Tony Klinger

Today is unusual in that I have decided to give over my blog to the words of a rabbi in the States who is both a friend and an unusually wise, gifted man. I have had the pleasure of hearing him speak in public as well as meeting him privately. In Time magazine’s poll he was voted the top pulpit rabbi in America. He says very clever things, lent truth by the simplicity of his message.

The reason for me including his words instead of my own is that I shall not be posting a blog anywhere for a couple of days because we are coming up to the Day of Atonement, or Yom Kippur as it is known in Hebrew. We are supposed to atone for the sins of everyone during this period of fasting, reflection and prayer. Given the seriousness of the current financial situation we can either pray or crack a joke.

I hope that when we resume blogging the worst of the immediate crisis will have started to blow itself out, and that Alistair Darling can find the bottle of Grecian 2000 his wife lost.

Failing Better By Rabbi David Wolpe
In Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl quotes the great German poet, Goethe: “If we take people as they are, we make them worse. If we treat them as if they were what they ought to be, we help them to become what they are capable of becoming.”
Through the holiday season we evaluate where we are and where we wish to be. Spiritual ascent is our goal, but too often we expect little of ourselves and of others. The same people who would never be shoddy at work, or careless on a test, are unmindful of the state of their souls.

Goethe’s words are prescient: what we expect of ourselves is often precisely what we get. Will we fall short? Certainly, failure is the one unvarying human constant. But there are different ways to fail; we can fail most profoundly by not striving.

Samuel Beckett expressed it this way: “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” We aim high and come up short. But better a life of spiritual aspiration than one of indifference.

With God’s help we will have more moral, spiritual and communal victories this year than failures. I fail every day, wrote Emerson, yet to victory I am born.