Rabbi Doug Heifetz’s Oseh Shalom Blog

We’ve read and heard a lot about the bailouts intended to address our economic crisis.  In case you’ve been living under a rock (the kind that doesn’t have wifi access or newspapers), read this story here for just part of the scoop.  The need for financial bolstering and repair often seems widespread beyond comprehension, and I’m grateful that President Elect Obama is putting together a strong team to help steer us through these very turbulent waters.  I’m hopeful that everyone involved will learn from the mistakes (and from their own mistakes) of the past as this New York Times editorial urges.

The other day, however, I experienced another kind of bailout–a much more visceral, physical kind.  This was a bailout involving weightlifting.  I stopped by Crossfit BWI, a conditioning and strength training gym in Glen Burnie that holds small group workouts with excellent instruction.  During this workout we were practicing the Olympic lift known as the snatch.  You use your hip strength to fling the barbell (or other weight) overhead, and catch it in a squat position.  I quickly discovered that it’s easy to loose balance during this explosive movement, and then you have to drop the weight and let it crash to the ground.  This is called “bailing out”.

I won’t say how much weight I was able to successfully snatch, because it wasn’t very much.  But I got a couple of rounds of applause from the group in response to my personal bailouts.

Fortunately, bailing out is encouraged.  When you try to push your limits—and that’s a good thing—sometimes you have to bail.  For this reason, most athletes who practice the Olympic lifts use specialized equipment that allows them to drop the weight safely.  The weight plates at either end of the barbell are usually solid rubber “bumper plates” instead of the iron weight plates which are found in most commercial gyms.  I love that bumper plates and Olympic lifting in general encourage positive risk-taking and failure as needed, and allow it to happen safely.

Along these lines, we have plenty of encouragement within Jewish tradition to try new things and fail.  For example, a midrash (commentary) points out that, in the creation story in Genesis 1, God created the world with ten utterances when one presumably might’ve been sufficient.  The midrash explains that, by means of God’s ‘extra’ utterances in the story, the Torah is sending us the strongest possible example that any great endeavor requires multiple attempts.  Along the same lines, Jewish prayer traditions also encourage us to try again and fail as necessary.  The prayers for starting off each morning include the words “The soul planted in me is pure.”  That is, regardless of what mistakes we’ve made, we’re encouraged to act as if we have a pure, blank slate for starting a new day.

So, how can we give ourselves a safe environment for failing, when the stakes in life may sometimes feel very high?  How can we put ‘bumper plates’ on our lives, when sometimes failure may negatively impact us or those around us?  Well, it helps if you can draft your own personal committee of those who will review your ideas and give their feedback.  You should be blessed with people in your life who can say to you with good humor and trust, “That’s a terrible idea!” or “Are you really sure about that?”  Multiple perspectives from trusted friends and teammates offer the greatest environment in which to try ideas which might fail—without facing serious consequences.

How do you incorporate the permission to fail into your life?  And how can we get those running the economy to incorporate the maximum range of thoughtful perspectives?