The Lab Where Creation Takes Place

     A little boy was watching his father, a Rabbi, prepare a sermon. “How do you know what to write?” he asked. The Rabbi said, “Well, after I think for a while, God tells me what to write.”

         The boy was quiet for a moment before saying, “Then why do you keep crossing out so much?”

     Privately, it is easy to make corrections: nobody has to see the original text.  We can write and rewrite the wording.  Which is fine. Being creative requires imagination with lots of room for experimentation and errors.  While I am sure that God helps, we have a definite proclivity  for making errors. Thus, the scratch-outs.

     Now, the Talmud used to be a simple, terse text of Jewish Law and Lore. With so much of it needing clarification, great Sages would scribble notes, questions, answers and diagrams in the margins (used to be that paper was scarce). That’s how the marginal commentaries on each folio of the Talmud was born.  Some printer saw the scribbling and had them inserted as permanent marginal notes. That is how Rashi’s commentary (among others) has come to be found in the Talmud.

     Mistakes are an inevitable and part of process. Mistakes means that you are trying. They are living proof of personal growth. A colleague, Harold Kushner, said “people do  not learn  from their successes. They grow from their failures.”  The scratches in the margins.

If it were not for the marginal notes of Rashi and others the Talmud would not be the Talmud.  So too, it is with all scientific studies.  They take place in labs where failures always exceed successes.