Sermon: Shabbat Ki Tissa: The Tyranny of Perfection

Written by Writings & Sermons by others — 18 March 2017

One of best by-products for me of chairing the group of Rabbis and scholars producing our next Movement for Reform Judaism Machzor for the High Holidays has been the opportunity to work closely with my teacher Rabbi Professor Jonathan Magonet.  Rabbi Magonet has been responsible for Reform liturgy for over forty years, having been co-editor with Rabbi Lionel Blue of Forms of Prayer and Days of Awe in 1977 and 1985, the Siddur you have in your hands in 2008 and with Rabbi Paul Freedman of our new Machzor due to be published in 2019.

The pleasure has not just been in the work on the Machzor but also in sharing a love of music from the 1930’s-1950’s, the big band era.  Jonathan has introduced Nicola and I to a series of brilliant big band concerts at the Cadogan Hall – you will see little snippets of them on my twitter feed @Rabbimarkg.  I just love the sound and the virtuosity of 20/30 people making music together in perfect time together with the individuality and creativity of the soloist.

Artie Shaw was among the greatest clarinettists of the Big Band era.  So famous was he that on the eve of America’s entry into World War II, TIME magazine reported that to the German masses the United States meant “sky-scrapers, Clark Gable, and Artie Shaw.”  For many years he played with the greats.  His Artie Shaw Orchestra with Billie Holiday as their lead vocalist was wildly popular known in particular for their hit version of ‘Begin the Beguine.’  Artie Shaw died a decade ago at the age of 94, living quietly in California.    I don’t expect so many people here have heard of him today but if you want to hear elegance and perfection personified in a musician go to You Tube and watch him perform his hit tune https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCXVxE_YeP4

Quite often, in his six-decade career Artie Shaw left the music business.  He identified in a documentary on his life that the reason for it was partly to do with the perfectionism that made him a good band leader.  When he knew that he couldn’t get it entirely, absolutely, right he wasn’t prepared to do it at all – even if that meant that no one would hear him playing his clarinet for years on end.

What happened though during these periods outside the music business is that Artie Shaw took up other things and tried to perfect them – like being a dairy farmer in Connecticut, becoming a writer, a novelist, an expert fly fisherman and in his later years one of the top rifle range marksmen in the US.

The basic discipline that his rifle shooting required was to shoot five bullets at a piece of paper 100 yards away to get them as near as possible through one single hole.

After a while of great shooting Artie Shaw asked one of his rifle shooting friends at the range – why do we do this?  We could just walk up to the target with a hole punch and achieve the same effect.

His friend said to him “you know why we do this, because we are trying to get all five bullets through just one hole.  We’re trying to achieve perfection.”

Artie said “so what happens if we do manage to make that one hole.”  His friend said “we won’t.  If we did there’d be nothing left for God to do.”

Perfection is so attractive.  It is the messianic age. It’s the poem or the song that says just the thing that we are thinking.  It’s the symmetry of the Greek Temple. It’s the purity demanded in the descriptions of the tabernacle over the past few week’s Torah portion.  It’s the red heifer who is so red that, according to our Mishnah Parah, no more than two of its hairs may be another colour.  Its what we want of our political leaders.  It is the single commandment that King Solomon included in his blessing for the Israelites “be perfect, wholehearted with your God.” (1 Kings 8:61)

But perfection is also tyrannical.  It is what stops you from doing something like writing an article until you know exactly what you are going to say and know that it is just right.  It stops you from taking part in a service unless you are totally confident of what you have to do.  It stops you from committing to something where your talents might be useful in case you can’t do everything that is needed.  It has been said that perfection is the enemy of doing good.

A perfect Judaism would recognise that, in the words of Mesekh Hochmah (Etz Chayyim p534) , “There is no intrinsic holiness in things. Only God is intrinsically holy. Physical objects can be holy insofar as they lead people to God”  So in a perfected Judaism there would be no idea of holiness in golden calves, in tabernacles, even Synagogues and Torah scrolls unless or until they are able to bring people to a sense of contact with the Divine and to behaviour that recognises God in our actions.  But we are not perfect and so of course we need physical objects to give us something to relate to and to lead us on the journey.

So when the Golden Calf was made – which was so obviously the antitheses of perfect Judaism, God allowed us in the Torah account to deviate from this counsel of perfection and build for ourselves a place where we could feel we could see God dwelling, the tabernacle or Mishcan.  Indeed it has been suggested that perhaps Moses smashed the tablets of the Ten Commandments because he was concerned that they themselves might become objects of excessive veneration, even idolatry – then he, according to Talmud, he kept these sacred obviously imperfect fragments in the Ark of the Covenant. (Baba Batra 14b)

Perhaps somehow we could have a perfect Judaism of spirit and values – but we know that we need more than that for our Judaism, we need buildings and communities with all their imperfections, their drainage problems and broughesses, in order to pass our values on and make them live in our lives, we cannot do it all in our minds.  The Synagogue has been a good thing.  Maybe one day in the Messianic Age we will be able to do without it as we unite with all peoples to live in a perfect world – but then God’s work will be done.

This week when we heard Archbishop John Sentamu give the Rabbi Lionel Blue Memorial Lecture for Leo Baeck College here at Alyth we heard him quote Lionel who said that a terrorist is someone with a heart of violence who uses the fig leaf of religion to cover his violence.  But terrorist organisations are something else too.  They are aiming at their own particular tyrannical vision of perfection that can only be achieved if you push everyone else, their values and their interests, out of your way, a world free from western influence or an Israel free from Jews. The terrorists quest for their vision of perfection creates the evil of killing and maiming innocent people as it is whenever humankind tries to wrest control of perfection from God.

Because we are not capable of perfection.  All that we can do is to strive for good.  We must find our satisfaction and fulfilment from doing good – not from achieving perfection.  It means that we may be unable to live in a world fully at peace, but that need not stop us striving for peace.  We pray Oseh shalom bimromav – Hu ya’aseh shalom.  May the One who brings peace from above bring that perfect peace.  We pray it because we cannot do it.  We cannot make it happen completely.  That absolutely does not mean that we should leave off the effort.

Our task on earth is to do good – not achieve perfection.  It means that we may never be able to achieve an Israel entirely run according the values that we would dream of for our Jewish state.  That does not tell us to disengage from Israel because she cannot achieve perfection – but rather we must be part of the efforts to support and help Israel in trying to do good as we understand it.

Reform Judaism at the turn of the twentieth century came from an era when religious Reform Jews believed in the possibility that the Messianic era of perfection might be achieved as science, and society progressed by leaps and bounds.  They had not yet experienced the first world war, even less so the second world war when the idea of the progress of humanity simply crumbled and disintegrated on the battlefields of the Somme and in the crematoria of Auschwitz.

We now know that perfection in human hands may never be achieved.  The spirit of the dream was well expressed in John Rayner’s Shofarot in the Liberal Jewish Gate of Repentance Machzor “To affirm God is to affirm that history has a purpose.  Man is to perfect himself; to unfold the great potential that, created in God’s image, resides in him; to learn to live with his fellow men in peace and harmony; to build a society of liberty and justice, brotherhood and love.” Beautiful words – and even then contrasted with the knowledge that “that goal is still very distant.”  The passage was omitted in the Liberal Judaism Maczhor of 2003. Machzor Ruach Chadashah and we know we cannot include such a counsel of perfection in the Movement for Reform Judaism Mazchor that we are creating today.

We now know the danger of unachievable perfectionism – but we also recognise that our responsibility absolutely does not cease.  We must do good.  We must make our efforts to create peace and harmony, liberty and justice, brotherhood and love – but not become cynical when these are not perfectly achieved.

Because that is what we can do – do good – and leave the final perfection to God.