Rabbi Strauchler's Blog

Avital and I have been receiving a number of recommendation requests from Grade 12 students for yeshiva in Israel and university. Writing those recommendations sparked a memory of a conversation from when I was filling out my own applications many years ago. I was advised to include my "shul skills" in my applications to secular universities. The idea is that leading mussaf or giving a dvar Torah for hundreds of people are skills that we take for granted. Outside their context, for a high-school student to do these things regularly is a much bigger deal.

I have been teaching the laws of prayer in shul between mincha and maariv. In light of discussions about today's political and social culture, I thought of another "shul skill" that we take for granted. Integrated into the laws of prayer are the laws of mistake making. What happens if you forget?

We do not assume that people will not make errors. Just the opposite: We will make mistakes! Our expectation is that our prayers will fall short and that we will need to make corrections. We are taught in some situations to ignore the mistake, in others to make a late insertion, and in still others to repeat the entire prayer. There is no reason to deny failures or to excuse losses.

We err if we assume that the political problems we are witnessing today will be resolved when one person leaves the scene. What we are seeing is a cultural phenomena in which an individual's perspective is made so sacrosanct that we have lost any social platform from which to assert objective truth. If a person makes his or her own truth, they need not acknowledge any wrong doing.

Losing has become a skill. The ability to acknowledge failure should not be taken for granted.