The Third Failure;: Failure to Realize the Good and Combat Injustice—Elul 11

For Kaplan, the third failure that repentance helps us surmount is “the failure to realize to the fullest degree the potentialities inherent in our natures and in the situations in which we find ourselves.” (The Meaning of God, 184)  We all have “latent powers for good” that we don’t call upon unless there is a crisis.  We’re all too familiar with this.  We quarrel, we bicker, we carp, we criticize—and then when we need to pull together or we need to be creative, we find we can actually do so and enjoy doing so!  Why didn’t we do it before? 
Kaplan stresses the social dimension of this as well.  We as individuals get fixated in old patterns, but so do social institutions.  And when they do, when they no longer respond to new situations in a life-giving way, they obstruct the ability of individuals to realize their creative potential for good; they actually obscure social evils and tempt individuals to accept certain inevitable conditions, like poverty or discrimination, instead of combating them.   He dares to call this “social sin.”  “Ethical religion” he concludes, “is incompatible with an attitude of submission to social institutions that work injustice.” (Ibid., 186) 
One of the sins we confess during the liturgy of the Days of Awe speaks to this:  “We are complacent.”  Kaplan puts it this way:  “To accept complacently ways of life that hinder us from realizing the best that is in us, or even to resign ourselves to the assumptions that they are intrinsically and unalterable, is sin, and calls for repentance.  Such repentance must express itself in determined and persistent effort to reconstruct our social institutions with a view to human welfare as realized in the synthesis of maximum individuality and maximum cooperation.” (Ibid.)
As our ancestors counseled, we don’t have to do all the work ourselves or  finish the work we have begun.  But we cannot stand idly by.  We cannot remain complacent.  We must choose where we can combat injustice in our lives and begin to realize, now,  the good among us.