Shabbat Shalom,
Last week, in the AdKan newsletter, I wrote about this unique and powerful season we find ourselves in, the ten-week journey that Rabbi Alan Lew describes as taking us from the destruction of Tisha B’Av to the rebuilding and joy of Sukkot. This is the season of t’shuvah, of turning and returning, and its central metaphor can be found in the story of the two sets of tablets.
This week, in Parashat Ekev, Moses retells that very story. It’s as if the Torah wants us to linger on this image, to understand its lessons more deeply as we stand on the precipice of Elul. Because this story speaks directly to this moment, to our moment. Let’s be honest: many of us feel shattered. The ground beneath us feels unsteady. At both the personal and collective levels, we are living through profoundly difficult times. We feel threatened, attacked, and at times, lost. The constant barrage of frightening news, the deep divisions that turn conversations into minefields, the sense that the world we knew is fracturing, it all takes a toll. People we thought were friends may have turned their backs on us, leaving us feeling isolated and questioning our own judgment.
And this collective anxiety seeps into our private lives, making our personal struggles feel heavier. In our quietest moments of introspection, we look back on our own actions and wish we had acted differently. It’s a quiet, internal ache, the memory of a word spoken in anger, an action not taken, a moment of weakness we wish we could reclaim. This, too, is a kind of brokenness, carrying the heavy weight of our own imperfections.
What do we do with all this brokenness? What is the place of our failures, our fears, and our regrets in a life we are trying to build?
The story of the tablets doesn't end with a simple replacement. The Talmud, in tractate Bava Batra, teaches something truly astonishing. It tells us that inside the Ark of the Covenant, the holiest object, the centerpiece of our sacred space, were placed both the new, whole tablets, and the fragments of the first, broken ones. This is a radical act. Most cultures build monuments to their victories, their perfection, their unblemished heroes. We build a sacred container and declare that what is broken is just as holy as what is whole. We are told to carry our history, not just the triumphant parts, but the painful, shameful parts as well.
Our tradition is telling us that our brokenness is not something to be discarded or hidden in shame. Our broken pieces are holy. Wholeness, then, is not perfection; it is the courage to integrate all of our experiences, our triumphs and our failures, into the story of who we are. It means we stop telling a version of our life story that conveniently leaves out the embarrassing chapters. Instead, we acknowledge that those chapters are precisely what gave our story its depth, its character, its humanity. Carrying our failures as a sacred reminder means they are not a source of shame, but a wellspring of empathy. Having known brokenness, we become gentler with the brokenness of others. Our own scars teach us how to tend to the wounds of the world.
The late poet Chana Bloch, in her poem The Joins, captures this idea perfectly. She writes that what is precious is fragile, like a clay cup that “shatters easily.” When it does, she says, “Repair / becomes the task.” She describes the Japanese art of kintsugi, where a potter repairs a broken cup not by hiding the cracks, but by tracing them with gold-dusted glue. The break is not concealed; it is illuminated. The repair itself becomes a beautiful, visible part of the object’s history, a testament to its journey. Bloch concludes with a breathtaking thought: “Sometimes the joins / are so exquisite / they say the potter / may have broken the cup / just so he could mend it.”
This is the very essence of t’shuvah. It is not about pretending the Golden Calf never happened, or that our world isn't fractured, or that we don't carry regrets. T’shuvah is the art of holy repair. This is not a quick fix. It is the slow, patient, and sometimes painful work of looking at the damage without flinching. It is holy because it is an act of profound self-creation, a refusal to be defined by our worst moments. It is about looking at the shattered pieces of our promises and our ideals, and instead of leaving them on the ground in despair, having the courage to pick them up and trace the edges with gold. It is about understanding that the cup, our lives, our community, is precious to us precisely because we saved it. The process of mending imbues it with a new, deeper value.
The journey from Tisha B’Av to Rosh Hashanah to Yom Kippur and Sukkot is the journey from seeing only the shattered fragments on the ground to building an ark large enough to carry them with us, to learning the art of mending with gold. The work is ours, we must cut the stone from the mines of our own lives. That mine is deep within us; it is the place of our deepest truths and most vulnerable memories. To descend into it requires courage. The tools we use are honesty, humility, and a stubborn refusal to give up on ourselves. But we are not alone. The promise of our tradition is that if we do the hard work of carving and mending, God will be there to help us fill the cracks with light.
May we, on this Shabbat, find the quiet courage needed for this work of introspection. May we learn not just to live with our shattered fragments, but to see them as holy, to build from them, and to find, in the joins, the exquisite, golden beauty of a life repaired.
Shabbat Shalom.
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