Parshas Bo: Taking Responsibility for our Mistakes

We all make mistakes.  When our lives are routine and nothing new comes up, it’s much easier to color within the lines and avoid making them, although we still manage to stumble here and there.  In some ways, I actually think these mistakes that come up in daily life are the hardest ones to deal with.

You see, in travel we also make mistakes, but we make them much more frequently.  If you’re a serious traveler, you make mistakes pretty much all day long, every day.  You go the wrong direction, you get on the wrong bus, you buy some rotten fruit, you check into a bad guesthouse… the list goes on and on.  Everything in travel is an opportunity for mistakes.

I know some travelers who stress about every single one of these mistakes.  I’m sure I was once one of these, but that would have to have been a very long time ago.  Most of the time, the people who are bothered by all of these errors of judgment are people on vacation, or long-term travelers just setting out for the first time.  If you’ve been traveling for a while, you learn pretty quickly not to worry so much about all the mistakes.

You see, when you make mistakes so regularly, you simply don’t have the energy or mental resources to deal with them all.  And it is easier to be more forgiving of mistakes in others.  When Rabbi Ben chooses a guesthouse with no running water, I might not be happy and I might want to switch to another one, but I won’t get angry at him.  Chances are, shortly beforehand, I’d mistakenly led us onto the wrong bus or bought some food we couldn’t eat or paid too much for something.  In your normal life, you (and the people around you) probably make mistakes less frequently, so it’s easier to be upset about them.  When you travel, you’re kind of on “mistake overload.”

I think that mistakes ultimately come down to how you deal with them.  You can turn all of your (and others’) mistakes into a tragedy, where you end up in fights with friends and a lack of forgiveness… Or you can turn those mistakes into a veritable comedy of errors.  It’s all about how you approach them.

At my core, I am a perfectionist, so I have a hard time admitting mistakes or dealing with them.  I expect myself to be perfect and I generally expect others to be, too, so I’m not very good at dealing with mistakes.  Travel has been good for me.  I have had to learn better how to deal with them.

The first step to how to deal with mistakes is to admit that you’ve made one.  In last week’s parsha, Pharaoh did exactly that. “Hashem (G-d) is the tzaddik (righteous) and I and my nation are rashaim (evildoers)!” exclaimed Pharaoh after the plague of hail.  With mistakes you first have to accept responsibility.  Often that is enough to repair the wrong you have done, particularly when it involves another person.

Of course, we see that they plagues continue into this week’s parsha, so why didn’t G-d accept Pharaoh’s acceptance of responsibility? Why did He carry on throwing plagues at Pharaoh?  There are a number of answers our sages give us, but to me it seems most obvious that simply accepting responsibility for the mistake was just not enough.  Pharaoh couldn’t just say, “Ok, G-d, You are right and I am wrong! I made a mistake. I did an evil thing.”  Pharaoh accepted responsibility and saw clearly that he was wrong, but that wasn’t enough.  He still did not want to let the Jewish people go.  From this we see that it is not enough just to accept the responsibility when you make a mistake – the responsibility must be accompanied by a change.

But Pharaoh does not change.  Even when he really can take no more and sends the Jews out of Egypt, he quickly regrets his decision and chases after them.  Ultimately, he suffers the consequences of these continued actions.  He is no longer making a mistake: Now that he has accepted that he was wrong, he is continuing to do wrong deliberately.

Most of us try not to do that.  If we feel we have made a mistake, we apologize and with that apology and acceptance of responsibility for our wrongdoing, we change our actions.  That is, as Rabbi Ben likes to say, the power of accepting responsibility.  It is not the acceptance of our mistakes that makes the difference: it is the change that follows.  If we can accept responsibility for our mistakes, we can find a way to avoid making them in the future.  In this regard, Pharaoh had a fundamental disconnect.  Like a kleptomaniac, he knew what he was doing was wrong, but he just couldn’t stop grabbing at something he wanted so badly.

So we have a personal challenge for this week.  As we continue to make mistakes, let us concentrate on taking responsibility for them – and changing our actions as a result.  Let us work on being more forgiving of others who take responsibility and want to change, rather than continuing to punish them through our anger or actions.  Let us not be like King Pharaoh, who only went halfway.  When it comes to rectifying our errors, let’s go the whole mile.

Shabbat shalom!