Imperfectionism
by Raphael Morris
In Isaiah 5:1-7, God is imagined allegorically as a winemaker. The winemaker takes pains to do everything he possibly can to ensure a successful crop. He ploughs the fields and clears them of stones. He builds a wall and a watchtower to protect the fields. He plants the field with choice grapes, and makes a wine-press in preparation of the crop. After all this work, he expects to get plenty of grapes for his troubles.
The winemaker, however, does not get the grapes he was expecting. Instead, the fields yield only be’ushim (בְּאֻשִֽׁים) — a cryptic word that connotes sour, spoiled things. How to translate the word remains contentious, but at best, the winemaker ends up with a blighted crop. At worst, the vines produce wild grapes — unfit for wine — or even “stinkberries”, according to some translators.
But hey, surely our Divine winemaker takes this in stride, right? After all, this is Adonai, Adonai, El rachum v’chanun — a “compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in lovingkindness” (Exodus 34:6). Surely God has the patience and resilience to — as the poet Rudyard Kipling put it — “watch the things you gave your life to, broken, and stoop, and build them up with worn-out tools”?
… yeah, not so much.
The allegorical winemaker complains, loudly: “What more is there to do to my vineyard that I haven’t done already?! Why, when I expected it to produce grapes, did it produce sour, spoiled things?”
Then, in a fit of rage, he declares that he will destroy the vineyard utterly. He will “remove its hedge and turn it to kindling… break its stones and turn them to rubble… lay waste to it until it is ruined”.
Well, it’s a little extreme, but maybe sometimes you have to tear something down to build anew, right?
Except the winemaker continues: “None shall prune, and none shall hoe, and thorns shall cover it and ruin it! And I shall command the dark clouds against raining their rain upon it!”
You don’t have to be a professional winemaker like Rashi to know that deliberately destroying your vineyard and letting it fall into disrepair and drought isn’t going to improve the quality of your crop next season.
* * *
This might not be a constructive response to failure. And it might not exemplify the kind of patience that many wish to attribute to the Divine. But humanity is created b’tzelem Elohim — in the image of God — and it’s hard to deny that “screw it, I’m gonna burn it all down” is an incredibly human reaction.
Who among us hasn’t had the experience of pouring heart and soul into a project, of doing everything right, of putting in painstaking effort — only for everything to go wrong for reasons we couldn’t have prevented? “The best-laid schemes of mice and men,” as the poet Robert Burns observed, often go wrong.
And who among us, when that happened, hasn’t been tempted to just go nuclear? To tear up the manuscript, to smash the hard drive, to throw it all away rather than having to deal with the flaws that just seem to totally overshadow all the good parts, present and potential?
Of course, this doesn’t help. Just like destroying your vineyard won’t help you get better grapes, a scorched earth approach does little more than help one vent one’s spleen. And by fixating on the ideal, we frequently miss the acceptable, getting rid of things that are important and valuable and rewarding simply because they fall short of our vision.
As the Enlightenment philosopher (and noted antisemite) Voltaire once wrote: “The perfect is the enemy of the good.”
* * *
Which brings us back to Parashat Noach, the first, biggest, and most famous of the many tantrums where God resolves to throw the baby (and everything else) out with the bathwater:
“When God saw that the earth was ruined, for all flesh had ruined its ways upon the earth, God said to Noah: “An end is coming to all flesh before me, for the earth is filled with wrong because of them, so I am ruining them with the earth.”” (Genesis 6:12-13)
Again, this is deeply relatable, especially from a Disability perspective. Our flesh betrays us constantly. Stomach issues, seizures, panic attacks, chronic pain, torn muscles — there are thousands of ways for our own bodies to ruin things for us. As I’ve talked about before, our capacity wildly fluctuates, making planning sometimes feel like a fool’s errand. It’s so easy to do everything right and still have it come to nothing because of a bad pain day, a bad body day, a bad mental health day.
And we don’t often talk about the vehemence of our reactions to this, because it’s one of those things that falls in the category of “the ugly side of Disability”, the side that invites the kind of pity that we, as Disabled folks, spend a lifetime fighting against. The sheer contempt, the anger — at ourselves and at the world. The intense frustration of dealing with a brain, a body, a self that feels broken, that feels ruined. If one thing goes wrong, it can feel like the whole day is a wash.
As someone who struggles with Autistic black-and-white thinking, this is especially tempting. In The Prophets, Abraham Joshua Heschel characterises the prophet by his “sensitivity to evil”: “To the prophets, even a minor injustice assumes cosmic proportions,” he writes. I have often turned to these words of Heschel in reflecting on my own experience. There is something empowering about it — I share a sensitivity, an intensity of feeling with the prophets, even with God — “a sympathy with the divine pathos”, per Heschel.
* * *
But empowering as it may be, tempting as it is, it is a temptation best resisted. After all, we see in Parashat Noach exactly where it leads: wholesale, world-ending destruction. After the deluge, “all that stood upon the earth was obliterated” (Genesis 7:23).
According to Rabbi Yochanan, it is this kind of black-and-white thinking that brought about the destruction of Jerusalem. The Talmud (Gittin 56a) relates the Jews could have appeased the Roman Emperor and prevented the destruction by sacrificing a blemished calf sent by the Emperor. Although such a thing was forbidden, the Sages would have done it for the sake of peace, were it not for the objections of a certain Rabbi Zechariah ben Avkolas, who was worried that this would set a precedent and people would think such sacrifices were permissible.
His voice no doubt dripping with irony, Rabbi Yochanan asserts: “The ‘humility’ of Rabbi Zechariah ben Avkolas laid waste to our Temple, burned our Sanctuary, and exiled us from our land.”
Living with Autism, an anxiety disorder, and likely undiagnosed OCD, tiny blemishes constantly spiral into catastrophes. It is unacceptable to sacrifice a blemished animal. It is unacceptable to reject the Emperor’s sacrifice. Taken together, it is an impossible situation. I am trapped, frozen, paralyzed.
For example, a month ago, I cleaned all my cupboards, specifically to prevent cockroaches. I put out traps. I cleaned my dishwasher. Two days later, in my kitchen — a cockroach.
I was literally shaking, hyperventilating. Did I not do everything I could to prevent cockroaches?
Did the winemaker not do everything they could to ensure a good crop?
Did God not create the world so carefully, checking at each stage to confirm that it was good?
Yes — yes, in each case, one did everything one could!
And yet, in each case, there was a cockroach in the kitchen, stinkberries in the vineyard, corrupt flesh ruining everything. Insufferable, tolerable, unbearable.
* * *
Unless, of course, it isn’t. We can choose to suffer the cockroach in the kitchen. To tolerate the stinkberries in the vineyard. To “bear the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” (to quote the Bard) because this beautiful, broken world is still worth living in.
The Midrash (Bereshit Rabbah on Genesis 18:25) imagines that when Abraham confronts God over the intended destruction of Sodom, Abraham explains that God has a choice to make. “You can have strict justice… or you can have a world.” We can’t have both.
Right before the start of Parashat Noach, God chooses justice over the world. God regrets creating humanity and all living creatures, and decides to destroy them (Genesis 6:6-7).
After the Flood, God’s mind is changed. God chooses the world over pure justice.
Like the rabbis who learn too late to “forget your perfect offering”, God realizes that a broken world is better than no world at all. In Leonard Cohen’s words: “There is a crack in everything — that’s how the light gets in.”
And when light itself is cracked and broken? That’s called a rainbow. The ultimate declaration that even when we do our very best and it still goes wrong, that doesn’t make it ruined.
Imperfect, yes. But still good.
Raphael Morris (he/they) is an AuDHD rabbinical student at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College. He feels privileged to be part of an intellectual tradition where his preferred modes of cognition, learning, and communication are not just tolerated but actively valued. In his spare time, he enjoys wiki walking, Talmud, long rambling conversations and anything else tangential.
