Do We Really Make Things Better - Erev Rosh Hashanah Sermon
If you’ve never seen NBC’s hit comedy, the Good Place, I’m about to spoil the show. So, if, for some reason, you are in the middle of binging it, or you are saving it for your next quiet summer, I’ll give you a moment to cover your ears.
NBC’s The Good Place, which stars Kristen Bell, Ted Danson, and D’arcy Carden, follows four strangers in their quest to make it into Heaven. After many twists, turns, and false starts, they finally get in, only to realize that this “good place” looks nothing like their expectations. Rather than see family and friends from bygone eras in their lives, they walk into a paradise filled with strangers from the distant past. In fact, there isn’t a single person who has made it to the Good Place since the start of the industrial revolution. According to the show, none of us, not you, not me, no one is good enough to secure our place in the afterlife.
Why?
As the show explains, even the best of us are victims of unintended consequences. We can try our hardest to be good. We can treat others well, pay our taxes on time, be good to the environment, treat our workers well. All of this gives us a sense that we are good. But are we?
In a really depressing turn, the show makes the point that simply living in this complicated, ugly, modern world means that we err, we falter, we even sin, just by being.
Take a simple choice many of us make in our effort to be good: driving electric vehicles. On the one hand, electric cars are the single greatest way to avoid the perils of gas vehicles. They reduce emissions and tax the environment less.
Yet, eclectic vehicles, while a step forward, are not the golden ticket to moral purity. Many charging stations continue to pull from coal and gas-powered plants. The mining process that produces the batteries can be environmentally destructive and exploitive of workers. After the batteries are done, there aren’t many great options for how to discard them and they add waste and leach toxins further into the environment.
You try to be good. You drive the best car possible. But simply by living, simply by consuming, you make this world worse. Now magnify this by every decision, big and small you make. You may live the most ethical life you can. But just by participating in our messy, interconnected world, where one decision stands on the platform of hundreds before it, not all good, you are implicated in a lot of bad stuff.
No one makes it into the “Good Place” because the modern world does not allow anyone to even come close to moral perfection. There are just too many forces working against you. NBC is telling us that we humans are a net drag on the world around us.
Normally, one would expect Judaism to take the opposite tack. We are, after all, a religion of hope, of optimism, of faith. Yet, Jewish sources seem to agree wholeheartedly with the thesis of the Good Place. We make the world worse, simply by being in it.
There is a famous Midrash that when God sought to create the world, God first tried to make the world balanced. God would judge the world with equal parts angry justice and loving forgiveness. Yet, because we are who we are, the world kept collapsing. If God was truly objective, our faults would outweigh or virtues and bring about our ruin. So God re-adjusted the ratio and gave preference to mercy. God would be a little more forgiving than just, and only then could humanity survive (Pesikta Rabbati 40).
Another famous folk teaching bolsters this point. It is said that the world is filled with such evil that it should not exist. Yet, it does, in part because God keeps the world stocked with 36 wholly righteous individuals called the lamed-vavniks who act as ethical ringers (Sanh. 97b; Suk. 45b). These people are so good, they tip the balance in our favor. Without them, our faults would implode the universe.
I’ve always loved this teaching because it’s fun to speculate on who those hidden righteous are. Yet, the story of the righteous 36 also paints a bleak picture of humanity. Without them, we don’t deserve to be.
Others Jewish texts take a slightly more optimistic view. And I emphasize slightly here. Maimonides, Judaism’s most accomplished moral philosopher, once wrote that if each of us see our actions on a scale, with our merits on one side and our faults on the others, we will be perfectly balanced at any given time (Hilchot Teshuva 3:4: based on Kedushin 40b). That means that every action we do, shifts the balance between being labeled as good or bad. Every choice we make, whether to apologize or dig in, whether to yell or walk away, tips the scales one way or the other. At every moment, we decide if we are more evil or more good.
Maimonides then goes on to talk about humanity as a whole. If every single one of us is walking the tightrope between merit and fault, that means our society as a whole has that same level of balance. Every action you do, literally shifts the categorization of the world from good to evil or evil to good at any moment. That’s a huge burden for all of us to carry, and remember Maimonides was writing at a simpler time before we all became victims of the unintended consequences of industrialization and globalization.
So what do we do about this? How do we function in a world that not only doesn’t need us, but likely would be better without us?
The answer is that being good is not about outcomes but about process. It turns out that in Judaism, what matters is not whether you are a net positive on the world around you, but that you always strive to be better. In almost every text that speaks to the inherent problems of humanity's existence, God cares more if you are genuinely trying to improve than that you always get it right.
That by the way, is also the message of the Good Place, but if I delved too far into that I would really be ruining the show.
One of the most famous debates about humanity's place in the world took place 2000 years ago between the students of two rabbis, Hillel and Shammai (Erubin 13b). The school of Shammai, looking at the devastation wreaked by us proclaimed “it is better that humanity had not been created.” Hillel’s students disagreed. They believed that the word is fundamentally better off with us in it.
Since they couldn’t agree, they decided to put it to a vote. In an uncharacteristic turn, Hillel lost. The consensus was clear. “It is better that humanity not have been created.”
Now, if the story ended there, it would be bleak indeed. But considering further, the group adds an important caveat to the ruling, “but now that they have, let us examine our deeds.”
We are here. We matter. We are, after all, created in God’s image. So, we have a choice. We can throw up our hands, resolved to live our lives complicit to our deleterious effects on the world around us. Or, we can stive to do better. Constantly improving. Always seeking to be honest with ourselves about how we can inch forward toward virtue.
For us, the most important factor in living a good life, is not getting it right all the time, not even batting .500 but in is our ability to tell ourselves the truth. There is room to grow.
In one famous Midrash, God engages in the same arguments as Hillel and Shammai. He debates with the angels in heaven, at the start of time, about whether to create humanity (Genesis Rabba 8:5). Half say to do it. The other half say to avoid it.
The arguments are diverse. Some of the angels say humans should come into being because they are capable of feeling love and doing righteous deeds. Other angels argue that God should avoid our creation because humans are also capable of lying, sowing discord, and promoting violence.
So, what does God do? God throws one of the angels down to earth to teach truth to humanity, and then goes forward with creation anyways. The angels are still fighting when God confesses, “It’s too late to argue. I already made them.”
Notice that God could have made any angel the messenger to help humanity, but God specifically chooses one who specializes in truth.
This is because truthful accounting is what matters most.
Much of the reason we cannot improve is that we tell ourselves stories. We make excuses. We equivocate.
To take one example, earlier this year, Ayelet had the idea to do an audit of our stock holdings to make sure that they were in line with our values. As we delved into our portfolio we noticed that our financial planner had purchased a certain stock that seemed wildly out of line with our values. We decided to make a list of funds we wanted to liquidate, so we could invest in other, less problematic companies. Yet, the further we looked, the harder it was to not just clear the decks. Very few companies are not without their problems. This one pollutes. That one may use exploited labor overseas. Another fails to protect the privacy of their customers. Still others failed to advertise just how unhealthy their food products were, especially to children.
At a certain point we looked at each other exhausted. Every decision, if we took it seriously enough required a moral dissertation on its own. Take Starbucks for example. There is no question that Starbucks has its problems. It may not be the worst Union busting company, but it's certainly the most famous. Starbucks will often do whatever possible to keep its employees from organizing.
Yet, Starbucks was one of the first major companies to take infertility seriously. They made sure to offer IVF benefits on their health plans before anyone else did. Couples who were struggling to afford the costs of in-vetro would work weekends at their local franchise since even part-time employees were considered for this benefit. And for this reason, Starbucks became an important meeting ground for people struggling to have kids.
In the end, we decided to drop some of our most problematic stocks, but we stopped short of liquidating our whole portfolio. We lacked the bandwidth to truly unpack which concessions to make. And ultimately, it was important to us that we continue to earn some money. True, we could divest from the market all together, but that would also mean less charity to give, fewer means to educate our children, and less participation in the economy, which itself creates jobs and improves people’s lives.
But if constant truth telling is what matters, then that decision cannot be final. No decision is. If we do things right, then every so often, we will revisit the contents of our portfolio with transparency and honesty, always striving to improve where we can while remaining realistic and grounded.
None of us will ever have a perfect portfolio, just as we will likely never live the perfect life. And often, when we examine ourselves, we will realize that we are falling far short.
But, as it was for Ayelet and I, God credits our virtue by way of our self-examination and moral striving. It’s in letting ourselves tell the truth about our failures, it’s about owning our quest to improve, that makes life worth living.
We will never be good enough, and that’s OK. But we can always be better, and that is perfect.
This is the season of Teshuvah, of examining our deeds, repenting, and determining to improve. When we truly engage in that process, our rabbis explain that something magical happens. God views us as more meritorious than if we had acted perfectly in the first place. When we take an honest account of ourselves and turn toward the good, we, in their words “transform our sins into merits” (Yoma 86b).
By the way, if this kind of discourse on Moral Philosophy interests you, we will be reading an amazing book by the creator of the Good Place, called “How to be Perfect” over the year in my weekly “Lunch with the Rabbi course,” which meets monthly on Tuesdays.
But even if you don’t have time for this class, take time these High Holy Days for moral reflection. It may sometimes feel that the universe is conspiring against you, that no matter what you do, you can’t achieve moral virtue. The world is just too messy, too complicated.
But there is a way in. And this is the season to nurture it. I don’t know if Shammai (or the Good Place) was right, that the world would be better without us. But I know for a fact, that they asked the wrong question. Since we are here, we need to work each day to prove, to earn, our existence. And we can do that by never giving up on our quest to be and live better than we were yesterday. God cares only about our growth, so let’s make this next year one of moral striving and transformation.
