Have you ever felt inadequate to a task you have been assigned or a job you have been given? Do you sometimes feel that other people have too high an estimate of your abilities? Has there been a moment when you felt like a faker, a fraud — that you would be found out and discovered to be the weak, fallible, imperfect human being you know in your heart you are?

If so, according to Rashi’s commentary on this week’s parsha, you are in very good company.

Here is the setting: The Mishkan — the sanctuary — had finally been completed. For seven days Moses had consecrated Aaron and his sons to serve as priests. Now the time had come for them to begin their service. Moses gives them various instructions. Then he says the following words to Aaron:

Come near to the altar and offer your sin offering and your burnt offering, and make atonement for yourself and the people; sacrifice the offering that is for the people and make atonement for them, as the Lord has commanded. (Lev. 9:7)

The sages were puzzled by the instruction, “Come near.” This seems to imply that Aaron had until then kept a distance from the altar. Why so? Rashi gives the following explanation: Aaron was ashamed and fearful of approaching the altar. Moses said to him: “Why are you ashamed? It was for this that you were chosen.”

There is a name for this syndrome, coined in 1978 by two clinical psychologists — Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes. They called it the “impostor syndrome.”

People who suffer from it feel that they do not deserve the success they have achieved. They attribute it not to their effort and ability, but to luck or timing — or to the fact that they have deceived others into thinking that they are better than they actually are. It turns out to be surprisingly widespread, and particularly so among high achievers. Research has shown that around 40 percent of successful people do not believe they deserve their success and as many as 70 percent have felt this way at sometime or another.

However, as one might imagine, Rashi is telling us something deeper. Aaron was not simply lacking in self-confidence. There was something specific that he must have had in mind on that day he was inducted into the role of High Priest.

Aaron had been left in charge of the people while Moses was on the mountain receiving the Torah. This was when the sin of the Golden Calf took place.

Reading the narrative, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that it was Aaron’s weakness that allowed the Golden Calf incident to occur. It was he who suggested that the people give him their gold ornaments, he who fashioned them into a calf, and he who built an altar before it (Ex. 32:1-6). When Moses saw the Golden Calf and challenged Aaron — “What did these people do to you, that you brought upon them this great sin?” — Aaron replied evasively, “They gave me the gold and I threw it into the fire, and out came this calf!”

This was a man profoundly (and rightly) uncomfortable with his role in one of the most disastrous episodes in the Torah. Now, he was being called on to atone not only for himself, but for the entire people. Was this not hypocrisy? Was he not himself a sinner? How could he stand before God and the people and assume the role of the holiest of men? No wonder he felt like an impostor, and was ashamed and fearful of approaching the altar.

Moses, however, did not simply say something that would boost Aaron’s self-confidence. He said something much more radical and life-changing: “It was for this that you were chosen.” The task of the High Priest is to atone for people’s sins. It was Aaron’s role on Yom Kippur to confess his wrongs and failings, then those of his household, then those of the people as a whole (Lev. 16:11-17). It was his responsibility to plead for forgiveness.

“That,” implied Moses, “is why you were chosen. You know what sin is like. You know what it is to feel guilt. You more than anyone else understand the need for repentance and atonement. You have felt the cry of your soul to be cleansed, purified, and wiped free of the stain of transgression. What you think of as your greatest weakness will become, in this role … your greatest strength.”

How did Moses know this? Because he had experienced something similar himself. When God told Moses to confront Pharaoh and lead the Israelites to freedom, he repeatedly insisted that he could not do so. Reread his response to God’s call to lead the Israelites out of Egypt (Ex. chapters 3-4), and he sounds like someone radically convinced of his inadequacies: “Who am I?” “They won’t believe in me.” Above all, he kept repeating that he could not speak before a crowd, something absolutely necessary in a leader. He was not an orator. He did not have the voice of command:

Then Moses said to the Lord, “Please, my Lord, I am not a man of words, not yesterday, not the day before and not since You have spoken to Your servant. I am slow of speech and tongue.” (Ex. 4:10)

Moses said to the Lord, “Look, the Israelites do not listen to me. How then will Pharaoh listen to me? Besides, I have uncircumcised lips.” (Ex. 6:12).

Moses had a speech defect. To him, that was a supreme disqualification from being a mouthpiece for the divine word. What he did not yet understand is that this was one of the reasons God chose him. When Moses spoke the words of God, people knew that he was not speaking his own words in his own voice. Someone else was speaking through him. This seems to have been the case for Isaiah and Jeremiah, both of whom were doubtful of their ability to speak and who became among the most eloquent of prophets.

The people who can sway crowds with their oratory are usually not prophets. Often they are — or become — dictators and tyrants. They use their power of speech to acquire more dangerous forms of power.

God does not choose people who speak with their own voice, telling the crowds what they want to hear. He chooses people who are fully aware of their inadequacies, who stammer literally or metaphorically, who speak not because they want to but because they have to, who tell people what they do not want to hear, but what they must hear if they are to save themselves from catastrophe. What Moses thought was his greatest weakness was, in fact, one of his greatest strengths.

The point here is the struggle. Moses and Aaron, in their different ways, had to wrestle with themselves. Moses was not a natural leader. Aaron was not a natural priest. Moses had to accept that one of his most important qualifications was what nowadays we would call his low self-image, but what, operating from a completely different mindset, the Torah calls his humility.

Aaron had to understand that his own experience of sin and failure made him the ideal representative of a people conscious of their own sin and failure. Feelings of inadequacy — the impostor syndrome — can be bad news or good news, depending on what you do with them. Do they lead you to depression and despair? Or do they lead you to work on your weaknesses and turn them into strengths?

The key, according to Rashi in this week’s parsha, is the role that Moses played at this critical juncture in Aaron’s life. He had faith in Aaron, even when Aaron lacked faith in himself. That is the role God Himself played, more than once, in Moses’ life. And that is the role that God plays in all our lives if we are truly open to Him. I have often said that the mystery at the heart of Judaism is not our faith in God. It is God’s faith in us.

This then is the life-changing idea: what we think of as our greatest weakness can become, if we wrestle with it, our greatest strength. Think of those who have suffered tragedy and then devote their lives to alleviating the suffering of others. Think of those who, conscious of their failings, use that consciousness to help others overcome their own sense of failure.

What makes the Tanakh so special is its total candour about humanity. Its heroes — Moses, Aaron, Isaiah, Jeremiah, etc. — all knew times when they felt like failures or “impostors.” They had their moments of dark despair. But they kept going. They refused to be defeated. They knew that a sense of inadequacy can bring us closer to God, as King David said: “My sacrifice O God, is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart you, God, will not despise” (Ps. 51:19).

Better by far to know you are imperfect than to believe you are perfect. God loves us and believes in us despite and sometimes because of our imperfections. Our weaknesses make us human; wrestling with them makes us strong.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks is the former chief rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth. He currently serves as the Ingeborg and Ira Rennert Global Distinguished Professor at New York University.

The opinions presented by Algemeiner bloggers are solely theirs and do not represent those of The Algemeiner, its publishers or editors. If you would like to share your views with a blog post on The Algemeiner, please be in touch through our Contact page.