I want you to think, for a moment, about the last two years. Not about the headlines or the politics, but about the feeling in your own body. For two years, since the terrible attacks of October 7th, many of us have been living in a state of heightened alert. Psychologists call it the ‘fight or flight’ response. It is a state of chronic stress where our nervous systems are primed for threat. We become quicker to anger, faster to defend, our words sharpened into weapons before we have even had a chance to think.
Here at Bet David, we are a diverse community. Over these two years, each one of us has held and developed different positions and opinions regarding the conflict. Our anxieties have pulled us in different directions. But the one thing most of us have shared is that feeling of stress, that readiness to fight for what we believe, to protect what we hold dear. It has been exhausting. It has created distance between friends, tension across family tables, and cracks in relationships we once thought were solid.
But now, something is shifting. I fear to be too optimistic, but it seems there is a real, tangible prospect of a lasting peace on the horizon, and with it, the air is beginning to change. The constant alarm bell in our minds is quieting just a little. And this presents us with a new, and perhaps even harder, question. The question is no longer, ‘How do we fight?’. The question is now, ‘How do we rebuild?’. Not just the physical rebuilding of shattered towns and cities in Israel and in Gaza, but the delicate, intimate rebuilding of fractured relationships right here, in our own lives.
Our ancestors, standing at the foot of Mount Sinai in this week’s parashah, knew this moment. They were standing amidst the ruins of a shattered certainty. They had just committed the ultimate betrayal with the Golden Calf. In response, Moshe, in a fury of grief and rage, smashed the first set of tablets. Those tablets, the text tells us, were “the work of God, and the writing was the writing of God, engraved on the tablets.” They were a top-down, pristine revelation. But they were brittle. They could not survive their first contact with messy, flawed, complicated human reality. They shattered.
And in the aftermath of that shattering, what does God command? Does God create another Divine-only set? No. The process for the second chance is entirely different. God says to Moshe, “Pesal lekha, Carve for yourself two tablets of stone like the first.” Moshe, the human being, must hew the raw material. He has to do the difficult, physical work of preparing the vessel. Only then will God write the words.
This is the Torah’s model for repair. It is not a magical return to an unbroken, pristine past. It is a partnership. The second covenant, the second chance, is stronger and more resilient precisely because it has human effort, human struggle, and the memory of failure baked into it from the very start. It is made for the real world.
This idea, that what is repaired can be even more precious than what was never broken, is captured with breathtaking beauty by the late poet, Chana Bloch, in her poem, “The Joins,” which I have already quoted in another drashah a few weeks ago, when we read about the shattering of the tablets in the book of D’varim, Deuteronomy. The poem introduces us to the Japanese art of kintsugi, where broken pottery is mended with lacquer dusted with powdered gold. The philosophy is that the breakage and repair are part of the history of an object, not something to hide. The cracks are illuminated, turned into a source of beauty. The “scar tissue is visible history,” and it is magnificent. She writes:
What's between usseems flexible as the webbingbetween forefinger and thumb.Seems flexible but isn’t;what's between usis made of claylike any cup on the shelf.It shatters easily. Repairbecomes the task.We glue the wounded edgeswith tentative fingers.Scar tissue is visible historyand the cup is precious to usbecausewe saved it.In the art of kintsugia potter repairing a broken cupwould sprinkle the resinwith powdered gold.Sometimes the joinsare so exquisitethey say the pottermay have broken the cupjust so he could mend it. [1]
“Repair becomes the task.” That is where we are now. For two years, our task was to endure. Now, repair becomes the task. Like Bloch’s cup, the relationships in our lives are made of clay. Many have developed cracks under the immense pressure. Some have shattered. And now, with tentative fingers, we are being asked to glue the wounded edges.
This is our challenge today. Can we become artisans of kintsugi? This is not a theoretical question. This difficult, sacred work is happening right now. I was listening recently to a Ha'aretz podcast about a powerful short documentary called The Path Forward. [2] The film showcases duos of Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel who refuse to succumb to the cycle of hatred. It features people like Maoz Inon, whose parents were murdered on October 7th, yet who immediately chose to channel his grief into building bridges with Palestinian peace activist Aziz Abu Sarah. Aziz’s own brother died of internal injuries after being released from an Israeli jail, where he had been detained for a year for stone-throwing.
These are people who have every reason to retreat into their pain, to build walls of anger. Instead, they are choosing to become artisans of repair. Their work sends a powerful message to us, right here. If they, who have suffered the ultimate loss, can reach across that immense divide to begin gluing the wounded edges, then surely, we can find the courage to do the same, each of us in our own context. Can we, like Moshe, take on the hard work of carving the stone, of initiating the difficult conversations, of reaching out across the divides that have grown between us and those to whom we were once close?
And can we find the powdered gold to sprinkle on the joins? In our tradition, that gold has many names, quite a few of them named directly in this week’s reading. They are known as the Thirteen Attributes of Divine Mercy, and you may recall them, since they were repeated multiple times during Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur: El Rachum (compassionate God), ve Chanun (gracious), Erech Apayim (slow to anger), verav chessed (abundant in kindness), veEmet (and truth), notzer chesed la-alafim (keeping kindness to the thousandth generation), nosse avon va-fesha (forgiving iniquity, transgression), ve-chata ve-nake (and cleansing sin). [3] These are not abstractions. They are a curriculum for how to mend. Compassion in tone. Patience in timing. Kindness in assumption. Truth that does not flatten people. Forgiveness that does not erase accountability. The gold is also in acknowledging the shared pain of the last two years, even with people with whom we have disagreed on fundamental aspects of what was happening.
This Shabbat, we sit in our sukkah, a structure that is, by design, fragile. The sukkah reminds us, as Chana Bloch’s poem does, that what is most sacred is often what is most breakable. But it does not leave us there. This week’s Torah reading gives us the blueprint for what comes next.
Our task is not to pretend the cracks do not exist. It is not to erase the painful history of these past two years. Our task is to find the courage of Moshe and the vision of the kintsugi artist: to see in the breaks an opportunity, to illuminate our scars with the gold of compassion, and to build a second tablet, a renewed community, stronger and more beautiful precisely because we had the courage to mend it.
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