human. Which could mean we’re capable of so much good, but it also means that we’re not infallible. No one is. The Torah goes on at length about that too, because everyone, absolutely everyone, in the Torah, even the best people, mess up. Sometimes remarkably so. There’s a prayer in our services, “Avot v’Imahot,” literally, the “fathers and mothers,” referring to our ancestors who began the Jewish people, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, Sara, Rebecca, Rachel and Leah. The truth is, that while they all have many admirable qualities, in important ways, most of them failed at some pretty basic tasks of actually being good fathers and mothers. Isaac favored his son Esau over Jacob, and Jacob continued that dynamic by favoring Joseph over his brothers. Even Moses was fallible. As a parent himself, he tended to neglect his own children’s needs while focusing on the larger community. And as a leader, he sometimes let anger guide his words and actions. Our Shabbat morning Torah study group - by the way, if you’ve never joined us before, you’re invited to drop in sometime! - our Shabbat morning Torah study group has definitely picked up on Moses’s anger management issues, especially as life has worn on him. I think so many of their failures are documented in the Torah to purposefully teach us that even the best of us are limited. People go against their better judgment, or they let their emotions get the better of them, or they simply fail to see what seems so obvious to others. And for what its worth, the others also fail to see things, maybe different things, but still. That’s part of what it means to say, “we’re only human.”
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks taught that we’re not commanded to be perfect, only that when we’re not, we recognize it and strive to do better next time. To be honest, I struggled with this teaching of his. If we’re not commanded to be perfect, then what area is it that it’s ok for us to do something wrong? It’s not OK when we hurt people, or we cheat, or we fail in some meaningful way. Rather than say we’re not commanded to be perfect, I think it’s better to say, it’s only to be expected that we’re not. And sometimes our reactions, to others or even to ourselves can be grace. Grace is absolutely a Jewish concept. Over and over today we referred to God as “El rachum v’chanun,” “God, compassionate and gracious.” And we were blessed with words from the Torah, “Ya-eir Adonai panav elecha vee-chuneka,” May the light of God shine upon you and may God be gracious to you.” Grace, in Jewish tradition, simply means to hold something with a favorable impression. When we look at ourselves or others with grace, it’s not that we overlook or are blind to ways in which we or they fall short. Rather, we realize that those don’t define us or them. That we acted in a way that doesn’t reflect who we truly are or our best selves. That’s grace, knowing that a person at their worst doesn’t define them.
Not only that, but a life without failures is hardly a life. Rabbi Kushner's book that I mentioned before talks about that very point. He tells the story of Adam and Eve and asks the question, “Was it really so bad for them to eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil?” Without doing so, their moral agency is completely in question. They’d be living with innocence and naivete of childhood forever. It’s often read as a failure, but it could be read in another way. It’s a story of growing up. By eating from the Tree of Knowledge, they both, by definition, make a mistake and learn from it at the same time. Now there’s a lot of lessons that I’m sure we’d rather not learn the hard way, but learning the hard way is proof of living a life.
Dr. Wendy Mogel, a psychologist who's spent her career turning to Torah and Talmud for parenting wisdom, wrote a book called The Blessing of the Skinned Knee — about exactly this. A child who's kept so carefully protected that they never fall off the bike, never get hurt, never fail at anything, doesn't turn out lucky. They turn out undeveloped. She wrote a follow-up called The Blessing of a B Minus, and applied the same idea to teenagers — because as it turns out, the B-minus does something for a kid that the A can't.
So where does that leave us? Our tradition teaches us to live a holy life, to strive, and to improve. But nobody’s ever going to get everything right.
Maimonides, the great 12th century rabbi lays out three categories of people in his Laws of Repentance: the rasha, a person whose sins outweigh his merits; the tzaddik, whose merits outweigh his sins; and the beinoni, whose merits and sins are in exact balance. Most of us should think of ourselves as beinoni.
But I want to pause on that word rasha, the wicked one, for a moment, because I don't want anything I've said tonight to be misheard. Everything so far — the beinoni, the grace, the idea that our failings don't define us — describes the ordinary terrain of being human. The hurtful comment. The insensitivities. Forgetfulness. Less than perfect parenting or less than perfect respect for our worthy parents. It was never meant to describe someone who commits real predation. A person who abuses a child. A person who murders. That’s the rasha, the wicked one, and Maimonides is not gentle and forgiving toward the rasha. Even as Maimonides was generous toward the rest of us muddling through as beinonim, he is precise about what such a person is owed by their victims. Which is: nothing, until real repair has been made. The Mishnah puts it plainly — Yom Kippur atones for what we do against God, but for what we do against one another, it does not atone until we've appeased the person we wronged. Not apologized to them. Appeased them. The tradition places that judgment in the hands of the one who was harmed, not the one who caused the harm. The abused owes nothing, nothing, nothing to their abuser.
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg, in her book On Repentance and Repair, builds on this same Maimonidean framework for our own time. She writes that forgiveness belongs only to the people who were harmed. Nobody else can grant it on their behalf, and nobody is entitled to receive it just because they've said the right words. What's owed, from the person who caused harm, is repair — as much of it as is actually possible. What is never owed, from the person who was harmed, is forgiveness, or access, or trust or a way back into their life. So if there is someone in your life who caused you real, serious harm, and you have chosen distance instead of reconciliation: that isn't a failure on your part. That isn't you falling short of what this day asks of you. That may be exactly the wisest decision. The saddest, hardest moments in my career as a rabbi have been when I’ve suspected or learned of a child being in an abusive home or setting. And it’s happened a few times. And each time, there’s a version of a conversation I have with the other adults in those children’s lives. That their first and most important responsibility is towards protecting those children, not towards the abuser. And if that means divorce or separation or calling the police, or whatever, the only thing to think about is what is owed to the victims. Not being a forgiving person, not being a gracious person. Being a protector. Being a guardian. The Talmud teaches that one who is kind to one who is cruel ends up being cruel to one who is kind.
Now I want to return to Maimonides’ advice for the rest of us. He said most people are beinoni, somewhere in between wicked and a saint, but that doesn’t mean he thought we were all the same. He says the scale isn't the same for everyone. Only God can actually see it, because only God knows each person's real capacity — and merit gets measured against that capacity, not against some universal standard everyone gets held to equally. If your potential is a 10 and you reach a 7, he says, you've actually accomplished less than someone whose potential was only a 5 who reached all 5 of it. The externally visible result can look identical. What God is actually weighing is how much a person lives up to their potential.
My teacher, Professor Laurence Thomas, z"l, who taught philosophy at Syracuse for decades, used to make a version of this same point about his own classroom. Some students, he said, had to work enormously hard to earn an A. Others could seem to get one without much effort at all. And he insisted it mattered enormously that those students put in a lot of work anyway — not because the A was ever in doubt for them, but because there's an A, and then there's actually fantastic work, and those are not the same thing. A gifted student who coasts to the top grade on raw ability would still never flourish in the way that they’re capable of flourishing. Our goal isn’t to achieve a goal meant for someone else. It’s only to become a better version of ourselves.
And then there's Rav Kook — Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, the first chief rabbi of pre-state Israel. In his writings on teshuvah, in Orot HaTeshuvah, he says that even a person who keeps stumbling, who keeps doing damage to their own righteousness, hasn't actually damaged their fundamental wholeness. Because our failing never defined us in the first place. What defines us is the wanting. The desire to become better — a desire Kook says never actually leaves us, no matter how many times we fall short of it — that desire is itself the engine of teshuvah. So if you're sitting here tonight uncomfortable, hungry, doing this hard work of looking honestly at where you fell short this year — that discomfort isn't a sign that you've failed to be who you're supposed to be. Kook would say it's the opposite. It's the clearest evidence there is that you already are.
So how good do we have to be?
Serious enough to take our Torah's calls to holiness to heart. Wise enough to know that nobody has ever gotten it all right — not Abraham, not Sarah, not Moses, not David, not one of us sitting here tonight. We all have regrets, or at least we should.
Gracious enough to see ourselves, and most of the people we love, in a full context — not just the worst thing they did, but the whole of who they are. That's most of what this night is for.
And honest enough to know that grace isn't the same as forgetting, and it was never meant to be handed out equally to everyone who asks for it. Some of you are owed an apology you have never received. Some of you have chosen, rightly, to keep a door closed that someone else wishes you'd open. That's not a failure of this season. That might be exactly what integrity looks like this year.
Not perfect. Not just fine, either. As good as we're actually capable of being — which, it turns out, for most of us, most years, is quite a lot.
G'mar chatimah tovah.
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