Can a Good Goal Turn a Bad Path into a Good One?
Can a Good Goal Turn a Bad Path into a Good One?
Can a Good Goal Turn a Bad Path into a Good One?
A father wants his son to succeed, so he humiliates him over his grades. A manager wants the company to grow, so he tramples employees along the way. A person wants peace at home, so he hides things from his wife that he believes would “only cause a fight.” A public figure wants to raise money for a wonderful cause, so he permits himself to apply pressure that, if someone used it on him, he would call manipulation. An educator wants a student to pray, so he causes the student to feel ashamed in front of everyone. In every one of these cases the goal may be very good, and precisely for that reason the danger is great: when we are convinced that our destination is sacred, it becomes much easier to forgive ourselves for the road we take to reach it.
The festival of Sukkot places a very sharp law before this way of thinking. The Mishnah opens the third chapter of Tractate Sukkah with the words: “A stolen or dried-out lulav is invalid” (Mishnah, Sukkah 3:1). On the first day there is an explicit basis for this in the verse: “You shall take for yourselves on the first day” (Leviticus 23:40), and the sages expound, “for yourselves, from your own property” (Babylonian Talmud, Sukkah 30a). But the Gemara continues and asks why a stolen lulav is invalid even in a context where the requirement of “for yourselves” is not the reason, and it answers in the name of Rabbi Yochanan, citing Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai: “because it is a mitzvah that comes through a transgression” (Babylonian Talmud, Sukkah 30a).
That is a startling sentence.
The person is holding a lulav.
He is about to perform a mitzvah.
He may even be praying with great concentration.
But the Torah does not examine only the hand that is waving the lulav now. It also asks how that lulav came into the hand.
Rashi explains the invalidity of a stolen lulav on the Mishnah with characteristic brevity: “Stolen, it is invalid, for it is written ‘you shall take for yourselves,’ meaning from your own” (Rashi, Sukkah 29b). On the first day it is not enough that the object happens to be in your hand. It has to be yours.
Yet in the following discussion it becomes clear that there is a deeper layer than technical ownership. The Gemara cites the verse, “For I, the Lord, love justice; I hate robbery with a burnt offering” (Isaiah 61:8), and compares it to a king to whom all customs duties belong, yet who nevertheless pays the duty so that the people of his country will learn from him not to steal (Babylonian Talmud, Sukkah 30a). The Holy One, blessed be He, is in effect saying: I do not want you to bring Me something that was taken unlawfully, even when you are bringing it to Me.
It is almost a paradox.
The person steals in order to perform a mitzvah.
Apparently, he takes from another human being and gives to God.
And God says: I do not want a gift that was built on harming another person.
Tosafot deepen the question further. They ask why the derivation “for yourselves, from your own” is needed to disqualify stolen property if there is already a disqualification of a mitzvah that comes through a transgression. Their discussion yields a fundamental distinction: in theft, the transgression is not merely something that happened in the past near the object. The transgression itself is what placed the object at the person’s disposal for the mitzvah (Tosafot, Sukkah 30a, s.v. mishum dehavei lei mitzvah haba'ah ba'aveirah).
This is an enormous distinction.
There is a difference between someone who did something wrong in the past and is now doing something good, and a situation in which the good act itself is made possible by the wrongdoing.
The Torah does not say that a person who sinned can no longer perform a mitzvah. Quite the opposite, the gates of repentance remain open. But it teaches that one cannot take the transgression itself, turn it into the tool through which the mitzvah is performed, and then expect the sacred goal to erase the wrongful path.
The Ritva expands the discussion with respect to a stolen sukkah. He asks why the Torah needs a special derivation from the verse “You shall make for yourself the Festival of Sukkot” to exclude a stolen sukkah if the principle of a mitzvah that comes through a transgression already exists. His analysis shows how carefully the early authorities examined the scope of the principle: whether it applies only to objects brought in an act of appeasement before God, whether its status is biblical or rabbinic, and in which circumstances an independent derivation is necessary to invalidate the stolen object (Chiddushei HaRitva, Sukkah 9a). Precisely this exact halachic analysis emphasizes that the question is not a general moral slogan. The Torah and the sages investigated when and how the connection between the transgression and the mitzvah damages the mitzvah itself.
Maimonides presents the principle in the Laws of Blessings in very sharp terms. When a person eats something forbidden, this is not an act of eating over which one recites the ordinary blessing, and he rules in situations involving prohibited food that one does not bless over something through which one is committing a transgression (Mishneh Torah, Laws of Blessings 1:19). The idea that emerges is clear: an act cannot be turned into an address to God through a blessing when the act itself contradicts His will.
The same idea appears with particular force in the Gemara in Bava Kamma. A person stole a measure of wheat, ground it, baked it, and separated challah from it. Apparently, he is now performing a mitzvah. Yet the sages say of a blessing in such a situation: “This is not blessing, but blasphemy” (Babylonian Talmud, Bava Kamma 94a). Tosafot in Sukkah cite this passage as part of the discussion of a mitzvah that comes through a transgression (Tosafot, Sukkah 30a).
We should stop at that phrase.
It does not merely say that the mitzvah is less beautiful.
“This is not blessing, but blasphemy.”
How can a blessing become blasphemy?
Because there is a moment when a person uses the name of Heaven to grant legitimacy to an act that Heaven itself does not want.
And this reaches far beyond the lulav into ordinary life.
Sometimes we use the most beautiful words to justify behavior that we would never be willing to accept from someone else.
“I am doing it for the child’s own good.”
“I only want the family to remain united.”
“I do everything for the community.”
“I have to save the business.”
“I am fighting for the truth.”
Every one of these statements can be true.
But each can also become a screen that hides the road from us.
Only after this Torah foundation is in place can we appreciate how familiar the phenomenon is in psychology as well.
Albert Bandura studied the mechanism known as moral disengagement. One of the central mechanisms he described is moral justification: a person presents problematic behavior to themselves as a means of achieving a noble goal, and thereby becomes capable of doing things that would ordinarily conflict with their own values.
The interesting point is that people do not always change their values in order to do something wrong.
Sometimes they do exactly the opposite.
They use their values to justify it.
A person does not say to himself, “I do not care about my son, so I will shout at him.”
He says, “Precisely because I love him, I have to shake him up.”
A manager does not say, “I do not care about my employees.”
The manager says, “I am responsible for the livelihood of fifty families, so right now there is no choice but to push everyone to the limit.”
A person does not say, “I want to control my wife.”
He says, “I simply know what is best for our family.”
And the more moral the story we tell ourselves sounds, the harder it becomes to see the damage we are causing.
There is a particularly deep trap here in education.
A father sees an adolescent son moving away from the path on which he was raised. The father is afraid. The fear is real. The love is real. The desire that the child live a life of Torah may also be entirely genuine.
But now the important question begins.
What tools will he use?
If he humiliates the boy, threatens him, compares him with siblings, tells him that he is embarrassing the family, and makes sure that every Shabbat meal includes another lecture, the father’s goal may be sacred, but we have to ask what this path does to the child’s soul and to the child’s relationship with Torah itself.
Sometimes a person wants so badly for his son to love Torah that, along the way, he turns Torah into the very thing from which the son wants to run.
Then a double tragedy occurs.
The path did not only harm the child.
It also damaged the goal for which the path was chosen.
The same thing happens in marriage. A person badly wants to “solve the problem.” He insists on discussing it now. The spouse says they are exhausted and asks to talk tomorrow. But the person insists: no, we are not going to sleep until we solve this.
Apparently, what goal could be more beautiful than peace in the home?
But if on the way to peace I deny the person facing me the right to stop, breathe, and choose when they are able to speak, perhaps I am no longer building closeness. I am imposing it.
Forced closeness is not closeness.
This can happen in the service of God as well. A person accepts a particular stringency, but the entire household has to pay for it. He wants a perfect Shabbat meal, so for two hours before Shabbat everyone is afraid to speak to him. He wants the children to sit beautifully at the table, so every meal becomes a discipline test. He wants a long and uplifting prayer, but does not see the person waiting for him.
The point is not that the religious enhancement is unimportant.
The question is what happens when we use a mitzvah to give ourselves permission to hurt.
Perhaps this is where “a mitzvah that comes through a transgression” becomes a mirror.
It is not a halachic ruling for every human situation, but a question we should learn to ask ourselves: has the good thing I am trying to achieve begun to give me permission to do things that in another situation I would know are wrong?
There is an excellent warning sign.
Pay attention to the sentence: “I have no choice.”
When we say it, it is worth stopping.
Sometimes there truly is no choice. Life includes difficult situations in which every option carries a price.
But often “I have no choice” means: I do have choices, but the alternative would require more patience, more humility, more time, or a surrender of control.
The father can speak without humiliating, but it is harder.
The manager can set demands without degrading people, but it requires skill.
A spouse can tell the truth without using truth as a weapon, but that requires self-regulation.
A person can raise donations without frightening people, but perhaps less money will be raised.
And here comes the test.
Do I still want the goal if I am forbidden to use the easy and wrongful path to reach it?
That is a very difficult question.
Because sometimes we discover that the goal was not the only thing that mattered to us.
The power the method gave us also mattered.
A parent says that he only wants to educate, but perhaps within the anger there is also a need for the child to obey him.
A manager says that he only wants results, but perhaps he also enjoys the fact that no one dares oppose him.
A person says that he is fighting only for the truth, but perhaps he also wants to win.
The moment we identify that, something changes.
There is another simple test we can take into life. Before an action that we justify by appealing to a great goal, we can ask: if a person I oppose used exactly the same method in the service of a goal they believe in, would I still say that the method is legitimate?
If the answer is no, perhaps our principle is not really a principle.
It is a permission we granted ourselves.
And that brings us back to the lulav.
We can imagine someone standing in the synagogue with a beautiful lulav. The etrog is exquisite. The myrtle branches are perfectly formed. The willows are fresh. Everything looks flawless.
But one question comes before the beauty.
Whose is it?
Where did it come from?
Because in the world of Torah, not only the result must be sacred.
The path to it must be sacred as well.
Perhaps that is why Sukkot does not teach us only to choose good goals. It demands something harder: not to let the sanctity of the goal put our conscience to sleep along the way.
There are parents who will one day discover that they succeeded in making a child obey, but lost the possibility that the child would confide in them.
There are managers who will hit the quarterly target and discover that their best people have left.
There are spouses who will win an argument and lose another piece of closeness.
And there are people who will succeed in proving that they are right, but the person facing them will no longer want to hear the truth from them.
So before we ask only, “Is the thing I want to achieve good?” it is worth adding a much harder question: “What kind of person am I becoming on the way to achieving it, and what is happening to the people who travel that road with me?”
Because some victories cost us the very thing for which we went to war.
And the festival of Sukkot places a lulav in our hand and reminds us: even when the hand is raised toward heaven, we must examine what it is holding, and above all, how that thing came into the hand.