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| Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash |
From Purim To Pesach - A Reflection of a Year of the Pandemic
Rabbi David Baum
As more and more people become vaccinated, people are asking, when are things going to go back to 'normal'? Another question we might be thinking about but not articulating is, what do we do with the brokenness that we have experienced and are still very much experiencing?
In this week’s parashah, we read about the episode of the golden calf, which led to Moses breaking the two tablets of the Ten Commandments in front of the peoples' eyes. A plague ensued (sound familiar?), many died, and the people were heartbroken, begging for forgiveness. They eventually received atonement, but the damage was done. Arguably, the greatest tragedy of this incident were the loss of the tablets, made by God. A second set was eventually made, but what happened to the first set that were broken? Were they simply discarded, added to the trash heap of history?
Our sages tell us that the first set were not lost; they weren’t thrown away, and they remained broken and shattered. The shattered pieces were placed in the Ark of the Covenant along with the whole tablets. The tablets that were in the Ark of the Covenant became the focal point of the camp – the people surrounded the Ark, it was the heart of the camp – when it moved, so did the people. When the Holy Temple was built, the Ark was placed in the Holy of Holies, the Kodesh HaKodeshim – it was the heart of the Israelites.
The question is, why did they keep the brokenness and imperfection of the first set of Tablets with them, both in the Wilderness, and then eventually in the Temple, when they had perfection at their center? Why keep the broken and the whole together? Because as Jews, we believe in Shalom.
Shalom comes from the word Shalem, meaning whole. The whole things in our lives, and the brokenness that we carry with us are in our hearts; one cannot be separated from the other. I could not think of a better way to describe our tradition. Chancellor Arnold Eisen of the Jewish Theological Seminary wrote the following in his book on Conservative Judaism:
“Jews continue to turn to Judaism in search of such meaning and purpose. I am a devoted Conservative Jew largely because, time and again, I have been vouchsafed the precious experience of meaning under Conservative auspices; I have long been shaped by the conviction, central to Conservative Judaism, that the Jewish part of myself need not be—indeed, should not be—separate from the rest of who I am. The Torah demands and offers wholeness. In our day it requires all that 21st-century men and women can bring to the task. Thanks in part to that conviction, imbued in me since childhood, my love of family and friends is inextricably intertwined with love of God and Torah…It (the Torah) aims to impact the entirety of life, individual and collective, and not merely the aspect of it that other scriptures and traditions call “religion.” The Torah offers a way called mitzvah that—if we walk it diligently—guides and transforms all of life: when we rise up and when we lie down, when we sit at home and when we walk upon the way."
Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Kotsk famously said, “There is nothing more whole than a broken heart.” Erica Brown wrote the following commentary on these words: “Many experiences in life try to break us: illness, loneliness, the death of those we love, rejection, insecurity, loss. But such experiences also make us more whole as human beings. They expand our range of consciousness and compassion. They enlarge our capacity for inclusion. They make us stronger and help us reach out to others with greater empathy and concern. When we acknowledge that we are broken, we enter a universe where we are not measured by perfection but by our willingness to repair ourselves and the world.”
As we begin our journey to Passover, a mixture of both the degradation of slavery and the promise of freedom, let's also begin to think about how we hold on to what we have experienced this year, what we are experiencing now, and what we can look forward to in the weeks and months ahead.
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