If G-d is so great and so capable why did he not make a perfect world?
How about yourself, do you consider yourself to be an almost perfect person? Even if yes, were you always that way inclined, or perhaps you had to work through certain character traits and personality issues before you feel you achieved a more wholesome sense of having a healthy spiritual and moral balance?
In this week’s Torah portion, there a famous commandment which has been a core part of the fabric of the Jewish people for millenniums. We are instructed that when we are blessed with a baby boy, the baby shall have a circumcision on the eighth day and thus enter the covenant of Abraham.
There is a theoretical question asked about this commandment, which is, if G-d holds this idea so dear, why create a world where we have to do it at birth? Why not simply have created a world where people are born naturally circumcised?
Yes it is a theoretical question, but Chassidic thought suggests that in fact G-d is sharing a very powerful idea with us through this commandment. Yes, G-d could have created us in a manner that when born we wouldn’t need to do an act like this, yet G-d created this dynamic on purpose so that we can have a hand in bringing our lives to its spiritual completion. In a broader sense, G-d created a brilliant and amazing world yet at the same time it is an imperfect world. The goal of this dynamic is so that we can then come along and make it the perfect world that it needs to be. G-d’s passion and pleasure in this, is for us to be his partners and bring the deficiencies and faults of the world to a corrected and better state.
We all know ourselves and many of us have certain areas of our lives, characters and perhaps our relationships which are not yet in that ultimate perfect state. Yet from G-d’s perspective there is a beauty in the imperfection, as now we can be the ones to bring those dimensions of our lives and the world around us to a more perfect state.
Of course this is easier said than done and changing and improving your character is not an easy thing. However another element of Judaism, is that the challenge and obstacles that we face in life are commiserate with the G-d given potential that we have been endowed with to overcome them.
Passover is the holiday where not only we celebrate leaving Egypt physically thousands of years ago, it is also a time where we focus on breaking out of our self-imposed box, and grow into a better and improved person. As we do so, let us remember that imperfection in of itself is not a terrible thing, if anything it is an opportunity that offers us a tremendous potential, rather imperfection is there for us to work through, overcome and thus be a partner with G-d in creation.
Good Shabbos
Yisroel