The Trouble With Temimut
If you describe someone in Modern Hebrew as tamim, it is no compliment. It means he is naïve, unsophisticated, maybe little too trusting. If your friend is about to fall for an obvious scam, you might tell him: אל תהיה תמים. Don’t be so gullible.
Yet, throughout the Bible, tamim is an extraordinarily positive word.
Noach is introduced as:
נֹחַ אִישׁ צַדִּיק תָּמִים הָיָה בְּדֹרֹתָיו
“Noach was a righteous man; he was tamim in his generation.”
God tells Avraham:
הִתְהַלֵּךְ לְפָנַי וֶהְיֵה תָמִים
“Walk before Me and be tamim.”
Tehillim describes the person worthy of dwelling in God’s presence as:
הוֹלֵךְ תָּמִים וּפֹעֵל צֶדֶק
“One who walks tamim and acts righteously.”
And in Parashat Shoftim, the Torah commands us directly:
תָּמִים תִּהְיֶה עִם ה׳ אֱלֹקֶיךָ
“You shall be tamim with the Lord your God.”
So what exactly is temimut, often translated as “completeness” or “wholeheartedness”? What is this quality that sounds almost insulting to the modern ear, but which the Torah considers one of the great religious virtues?
Maimonides explains the command in light of the verses that immediately precede it. The Torah warns the Jewish people not to imitate the practices of the nations they will encounter in the Land of Israel:
לֹא יִמָּצֵא בְךָ מַעֲבִיר בְּנוֹ וּבִתּוֹ בָּאֵשׁ קֹסֵם קְסָמִים מְעוֹנֵן וּמְנַחֵשׁ וּמְכַשֵּׁף.
וְחֹבֵר חָבֶר וְשֹׁאֵל אוֹב וְיִדְּעֹנִי וְדֹרֵשׁ אֶל הַמֵּתִים.
כִּי תוֹעֲבַת ה׳ כָּל עֹשֵׂה אֵלֶּה...
תָּמִים תִּהְיֶה עִם ה׳ אֱלֹקֶיךָ.
Do not practice divination. Do not consult soothsayers. Do not engage in sorcery, consult ghosts or the dead. Right after those warnings, as if in contrast, we are commanded: Tamim tihyeh im Hashem Elokecha.
For Maimonides, the connection is straightforward. All of these supposed methods of discovering the future are nonsense. He calls them sheker ve-chazav, “falsehood and lies,” and tohu va-hevel, “emptiness and nonsense.” To believe that a fortune-teller or sorcerer actually possesses some secret knowledge of the future is not an expression of faith. It is an abandonment of reason.
Seeking such promises of the future is a natural human temptation. Countless people read horoscopes, wear charms, recite incantations. A few weeks ago, Rachel and I were walking on the Asbury Park Boardwalk in New Jersey, and there was a Tarot Card reader shop on the boardwalk. As far as I’m concerned, I don’t understand how a business like that can afford boardwalk rent, but lo and behold, there was a line to get in. There are Jewish dressings to this as well, Segulot, various amulets or photographs of specific rabbis, making sure mezuzas are checked. But, of course, the Torah warns against believing these false promises of the future. Rav Yehuda Amital used to exhort his students: אין קונצים, there are no tricks to life. There are no shortcuts.
The Rambam says that being tamim is the opposite: Make rational, learned, informed decisions. We can investigate, weigh evidence, anticipate consequences, and plan our actions. It’s actually a unique characteristic of being human: planning rationally for the future. Even animals that seem to plan, like birds who migrate south in the winter, those behaviors are the result of biological programming, not mental foresight. Humans have the ability to plan - to build earthquake-resistant buildings in anticipation of earthquakes, to save and invest for retirement, to take proactive measures to avoid certain illnesses. The Rambam says this feature is a gift of being human, and we should use it.
Paradoxically, Rashi thought vehyeh tamim means the exact opposite. Rashi explains:
הִתְהַלֵּךְ עִמּוֹ בִּתְמִימוּת וּתְצַפֶּה לוֹ, וְלֹא תַחְקֹר אַחַר הָעֲתִידוֹת, אֶלָּא כָּל מַה שֶּׁיָּבֹא עָלֶיךָ קַבֵּל בִּתְמִימוּת.
“Walk with God in temimut and place your hope in Him. Do not investigate the future. Whatever comes upon you, accept it with temimut.”
According to Rashi, temimut means precisely that we should not be preoccupied with figuring out what the future holds. We place our trust in God, focus on what is before us, and accept that we simply do not know what tomorrow will bring.
In truth, this too speaks to something very basic about the human condition. As much as we are uniquely capable of planning for the future, we are notably bad at living with the fact that we cannot know it.
Psychologists speak about our “intolerance of uncertainty,” the difficulty we have living with an outcome that remains unresolved. In one fascinating experiment, researchers told one group of participants that they would definitely receive a painful electric shock. Another group was told that there was only a fifty-percent chance they would receive one. You would think the second group would be more relaxed. After all, they had a fifty-percent chance of avoiding the shock altogether.
The opposite happened. The participants who were uncertain whether they would be shocked experienced greater stress than those who knew for certain that the shock was coming.
There is something remarkable about that. We would rather know that something bad is going to happen than not know what is going to happen at all.
This has only become more difficult in our time. We have become accustomed to living in a world in which uncertainty can usually be resolved with the device in our pocket. We know exactly where our Uber is. We can watch a package move from a warehouse across the country to our front door. It is hard to live with the fact that, when it comes to what is really going to happen next, we just don’t know. That’s why Rashi advises, וְלֹא תַחְקֹר אַחַר הָעֲתִידוֹת — don’t be consumed with trying to know the future. Temimut means accepting that, however carefully we plan, we can never know what tomorrow will bring.
So which is it? The Rambam says that temimut means using our uniquely human capacity to think rationally about the future and plan for it. Rashi says that temimut means relinquishing our need to know the future and trusting God with what we cannot know.
I think the paradox is precisely the point. These are two realities we necessarily inhabit at the same time. We are obligated to plan for the future, all the while recognizing that we can never predict it. Both are true, all the time. Every serious human decision contains both realities at once. We decide whom to marry by thinking seriously about the person standing before us, while knowing that we have absolutely no idea what our future together might hold. We make decisions for our children based on everything we know about them today, while recognizing that we cannot possibly know who they will become. A doctor recommends a course of treatment based on the best available medical evidence, while everyone in the room understands that there is no guaranteed outcome. We plan because the future matters; we live with uncertainty because the future is not ours to know. President Eisenhower, in reflecting on D-Day, said it best: “Plans are useless, but planning is everything.”
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks suggested that life with uncertainty was precisely the message of the verse from Yirmiyahu, which we recite on Rosh Hashanah:
זָכַרְתִּי לָךְ חֶסֶד נְעוּרַיִךְ אַהֲבַת כְּלוּלֹתָיִךְ לֶכְתֵּךְ אַחֲרַי בַּמִּדְבָּר בְּאֶרֶץ לֹא זְרוּעָה.
God remembers with affection that the Jewish people followed Him into the wilderness, into an unknown future, without knowing how it would all work out. Rabbi Sacks called faith “the courage to live with uncertainty.”
As we begin this month of Ellul, and take stock of ourselves and what we want our coming year to look like, Teshuvah requires us to plan for the future: What do I want to change this year? What relationship needs repair? What aspect of my relationship with God needs strengthening? Kabbalah al ha-atid requires more than hoping we will be better. We need a plan.
And yet, our prayers this season also acknowledge that we have no idea what the coming year will bring. Mi yichyeh u-mi yamut? That is temimut: we plan carefully while knowing that we cannot predict the outcome. We use every capacity God has given us to prepare for tomorrow, and then we trust Him with the tomorrow we cannot know.