[I’m putting on a reading of the first act of my new opera this May! It’s got a rad cast, and I’m really proud of the music I’m writing for it. And there’s a livestream!]

ALEXII ANTEDILLUVIANOVICH PRELAPSARIANOV, the world’s oldest living Bolshevik: How are we to proceed without Theory? . . .

Change? Yes, we must change, only show me the Theory, and I will be at the barricades, show me the book of the next Beautiful Theory, and I promise you these blind eyes will see again just to read it, to devour that text. . . .

If the snake sheds his skin before a new skin is ready, naked he will be in the world, prey to the forces of chaos. Without his skin he will be dismantled, lose coherence and die. Have you, my little serpents, a new skin?

Then we dare not, we cannot, we MUST NOT move ahead!

— Tony Kushner, Angels in America (Perestroika, Act I scene i)

My very first year in undergrad, I took a course in philosophy, which impressed on me, among other things, the ease of critique compared with the difficulty of construction. Poking holes in others’ work is much less challenging than building something sturdy enough to resist such poking. Skepticism is safe: If you don’t commit yourself to an idea before you’re convinced it’s flawless, you’ll never have to commit to anything, because nothing will ever be that securely established; by never going anywhere, you avoid the danger of crashing along the way.

This phenomenon is hardly limited to the ether of academia. You may well have encountered it yourself on social media: people whose accounts seem solely given over to pointing out the failures and limitations of this or that proposed solution to some crisis or other of the many in our current moment. Nothing goes far enough, nothing runs smoothly enough, nothing accounts fully enough for the immeasurable complexity of the world. These people are often not wrong — their points are often incisive and rigorously argued — but they leverage their truths not in the service of making the next action better targeted, the next legislative bill better written, the next change more systemic, but instead in the service of rejection, condemnation, inaction. All human action is imperfect, and thus all human action is open to critique; if you refrain from acting until the perfect, un-critiquable action presents itself to you, you will never act. In smug, skeptical stasis, you will be immune from the failures of flawed attempts at bettering the world, but also you'll never better the world. Prelapsarianov would be proud.

This week, the Israelites finish making all the stuff for the Mishkan: כֵּן עָשׂוּ בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל אֵת כׇּל הָעֲבֹדָה׃ | Kein asu bənei Yisra’eil eit kol ha’avodah | “So the Israelites made the whole service” (Shəmot 39:42). Asu — “made” — is plural here; this was a group effort that the whole community made happen together. And also, asu is not necessarily a verb of completion or perfection. At its heart, it is a verb of doing, of acting and making a change in the world. The Israelites didn’t just think about the Mishkan, they didn’t wait until everyone was perfectly ideologically aligned; they just made things for their most sacred structure.

It was probably not perfect. Mosheh’s instructions are, in places, somewhat bewildering, and even where they make sense, there is always a gap between design and fabrication — an uneven stitch here, a splinter of wood there, an impurity in the bronze tucked away on the back out of sight. It was certainly not permanent. If the Mishkan even ever existed to begin with, it’s been about three thousand years since it was replaced by the First Temple and then lost to time. In all likelihood, the spinners didn’t really understand what the metalworkers were doing, and neither would have been able to do the woodworkers’ tasks. They may all have had their parts to play, but that doesn’t mean they all got what everybody else was doing. I don’t think I’ve ever prayed in a bare minyan where everyone agreed exactly about the nature of G-d, prayer, and Holiness; it seems hard to fathom that all two million of those the text places at Mt Sinai had no points of dissension between them. (And, indeed, we’re not that far past the Golden Calf incident, hardly a high water mark of social and theological agreement.) But they built a sacred structure anyway.

This is, I suggest, a useful model for us. We are in a moment when much needs to be done. It’s easy to come up with reasons not to do things — many of the available courses of action for most of us are limited, flawed, insufficient, uncertain of success. It’s risky to try any of them, because trying opens up the possibility of failure. Much safer to hold out for a sure thing.

But there will never be such a sure thing, such a perfect action. There will only ever be the partial, the faulty, the human. It’s that or it’s nothing. We must act with what we have, as we are. If it was good enough for G-d’s dwelling, it’s good enough for our moment too.

This isn’t to say there’s no room for critique. If we want to be most effective, we have to learn from how past and present efforts fall short. If we want to do the best we can, we have to be open to learning how to do better. But there is a difference between critique for the sake of improvement and critique meant only to silence and stop action. If we want to get anywhere, we have to heed the former while setting aside the latter.

Perhaps no one will ever be able to look back and say of us, “So they made the whole world good”. But only by acting, however imperfectly, will they be able to say we made any of the whole a little better at all.

Even without Mosheh’s divine instructions to guide us, we have to spin the thread and hammer the silver and plane the wood and build the structures we need, however flawed, however patchy, however human. The work waits; let’s get to it.

[This has been an installment of one-word Torah. You can read the full series here.]