We love to be right. All justice, all truth, all honesty – only with us. Only the other person has shortcomings. He needs to take stock. He needs to mend his ways. Us?! What the hell! We are the just, the beautiful, the perfect.
Then we gather in the dead of night to recite the Selichot, and the entire envelope of justice we have covered ourselves with dissolves at once.
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With bowed heads and trembling hearts we declare: "To you, O Lord, belongs righteousness, and to us belongs shame." It turns out that we are not so righteous, but rather full of shame and reproach. And perhaps we are not so beautiful and perfect either - "Neither with grace nor with deeds have we come before you, as weak and feeble have we knocked at your doors.".
Justice in the middle
The sense of justice that fills us, as individuals and as a public, blocks us from listening to criticism, from seeing flaws, from understanding that others also have points of light and beauty.
We are so right that before we have time to listen and internalize any comment, we have already rushed to return fire and attack. We remain right, but we have learned nothing.
The Lubavitcher Rebbe once said to a new community rabbi: You will be presented with Torah cases involving private individuals and public entities. Each side will be convinced that they are entirely right, but you should know that it is very rare that one side is entirely right. Usually, truth and justice lie in the middle, and the rabbi's job is to determine who is half right, who is a third right, and who is a quarter right.
Those who truly want to rise and advance do not wrap themselves in the cloak of righteousness, but rather strive to accept rebuke and criticism. Some of the great men of Israel appointed themselves a 'reprover' – a person whose job it was to deliver words of rebuke and moral instruction to that great man of Israel. They did not see this as a lack of respect; quite the opposite.
It is told about the 'Sefat Emet' from Gur that as a child he had a habit of studying in the morning with his grandfather, the author of 'Chiddushei HaRim'. Once he studied with a friend all night, and went to bed at dawn.
As a result, he was a few minutes late for his lesson with his grandfather. The grandfather reprimanded him for sleeping too much and being lazy to get up on time, and he stood with his head bowed and listened to the teacher's words. Then the friend asked why he didn't tell the grandfather that he had studied all night. The boy responded: "I didn't want to miss Grandpa's precious words of rebuke.".
The toothpick and the beam
Chazal say that one of the grave evils of the period of 'Ekveta Damshicha' is that 'there is no rebuke' - there is no ability to utter words of rebuke. Because when one remarks to his friend: "Put a thorn out of your teeth," the other immediately retaliates with an attack: "Put a beam out of your eyes.".
This way everyone remains right but very unwise.
A Hasidic proverb says that the advice for this situation is "Let us search our ways and investigate, and bring it to the Lord.' As long as one accuses the other, one will be left with a toothpick between his teeth and the other with a beam between his eyes. But if we take the approach of "let us search our ways" – let us search for the path together, acknowledge the fact that we are not perfect and that not all justice is in our hands – then "we will lay the beam'; that beam will rest and fall from standing as a wedge between us.
The days of forgiveness pierce our armor of justice, and this is the key to correction, connection, and a good and sweet year.
