It is human nature to believe that when things go well, it is because of ourselves, and when things go poorly it is because of others. The axiom, “Success has many fathers but failure is an orphan” actually goes back to the 1st century CE, when the Roman Tacitus wrote: “This is an unfair thing about war: victory is claimed by all, failure to one alone.”
However, so much of our success is the result of circumstance, timing, our families, our schools and teachers, the people we know and those who went before us, and a large dose of luck. Thomas Edison said, “Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.” His first commercial success was in 1870, when he made a stock ticker based on the telegraph. Forty years earlier, Samuel Morse had patented the telegraph, but adoption was hampered by the cost of land rights to run the cables. In 1851, railroads allowed the cables to be run alongside the tracks, so telegraph operators were located at the stations. In 1860, a 13-year-old Edison got a job selling newspapers at the local station. The station agent befriended him and taught him how to operate the telegraph, and he was an operator for 7 years before creating the stock ticker, which earned him $40,000 (about $750,000 US in today’s money) and allowed him to become a full-time inventor. If any one of those hadn’t occurred, we wouldn’t be discussing Edison right now. He should have said genius is one percent inspiration, five percent perspiration and 94 percent happy circumstance, although admittedly that’s not as catchy.
Of course, there’s nothing wrong with taking pride in our efforts, accomplishments, children, etc. The problem comes when we believe our success is solely due to our own actions, because we then must also believe other people’s failures are solely due to their actions. If we are successful because of our hard work, then less successful people must be lazy. If we are wealthy because we are careful with money, then poor people shouldn’t be trusted with money. When our children do well at school because we are good parents, then children who don’t do as well must have bad parents.
Rabbi Shira Milgrom writes, “We forget that in the web of the universe, we are all connected. We forget that our successes depend on the successes and sacrifices of countless others, we forget how dependent we are on a larger society, on the planet and its health. We forget our obligations to others—and, we forget that with all this material wealth, we will not be happy or even satisfied without gratitude.”1
Moses was warning us that when we take our success for granted, and assume it is because of our virtues, we cut ourselves off from G-d, our community and the rest of the world. Rabbi Paula Feldstein wrote: “The family into which we are born, the schools we attend, and the communities in which we are raised all play a major role in who we become and how we succeed… We should respond to our prosperity with recognition of the factors that lead to our success and with humility before God.”2
The term ‘humility’ has gotten a bad rap; after all, it has the same root as ‘humiliation,’ from the Latin humus (“soil”). Dictionaries define humility as a low self-regard and sense of unworthiness. When someone said Clement Attlee was a humble man, Winston Churchill said “he has plenty to be humble about.”
However, that is not the original definition. Rabbi Louis Jacobs, founder of the Masorti movement in the UK, wrote, “In the Jewish tradition, humility is among the greatest of the virtues, as its opposite, pride, is among the worst of the vices. Moses, the greatest of men, is described as the most humble: In Numbers 12:3, ‘Now the man Moses was very meek, above all the men that were on the face of the earth.’ In Genesis 18:27, the patriarch Abraham protests to God: ‘Behold now, I have taken upon me to speak unto the Lord, who am but dust and ashes.’ Greatness and humility, in the Jewish tradition, are not incompatible.”3
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks writes, “Humility — true humility — is one of the most expansive and life-enhancing of all virtues. It does not mean undervaluing yourself. It means valuing other people. It signals a certain openness to life's grandeur and the willingness to be surprised, uplifted, by goodness wherever one finds it."4
C.S Lewis wrote, “Humility is not thinking less of yourself, but thinking of yourself less.”
So being humble does not mean feeling bad about yourself, or debasing your own efforts and contributions; it only means acknowledging all of the contributors to your success. Isaac Newton wrote, “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.” Every week, as we recount the stories of our ancestors, we remind ourselves we stand on the shoulders of giants. Humility frees us from judgment and allows us to connect with one another, to lift up others and to recognise our place in the world.
The Talmud states, “The word of God can only be heard in a humble heart.”5
We all know Aesop’s fable, “The Ants & the Grasshopper.” The ants are busy all summer storing grain, while the grasshopper plays his fiddle. Come winter, the grasshopper is begging for food and the ants mock him and turn him away. However, worker ants generally live only a few months, so the grain they were eating in winter was collected and stored by a previous generation.
Every spring, Monarch butterflies migrate 3,000 miles from Mexico to Canada, but they only live 6-8 weeks and it takes 4-5 generations to cross that distance. The ones who left Mexico will never see their destination, but they start the journey anyway. I’m not sure the Pirkei Avot had butterflies in mind when it said, “It is not your responsibility to finish the work, but neither are you free to desist from it,” but it certainly applies.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been collecting photos for the Temple’s 59th birthday, which is next Sunday. Seeing people I’ve known for a couple of years engaged in Temple life twenty or thirty years ago has been delightful. These are not people who took the Temple for granted, nor believed they alone could support it. They recognised the Temple as an inheritance, and that their hard work was needed to continue it for the next generation. They did not do it for glory or recognition, but out of a sense of responsibility. These are humble people in the truest sense and I, for one, am very grateful that I can be here today because of them.
Of course, I don’t want this to go to their head. As writer E.D. Hulse said, “Humility is a strange thing. The minute you think you've got it, you've lost it.”
The last verse of the triennial is Devarim 10:11: And the LORD said to me, “Up, resume the march at the head of the people, that they may go in and possess the land that I swore to their fathers to give them.”
Shabbat shalom.
1 https://reformjudaism.org/learning/torah-study/eikev/all-you-need-love
2 https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/the-challenges-of-humility/
3 https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/humility-in-judaism/2 https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/the-challenges-of-humility/
4 https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/83807/jewish/On-Humility.htm
5 Taanit 7a
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