There’s a Hasidic story I return to often—because I need to. A student once asked the Rebbe, “Rebbe, why is it that every time I try to become a better person, I fail? I make promises before Rosh Hashanah, I take on something for Elul, I swear I’ll stop gossiping, or start being more present with my children—and then I find myself right back where I started.”
The Rebbe smiled and said, “That’s exactly where you’re supposed to be. The work is not about being perfect. The work is about returning—again and again—to the person you were meant to be.”
Judaism never assumed we would be perfect. But it did assume we would try.
There’s a sacred dissonance that lives inside us—the space between who we are and who we hope to become. It is, for most of us, a daily tension. It can feel exhausting. Defeating. But our tradition teaches that it’s in that very space—in that aching, unresolved striving—that God lives.
This isn’t a new problem. In Pirkei Avot, we are told: “Do not be wicked in your own eyes.” It’s a curious teaching. It doesn’t say: Don’t do wicked things. It says: Don’t think of yourself as wicked. In other words, don’t allow your imperfections to harden into identity. You are allowed to fail. You are not allowed to forget that you are capable of rising again.
Still, I wrestle with that space. I feel it when I’m impatient with my kids. I feel it when I give too much of myself to work and forget the rabbi I once imagined I’d be. I feel it when I show up to pray but feel nothing—or worse, when I don’t even try.
And sometimes, if I’m honest, I wonder: What if this is it? What if I never become the husband or father or Jew I aspire to be? What if the best version of me is always just out of reach?
There’s a word that Christians use to answer that fear. It’s not native to Jewish vocabulary, but maybe it should be: grace.
Grace says: You don’t have to earn your worth. You are loved, even as you stumble. You are accepted, even as you grow. Grace isn’t permission to give up—it’s permission to keep going.
In Jewish terms, maybe we could say it like this: You are b’tzelem Elohim—made in the image of God—even when you are a mess. Even when you fall short. Even when your internal life doesn’t match the person you pretend to be in the world.
Judaism doesn’t talk about grace as much as it talks about mercy—rachamim, which comes from the word rechem, womb. Divine mercy is maternal, nurturing, sustaining. It makes space for our flaws, not because God is lenient, but because God is loving. Psalm 103 says: “As a parent has compassion on their children, so does the Holy One have compassion on us—for God knows our frame; God remembers we are dust.”
That verse always gets me. God remembers we are dust. Not excuses. Just the truth of what it means to be human.
We are built to fail. Not fatally, not finally—but repeatedly. The entire system of mitzvot, of teshuvah, of the Jewish calendar, is a cycle. We fall, we return. We forget, we remember. We miss the mark, we re-aim. There’s no such thing as being finished.
Rav Kook wrote that “the soul is always in motion, always ascending.” Even if we don’t feel it, even if we think we’re standing still or falling back, there’s an inner light trying to rise within us.
But if you’ve ever really tried to change—really tried—you know how brutal that process can be. We make promises to ourselves in quiet moments. We promise to be better parents, more present partners, more patient, more kind. And then the world happens. Our kid has a meltdown in the car. The email arrives that sets us off. The anxiety flares. We go numb. We go cold. We lash out.
And we think: What is wrong with me?
The answer is: Nothing is wrong with you. You are a person. You are a soul in process.
I sat with a man not long ago going through a painful divorce. He told me, “This isn’t who I thought I’d be at 47. I failed at marriage. I failed my kids.” I paused. Then said, gently: “The fact that you still feel that gap—between who you are and who you hoped to be—tells me that the dream is still alive inside you. It’s hurting, but it’s not gone.”
There’s a passage in the Talmud (Berakhot 7a) where Moses asks to see God’s face. God says, “You can see my back, but not my face.” Some interpret this to mean that we can only see God in hindsight, not in the moment. But others say something different. That even when we cannot look at God directly, we can follow. We can walk behind God. We can try, every day, to move in God’s direction.
We do not always succeed. But we can follow. That is enough.
The work is not to eliminate the dissonance. The work is to live with it—faithfully, truthfully, lovingly. To walk forward even when we feel unworthy. To forgive ourselves, not because we don’t need to change, but because we do.
So how do we close the gap?
We don’t close it all at once. We close it with honesty. With humility. With compassion. We close it by waking up again tomorrow and trying—just a little—to be gentler, stronger, more grounded, more grateful.
We close it by remembering that God is not waiting for us on the other side of perfection.
God is right here. In the space between.
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