One of the advantages of making mistakes is that our failures give us a lot more humility about other peoples’ lives. It is easy to be an expert on marriage – when you are single. Similarly, everyone without children is an expert on child-raising. Every parent of pre-teen parents is an expert in how their friends should be raising their teenager. It is only through failing ourselves that we realize how hard success really is.
I am not sure what the difference is between “sin” and “failure.” They are not quite the same, but there is quite a lot of overlap.
But with both sin and failure, we have an opportunity to learn and grow. Indeed, I think, just as with marriage and parenting, growing is impossible without some amount of flailing and failing.
I am exploring not only whether sin is unavoidable, but whether, in fact, it is a good thing, in the larger scheme of things. The ability to make good decisions requires some experience with making bad ones. A life without trials and tribulations is a life without personal growth.
The Gemara (Bava Batra 17a) tells us that only 4 men ever lived without sinning. None of them (Benjamin, Moshe’s father, David’s father, and one of David’s sons) amounted to much. The sinners they knew in their lives were far more accomplished.
And the greatest men have indeed made profound mistakes: Aharon the High Priest only became the occupant of that office, with all of its importance, after he chose to sin by making the Golden Calf.
Just as businessmen say that they learn far more from their failures, maybe we must wrestle with our mistakes before we can succeed? Perhaps this is a feature, not a bug?
P.S. Today, probably due in large part to Christian views on sin, society assumes a stigma to sin that is not found in the Torah itself. For example, the Torah requires that all women who give birth bring a sin offering. I don’t think this is because a mother is a bad person, or has done something that is wrong, exactly. I think her sin offering is nothing more or less than an acknowledgement that the process of creating new life is unavoidably animalistic, and that, even when we act as animals as a matter of necessity, we are to separate from the animal state before being able to approach G-d again. In other words, the physical functions of procreation and labor are not bad, exactly – but because they are animal functions, the mother should aim to grow out of and away from that phase. So she is commanded to bring a sin offering in order to be able to elevate herself. Hers is a “necessary sin,” if you will – which supports the thesis above.