Rabbi's Reveries

In the musical Into the Woods, the Baker and his Wife argue about the morality of trading “magic” beans for Jack’s all-white, but entirely dried-up cow, which they need to break the Witch’s curse. The Baker’s Wife thinks that the beans are a fair trade—magic beans are certainly worth more than anyone else would pay for a cow that can’t give milk. The Baker, on the other hand, isn’t sure that the beans are magic and worries that they have scammed poor Jack. He asks his Wife, “Are we to dispel this curse through deceit?” and she responds, “There are rights and wrongs and in-betweens…If the end is right, it justifies the beans.”

Our machzor (High Holy Day prayerbook) challenges this perspective. It includes in the Al Cheit confession of sin “all the evil means we employ to accomplish good ends.” We compromise our integrity and the integrity of our work when we bend our morals to accomplish our goals. And it can be so easy to rationalize some of the “in-between” means that don’t seem “evil.” We might tell a little lie here or a half-truth there to make ourselves look better. We might ignore the needs of the people helping us as we work to reach the end more quickly. We might make promises we know we won’t try very hard to keep. We might cause a little harm here to do a lot of good there. 
The problem with these small, rationalized, just-a-little-wrong acts is that they lead us to more. In Pirkei Avot we read, “Aveirah goreret aveirah—one transgression leads to another.” It’s not just that little sins can lead to big ones, the way a small lie can require us to weave a greater web of lies. It’s more that doing one wrong thing can make it easier to do another until we’re habituated to wrongdoing. Like a branch on a tree, if we keep bending our morals, we risk breaking them. On the other hand, when we uphold our morals, when we strive to follow the path of righteousness in everything that we do, “mitzvah goreret mitzvah—one mitzvah, one act of justice, leads to another.”

Of course there are sometimes gray areas: good ends that require us to choose less than ideal means because there are no good options. We do ourselves a disservice when we rationalize the best of the worst options as good. We would uphold our integrity better if we recognized the evil we must choose as such and made every possible attempt to avoid being in a similar position in the future. (This, by the way, will be an important part of the discussions in the iEngage class on Israel that I’ll be teaching.)

As we enter the new year, I encourage us all to reflect on the times when we let good ends justify immoral means and times when we rationalized “wrongs” into “in-betweens” or “rights.” How can we accomplish our goals without resorting to acts that detract from our integrity? Thankfully, the Yamim Nora-im (Days of Awe) give us the opportunity to learn from the past and prepare ourselves to respond more justly, more righteously in the future. 

May the coming year be filled with blessings of life, peace and justice.