Does Hashem Expect Us to Be Flawless?

Rav Amnon Bazak writes of his Yeshiva high school experience: “The rabbis in my yeshiva high school …all believed that one who truly wishes to serve God must totally cut himself off from this world and devote himself entirely to God. A true Torah scholar is someone who overpowers all his passions, rises above all his weaknesses, and all his life enjoys the splendor of the Shekhina. This model was a great challenge;… attractive and exciting… But as I grew up and understood that I could never meet such expectations, I almost despaired of the aspiration to serve God in a serious manner, and thought that I would have to direct myself to a life of mediocre religiosity, which is not really connected to the true ideal.”¹

Were Rav Bazak’s teachers correct? Is that the only way to serve Hashem? Does Hashem expect all of us to be flawless and cut off from this world?

Rav Bazak goes on to explain how his perceptive changed when he began to learn from HaRav Amital at Yeshivat Har Etzion:  “When I am asked what is the most important thing that I learned from Rav Amital, I reply briefly: the legitimacy to be a human being, with all of a human being’s complexities, virtues and deficiencies.”

Nowhere does Judaism tell us that we have to be perfect (holy, yes, flawless, no). In fact, the Torah doesn’t even attempt to hide the fact that our ancestors themselves were not flawless. Commentators over the years have even pointed out their mistakes, gleaning lessons from the challenges our leadership faced in their personal lives.

The concept of perfection is something that anyone who engages in religion will grapple with. We are created in the image of Hashem, and Hashem is perfection. Hashem commands us to be holy². As Elul, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur approach, this is an important question, one which accompanies our preparations and choices for the new year. We will see that in Judaism, Hashem expects us to be human, and that being human comes with a host of flaws, but also great opportunities.  

Faults of Our Fathers

Nowhere does Judaism tell us that we have to be perfect (holy, yes, flawless, no). In fact, the Torah doesn’t even attempt to hide the fact that our ancestors themselves were not flawless. Commentators over the years have even pointed out their mistakes, gleaning lessons from the challenges our leadership faced in their personal lives. Examples of this is Ramban on Avraham’s decision to leave Canaan during the famine and lie about Sarah being his sister³ , Rav Hirsch on Yitzchak and Rivka’s approach to parenting⁴. In many cases, the mefarshim do not need to do it for us, as our heroes do it themselves- Yehuda admits his fault regarding Tamar, David admit’s his sin regarding Batsheva. Kohelet writes “There is none so righteous on earth, as to do only good and never sin.”⁵

There are two ways to approach this: We can despair, as Rav Bazak was beginning to. If even our holy foremothers and fathers made mistakes and were not flawless, how can I even hope to reach a level of closeness with Hashem?! But really, the fact that even the holiest among us was not immune to mistakes should motivate us, because nowhere does imperfection prevent any of our ancestors from having the closest relationships with Hashem. Rabbi Sacks writes on the subject; “No religion has held a higher view of humanity than the Book that tells us we are each in the image and likeness of God. Yet none has been more honest about the failings of even the greatest. God does not ask us to be perfect. He asks us, instead, to take risks in pursuit of the right and the good, and to acknowledge the mistakes we will inevitably make.”⁶

Really, the idea of a person being flawless would stand in conflict with a basic tenet of Judaism, that is, the power of each individual to grow. One who is perfect, like an angel, has no cause to grow, nowhere to strive to. In a world of flawless individuals, there would be no point in having a world. A testament to this is the strange usage of the phrase Hashem uses when creating mankind. He says, supposedly to the angels, ‘let us make man in our image’⁷. Not let us make angels, or let us make perfect creations – rather, let us make man-human beings, with human tendencies, a yetzer tov and a yetzer ra, and with this, the human capacity for change. This being is ‘in our image’, created with Godliness and imbued with holiness, but not God. Our job, as humans, is to bring more holiness into this world through our human actions. 

Entering Yom Kippur

Yom Kippur is perhaps the best illustration of Hashem’s endorsement of our flawed existence. Built into our religion is a yearly second chance. According to the Talmud⁸, on the first Yom Kippur, when Hashem gives Moshe the formula of the 13 Principles of Mercy and forgives Am Yisrael for the sin of the Golden Calf, he tells Moshe, that when Bnei Yisrael sin, this formula will be the one through which we ask for forgiveness. This is such an astounding concept – Hashem doesn’t say ‘if’ Bnei Yisrael sin, He says when! He knows we will sin! Hashem recognizes that we are flawed, but also gives us a way to reconnect to Him when those flaws conflict with our virtues. Through our sincere admission of our mistakes, through invoking the unique relationship we have with Hashem, we can grow and become closer to Him. Rabbi Sacks says, “We’re all human, all too human. And God knew that before He ever made us. Which means that He created forgiveness before Homo sapiens ever set foot on earth. But with one condition. It sounds so simple. But it turns out to be one of the things we find hardest of all. Before we can be forgiven we have to admit, acknowledge, that we made mistakes. … Because until we accept responsibility for the wrong we did, we can’t grow, we can’t learn, we can’t even really understand why we haven’t yet reached our full potential.”

On Yom Kippur we spend the day dressed as angels, striving to behave as angels do- separating ourselves from the physical and engaging in the spiritual- but we also appear before Hashem as intrinsically human; we spend the day admitting our mistakes and begging Hashem to forgive us, to embrace us, as the fallible humans we are. 

Hashem created us as humans, that is His will. Humans are imperfect. We are created with both a yetzer tova and a yetzer ra. But in this is our unique  opportunity; to strive and to grow through those very mistakes and complexities. And when we inevitably falter along the way, we are blessed to be able to return, to correct and to try harder. 

1. https://etzion.org.il/en/philosophy/great-thinkers/harav-yehuda-amital/legitimacy-be-human-thought-rav-amital-zt%E2%80%9Dl
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2. For example, Vayikra, 19:7, 21,8 among many other examples ↩︎
3. Ramban, Commentary to Genesis 12:10, based on Zohar, Tazria, 52a. ↩︎
4. See commentary of Rav Hirsch to Bereishit 25:27. ↩︎
5. Kohelet 7;20 ↩︎
6. https://rabbisacks.org/covenant-conversation/lech-lecha/how-perfect-were-the-matriarchs-and-patriarchs/
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7. Bereishit 1;26 ↩︎
8. Rosh Hashanah 17b ↩︎