Yaakov Hibbert Presents…Failure Week

A while ago the Wimbledon High School ran “failure week”. The Headmistress decided it was time to “look at failure and encourage her pupils in both the junior and senior school to take risks even if it did not lead to immediate success. “Failure Week is not about encouraging failure but bouncing back when things go wrong”.

The week-long discussion of failure comprised of assemblies looking at the disappointments behind some of the success stories of recent times. Take for example James Dyson, who made over 5,000 prototypes during his attempt to create the perfect vacuum cleaner; or Steve Jobs who had lots of false starts on the road to global success, including being sacked from his own company!

As well as the personal testimonies there was a guest speaker, mountaineer Nick Carter, who described how he attempted to climb Everest but turned back 30 meters from the summit in order to save his life and his frostbitten toes.

The idea of ‘failure week’ was partially inspired by a new booked entitled “Why Success Always Starts With Failure” which argues that fear of failure can lead to greater failures and insists it stymies brave new ideas that our world needs.

Hearing about the school’s activities, I was reminded of this very idea in this week’s Parshah! We are told that on the straps that went over the shoulders of the High Priest there were two stones called “remembrance stones”. On these stones was to be etched the names of the twelve tribes so that during the Temple Service the righteousness of the tribes would be evoked.

The question is asked; we know that the clothes of the High Priest were extremely sensitive – any item that had even the faintest memory of sin was to be omitted. When going into the Holy of Holies on Yom Kippur any clothes that had gold on them had to be taken off so as not to conjure up the slightest remembrance of the sin of the golden calf. How then could the High Priest walk around with the name’s of the twelve tribes on his shoulders – they had a rationale for what they did, but they still plotted and carried out an attempt to kill their brother Yosef? A sin which was the cause of the ‘ten martyrs’ shortly after the destruction of the second Temple.

A brilliant parable will help understand the answer. Suppose you had in front of you two diamonds; one beautifully cut but with a minor flaw seen only with a very powerful magnifying glass, the other exactly the same but flawless! One would assume that the flawless one would be far more valuable than the other.

However anyone in the diamond industry would tell you that the flawless one is worth a couple of pounds whereas the one with the flaw could be worth thousands! The flawless one is a fake, made of cubic zirconium, and is just costume jewellery. Any genuine diamond has flaws!

This is why the ‘memory stones’ which conjured up the twelve tribes would not impede the Cohen’s service. The flaws that make up the sins of great people need magnifying to be able to see them. Such flaws are to be expected in diamonds, as the wisest of all men King Solomon said “there is no man so wholly righteous on earth that he always does good and never sins ”

If you had the choice to never do anything wrong again or to go and do great things with your life, what would you choose? What could possibly be better than never sinning again? Aiming for greatness. Many people think that religion is based solely on the rule “avoid sin”. However if all we had to do was not to step out of line than we have missed the boat of Judaism. We must also positively be great and go on to achieve big things.

To use the phrase of Albert Einstein, “A person who never made a mistake never tried anything new.” Or as my good friend said, “People who don’t try aren’t even failures”.

However you want to put it, failings are an instrumental part of our growth. Therefore as Wimbledon High School discovered we need to find the way to embrace our failings and use them as opportunities for growth.

I heard of a lady who runs a very successful catering company. In the early days before she made it big, she catered for a wedding which all went wrong. The wine didn’t turn up and some food got over cooked. She ended up having to pay for it out of her own pocket! Several years later the family called her up to cater the wedding of another child. Slightly shocked at being asked, her track record wasn’t that good; and most people prefer good food and wine than no wine and bad food for free – she asked them what made them choose her a second time round? “We know that if you cater the wedding – absolutely everything will be perfect!” Her first time ‘failure’ was a guarantee to success on the second attempt.

Good Shabbos, Yaakov