A Perfect Year
Rabbi Deborah Wechsler
How was your year? We come here tonight prepared to look in some measure at that question, how was our year? From the outset we have certain ideas or notions about what we would like it to be, a perfect year. But what would a perfect year look like? Would it be a year in which we celebrated only simhas, attended all weddings, baby namings and bnei mitzvah and no funerals? Would it be a year when we never set foot in a hospital or the doctor’s office? Would it be a year in which the only tears we cried were tears of joy? Would it be a year when the market kept going up and interest rates kept going down? What would a perfect year look like? A year in which there were no natural disasters, a year with children who always listened the first time, a year with a beach vacation. Please raise your hand if you have this kind of perfect year.
That’s what I thought. Perhaps perfect is in the eye of the beholder and a perfect year might be something less than perfect. Tonight I’d like to share the story of a different kind of perfect. In the game of baseball there is something called a perfect game. A game in which for nine innings a pitcher does not allow any opposing player on base, - 27 battters up and 27 batters down.
A perfect game began on June 2 of this year in Detroit, Michigan. The young pitcher Armando Galarraga reached his 27th out of the game when at first base a runner, Jason Donald, who was clearly out, was instead called safe by longtime umpire Jim Joyce. Mistakes, even of that magnitude, are not uncommon in baseball or even in life, but what happened next certainly was uncommon. The young pitcher, despite losing the opportunity of what would have been only the 21st perfect game in baseball history, smiled, turned around and went back to the pitcher’s mound to finish the game. The seasoned umpire, after watching the replay tape and seeing what he had done, asked to speak to Galaragga. He hugged him and said “Lo siento, I’m sorry, You were perfect, I was not.”
And with a gentle touch, forgiveness was offered and accepted.
So much of life hangs in the decision of a moment and we are forever marked and sealed based on the choices of that moment. As we look back to the year that has been, what are those moments that shaped our destiny? Looking ahead to 5771, how might we make good choices that will help us live lives of integrity and dignity?
The year is not a good year or a bad year. It is the same 365 and a quarter days up and 365 and a quarter days down. The only difference from year to year is what happens in the course of those days. “Lo siento, I’m sorry, You were perfect, I was not.” The year is perfect, it is we who are not. And therein lies the difference in your perfect year and my perfect year. You might look at the person sitting next to you and see their year with sadness and sickness and hopelessness and loss. But they might see their year as a great blessing with innumerable joys, their own kind of perfect.
History will not record a young pitcher’s perfect game from June 2 but that doesn’t mean that it wasn’t perfect in its own way. A different kind of perfect, but perfect all the same.
Whatever form the next 365 and a quarter days take for you, I wish you a perfect year in 5771.
Tom Verducci “A Different Kind of Perfect” Sports Illustrated June 14, 2010
