Yair Robinson

Yom Kippur Morning 5787

“Finding Our Way Back From Failure”

It wasn’t supposed to be like this.

As many of you know, this past year I was running around with what’s left of my hair on fire. In addition to the work around the 120^th, and my normal congregational responsibilities, I was finishing up coursework and clinical work with The Council for Relationships in Philadelphia, working toward a post-graduate certificate in Marriage and Family Therapy. I was doing group work with Jewish Family Services and seeing as many as six clients a week building on the learning I had done in the Family Systems leadership program I had already done. I was excited by the learning and the work, and the idea that I was following in the footsteps of both my former senior, Elliot Strom, who got his certificate from CFR, and Rabbi Grumbacher, who earned his MSW and continues to do some clinical work. I was supposed to be finished this summer, right before the High Holy Days, and even decided not to go to camp as faculty this year in part so I could finish up this work. But as much as I enjoyed working with clients and appreciated my classmates, something felt off. The quality of instruction and supervision seemed on the decline, and I was finding increased anxiety at the organizational level, including seeping into my supervisory sessions.

And then the needle dropped. We were called into a meeting the week before our 120^th celebrations where they announced that Council for Relationship was closing due to lack of funds. An article in the Philadelphia Inquirer appeared shortly thereafter. 94 years of training the next generation of family therapists, of working with clergy, of supporting people, including the most vulnerable populations, with systemic therapy, all gone. As you may have experienced with a mass layoff or a wind down, we received mixed messages about whether there was a plan to let us finish the program, when we had to terminate with our clients, and the like. Clinicians started leaving to start their own practices or join other groups. I finally closed everything out in late May, just short of my goals academically and clinically. Closing out my clients on such short notice, many of whom I’d been working with for a year, was profoundly painful. I was proud of the work I’d done: with a woman living in sober housing, with a PHD/MD student overwhelmed with anxiety, with couples navigating their relationships and several men trying to come to grips with their identities. It was good work, and then…nothing. Meanwhile, I watched as one of the oldest institutions of Family Therapy and its leaders completely decompensated, with recrimination, abandonment, disorganization, obfuscation, and a general sense of coming apart at the seams. Instead of supporting the students and clients who were the most vulnerable, we were sort of left to our own devices, which for me, included filing a series of complaints with the accrediting board and the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s office. Fortunately, most everyone did graduate, and after another clinical organization bought Council and some negotiating, they offered me a different certificate, for which I’m grateful, but the damage had been done. There was a real sense of rupture, a real sense of abandonment, a violation of the covenant between teacher and learner, between client and counsellor. My classmates, some of my faculty members and I did some real grieving. And at the same time, as exhausted and angry as I was, I also kind of got it. At the time when it was fresh, I found myself repeating a line from the TV show Star Trek, though it could come from Aristotle or the Talmud: “it is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not failure. That is life.” I rolled the dice, I took a chance, and it didn’t work out the way I wanted it to, the way anyone wanted it to. And sometimes, that’s just how life is. Each of us have had our setbacks, have lost despite our best efforts. I’m sure everyone in this room right now can remember a time when they committed no mistakes, and lost: jobs, opportunities for advancement or growth, even relationships simply reduced to ashes. It’s not the first time I’ve thought about that question. As we’ve watched bedrock civil rights legislation be torn apart, I’ve often thought of one of my heroes, Al Vorspan, zichrono livracha, a titan of social action in our movement, or folks like John Lewis, and what it must have felt like to reach the age when one should be resting on their laurels, only to see those laurels burn away.

What do we do when we work so hard for something, and see it undone? Do we carry it as a leaden weight in our lives forever, a source of resentment, a wound that won’t close? Do we spin through our choices, review the ‘game tape’ as it were, in our heads, ruminating over all we could have done and should have done, taking on fault—and with it guilt and shame—even if there was nothing we could have done? Do we shrug our shoulders and move on? To protect ourselves, do we become cynical, and just give up any effort moving forward? We’ve read in the news over and over again about people ‘quiet quitting’, doing the bare minimum at work; how much of that is a protective measure, an emotionally defensive response? What do we do when we don’t fail but we still lose?

It seems to me that the answer is to turn to teshuvah, to repentance, but not in the sense that we traditionally understand that word. Normally, when we think of teshuvah we reflect on our own mistakes with an eye toward learning and repair. We atone, asking forgiveness for our actions, seeking to correct our behaviors so that we don’t fall into the trap again. And that is the main thrust of this day: to seek out to improve ourselves—to take ownership for our choices and repair the breach made in our relationships through our offenses and errors. What I’m suggesting, I suppose, is that there’s another way to think of that word teshuvah, and apply it to those circumstances where we feel we did everything possible and it still went cattywampus.

What do I mean? Teshuvah, repentance, as we have so often heard, means ‘to turn’. Sometimes we understand it to mean ‘to return’. And we interpret it as such: Return to the ways of the right and good, to turn away from our terrible choices, etc. Certainly that is among the themes of today’s Torah reading: that when we take blessing and curse to heart—that is, we understand the consequences of our actions—and return to God with our full selves, then God will take us back in love, which is all we want when we offer our repentance, to God and to each other. But what if we could also understand it to mean that we refuse to give up, to turn away from the path we set for ourselves, to refuse to give into cynicism and despair? Does that feel like too radical a re-reading of the idea of teshuvah? Maybe. And I acknowledge that we don’t want to reimagine repentance from apologizing for one’s bad behavior to some kind of doubling down or pretending that our mistakes are actually virtues; we don’t have to go too far to see enough of that behavior in the world. Rather, at the risk of torturing Jewish tradition, I want to suggest that sometimes the lesson of teshuvah is not to course correct, not to tack a different way, but to keep going. Or as the playwright Samuel Beckett wrote in Worstward Ho, “Ever tried, ever failed. No matter. Try again, fail again. Fail better.” He wrote that, of course, on the art of writing, but we could apply it to our lives as well; that failure should not be seen as a reason to stop, but a reason to persist.

Which is all well and good, but when we fail, we don’t want to persist. We’ve been doing enough persisting, thank you very much. We want to throw in the towel. We want to lie down. We want to be DONE, one way or another. When we reach that place of real failure, especially when we feel we did everything we could, all the positive aphorisms and encouragement just doesn’t land. Oh, you can quote Adam Grant and Brene Brown, and Roosevelt’s “The Man In The Arena” and Kipling and whoever else, but we know in that moment, it’s all just the sound of waves crashing on the beach. Just noise.  So how can we move forward? How can we persist? How can we fail better?

As many of you know, Rabbi Nick Renner from Beth Shalom and I have been studying for a few years now, mostly looking at tractate Ta’anit in the Talmud, a tractate that deals with the idea that ecological disaster is a result of our actions, and that the practice of fasting and self-denial can mitigate the decree and bring about God’s mercy and grace: themes that might be relevant in this moment in our lives. Recently, we came to a series of episodes where prominent rabbis renowned for their Torah and their piety order a fast and pray for mercy in response to a prolonged drought, but no rain comes. They fail, all of them for different reasons. This one fails to have the sufficient piety or Torah knowledge, that one calls the fast but cannot fulfill it himself due to age or infirmity; one of them just simply finds himself wanting in comparison to his colleagues. And their failure has real consequences, the potential destruction of their communities. They are ridiculed and mocked by their colleagues, and their community members look to them with increasing exasperation. Rather than give up, they double down. They issue threats to heaven, demanding that they be thrown from the city walls if rain doesn’t come, or chide God for not seeing the piety and humility of their community, never mind their own. But most powerfully, several of them cry out from such a deep and low place in their lives, from such a place of not only embarrassment or shame but humility, a place of weeping and despair, that the heavens open and the rain finally comes. The cry, as the Ba’al Shem Tov reminds us, is the axe that breaks open the Gate of Heaven. Perhaps it is also that moment of exhaustion and despair and grief where we can reach a kind of clarity as well. Where we can understand other people’s suffering better than we did before. Where we can find the strength to push past the fear and sadness and anger and try one more time, not from a place of embarrassment or shame, but a place of devotion. It’s a choice, isn’t it, to get back up, to stand up, to try again, even when every voice in your head says, ‘sit back down’. Our Torah reading reminds us repeatedly of the choice: good and evil, life and death, and urges us to choose life. What if choosing life if not the choice to carry forward, to recommit, to engage again despite falling down?  What if the teshuvah, the repentance we perform this day, is not only toward others, but toward and for ourselves, to remind ourselves of who we are, what we are capable of, and that our failures are not signs to give up, but to cry louder, recommit despite all that has happened; fail better.

Today we confess our sins. Today we say, “we have gone astray, we have transgressed.” But we may also say, “I have done all that I can. I did all that was asked of me, and more. In these ways I committed no mistakes, but I still failed. But I will not give up. I will not give in to cynicism, or despair. I will not stray from the path. I will choose life, and in doing so I will choose to recommit myself, even if it means I fail again. Just this time, let me fail better.” May that prayer, that cry, be heard today as well, and may we, in our choosing life, in our choosing to commit, in our refusing to give in, each do our part to repair ourselves and this world around us. Then may we return and be returned to all we love. Amen.