How Many Good Moments Have We Lost While Waiting for Perfection?
How Many Good Moments Have We Lost While Waiting for Perfection?
How Many Good Moments Have We Lost While Waiting for Perfection?
Some families have not taken a vacation for years because it never works out exactly right. The hotel is too expensive, the date is not ideal, one child has an exam, the weather is uncertain, and the destination they wanted is full. Some people do not invite friends home because the living room is not yet arranged as they would like. Others postpone beginning to study until they have a fixed, quiet time, postpone exercise until they can do it “properly,” and even postpone an important conversation until the right moment arrives. We say we are waiting for better conditions, but sometimes what we are really waiting for is a world that does not exist.
Then the sukkah arrives.
The Torah does not command us to build a second, perfect house for seven days. It says: “You shall dwell in sukkot for seven days” (Leviticus 23:42). The sages established a minimum size for a sukkah that does not even resemble an ordinary room. According to Beit Hillel, whose view is accepted as halachah, there must be enough room for one's head, most of one's body, and one's table (Babylonian Talmud, Sukkah 3a). The Shulchan Aruch rules that the minimum size of a sukkah is seven handbreadths by seven handbreadths (Shulchan Aruch, Orach Chaim 634:1).
Seven handbreadths by seven handbreadths.
Not a living room. Not a magnificent house. Not an ideal space. Yet if it meets the halachic requirements, a person can enter it and perform a complete mitzvah.
Even the number of walls contains something surprising. The Gemara derives that a sukkah does not need four complete walls like an ordinary house. The halachic structure established by the sages is sufficient: “two walls according to their law, and a third even of one handbreadth” (Babylonian Talmud, Sukkah 6b). Maimonides rules accordingly concerning the walls required for a sukkah (Mishneh Torah, Laws of Shofar, Sukkah and Lulav 4:2).
These measurements were not, of course, stated in order to teach us the psychology of perfectionism. They are precise halachic parameters. Yet precisely that precision provokes thought: the Torah knows how to define when something is sufficient to be complete in its purpose, even when it is very far from perfect in appearance.
We, by contrast, have great difficulty with the word “enough.”
If I do not have an hour to study, I do not study for twenty minutes. If I cannot exercise four times a week, I do not begin walking twice a week. If the house is not tidy, I do not invite guests. If I cannot give a large donation, I give nothing small. If I am not sure I can keep a resolution for an entire year, I do not even begin it.
Psychology has studied perfectionism in many forms. It is important to distinguish striving for excellence from harmful perfectionism. Wanting to do something well can motivate effort, improvement, and achievement. The problem begins when a person ties the value of the action, and sometimes personal worth, to meeting an inflexible standard, and when any result short of perfect is experienced almost as failure.
Paul Hewitt and Gordon Flett distinguished among different dimensions of perfectionism in their research, and other researchers have especially examined the cost of what are called perfectionistic concerns, excessive concern over mistakes, discrepancies, and meeting expectations. One practical expression is paradoxical: the desire to perform something perfectly can actually increase procrastination and avoidance.
The logic is simple. If every workout must be excellent, it is hard to begin exercising on a tired day. If every article must be a masterpiece, the blank page becomes threatening. If every family meal must look like a photograph, it is much easier to cancel when reality is messy. When only one hundred percent counts as success, ninety percent, seventy percent, and even fifty percent are mistakenly turned into zero.
King Solomon says: “For a righteous person falls seven times and rises again” (Proverbs 24:16). The righteous person is not defined as someone who never falls. The person falls and gets up. If perfection were a condition for progress, the first fall would end the road. The verse offers another model of life: it is possible to be deeply serious and still build progress out of corrections, failures, and renewed beginnings.
The sages say: “It is not your duty to finish the work, but neither are you free to desist from it” (Pirkei Avot 2:16). This sentence cuts directly through the trap of all-or-nothing thinking. The fact that you cannot complete the work does not exempt you from doing the part you can do. We tend to think that if we cannot reach the end, beginning has no meaning. Rabbi Tarfon teaches the opposite conclusion.
The Torah itself also says: “It is not in heaven” (Deuteronomy 30:12). In context, the verse describes the accessibility of Torah and mitzvah: “For the matter is very close to you, in your mouth and in your heart, to do it” (Deuteronomy 30:14). Service of God was not designed only for an ideal person living under ideal conditions. It was given to human beings in the real world, with limited time, weaknesses, interruptions, and days that do not look as planned.
This is especially visible in parenting. Young parents can enter an impossible race: the house must be orderly, the children must eat correctly, succeed in school, receive quality time, avoid too much screen exposure, develop self-confidence, learn boundaries, and the parents themselves must always remain calm. Then one evening arrives when everyone is tired, one child screams, another refuses to bathe, and the parent loses patience. The parent does not say, “That was a difficult evening.” The parent says, “I am a terrible parent.”
That is exactly the leap perfectionism knows how to make: from a local mistake to a total identity.
A child does not need a parent who never makes a mistake. A child also needs a parent who knows how to repair. Sometimes the sentence, “I shouted before, and I should not have spoken to you that way,” teaches a child something that no performance of perfect parenting can teach: one can make a mistake without fleeing responsibility, and one can repair without collapsing in shame.
The same is true in marriage. Some couples imagine that a good marriage is one without arguments. The moment disagreement appears, they become frightened: perhaps something between us is wrong. But a real human relationship includes differences, misunderstandings, and less successful days. The question is not whether we will never argue. It is whether we know how to return, listen, apologize, and rebuild.
We fall into the same trap in spiritual life. A person resolves to study forty minutes every day. For one week it works, then a busy day arrives and the person misses the study session. The next day the person does not return because “the streak is broken.” But what exactly broke? One day. Perfectionism turns one unsuccessful day into an entire month in which the person stops trying.
The Gemara says: “Whether one does much or one does little, provided that one directs the heart toward Heaven” (Babylonian Talmud, Berakhot 5b). This does not mean that quantity never matters. It means that the value of a person's service is not measured only by how much was accomplished compared with others. There is genuine value in what is done within one's present capacity.
We can take from this a practical rule. When you are about to abandon something good because you cannot do it in the ideal form, ask: what is the smallest version of this thing that is still worth doing?
No hour for study? Perhaps twenty minutes. No possibility of a festive family dinner? Perhaps half an hour of coffee with the child. No money to give as much as you would like? Perhaps there is a small amount you can give. Unable to repair the entire relationship right now? Perhaps you can make one phone call. Unable to organize the whole house? Perhaps one room.
This is not surrendering aspirations. On the contrary, sometimes the only way to go far is to agree to begin in a way that is not impressive.
Here the sukkah gives us an image that cannot be missed. A person leaves a home of one hundred and twenty square meters and enters a small place with walls and schach, and there recites the blessing with God's name and kingship: “Who has sanctified us with His commandments and commanded us to dwell in the sukkah.” The mitzvah does not wait for the structure to become a palace before entering it.
Perhaps there are good things in our lives that have been standing outside the door for years because we tell them: come back when conditions are perfect.
They do not come back.
Perfectionism convinces us that if we cannot do everything, it is better to do nothing. The sukkah reminds us that there is something far more important than perfect: good enough to begin.
Sometimes the question we need to ask is not, “How will I do this perfectly?” but, “What can I do today, even if it is still small, partial, and not exactly as I imagined?”
Some lives are not ruined by mistakes. They simply never begin because their owners waited too long for the moment when there would be no mistakes.