Rabbi Bradley Levenberg
This past spring I found myself traveling to California for our annual gathering of Reform rabbis and listening to Leonard Cohen on the five-hour flight. I came across the song Anthem, one of the more recent songs by Cohen, which contains the following lyric:
Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.
These lyrics remind me of the famous quote from Pirke Avot: “You are not obliged to finish the task; neither are you free to neglect it.”
In a world with so much that needs fixing, it can feel overwhelming. But what we do, how we contribute, need not be perfect or complete. Each of us simply needs to do something, to contribute in some real and tangible way to causes that make our world more just. As we ready our souls for the coming year, may we also ready our eyes to see injustice all around us, may we ready our hands and our feet to fix the wrongs we witness, and may we realize that we need not perfect the world…all we need to do is work toward making it a little better.
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