The cracks are where the light gets in

Posted on October 13, 2024

The night before I went to sleep-away camp for the first time, I threw a fit. I don’t think tantrum even does it justice. I cried, I screamed, I railed at my parents for having the audacity to spend thousands of dollars so that I could spend two weeks away with my friends. This continued the following morning, when I made sure to once again express my upset and anger before we left for the bus. And it didn’t end there. Two days into camp, I found the payphone (kids, before cellphones there were coin operated phones) and called home to tell them I was having a terrible time.

Through those experiences, I am sure that at any point my parents could have “fixed” it for me and told me that I didn’t need to go to camp or driven the three hours to pick me up and bring me home. And knowing my mother, I am sure that they came pretty close. After all, these are the same parents who once cancelled a family vacation to Europe mid-trip, because at two-years-old I spent the entire boat ride across the English Channel crying to go home. A story that my wife Micol will still not let me or my parents live down. But this time they didn’t fix it for me; and in not fixing it, they gave me a gift. The gift of summer camp, which was probably the formative experience of my teenage years. But also, a much more important gift – the gift of overcoming adversity, of facing a challenging situation, of doing something hard – of not having someone fix it for me, but needing to fix it myself.

As parents we can have an understandable desire to want to fix things for our children, to protect them from any harm, to prevent them from experiencing any failure. The problem with this approach to parenting is that one of the main ways we grow and learn is through adversity, through challenges, through failure. We do our children a disservice when we clear a smooth path before them and remove every obstacle, because we rob them of this vital opportunity to learn and grow. They never learn self-reliance, they never learn that it’s natural and even necessary to experience challenges, they never learn about the strength that they possess.

Think about a baby who is learning to walk – they are supposed to fall. No baby walks perfectly the first time; rather it is through the trips, the falls, and the stumbles that they learn not only how to walk, but also the ability to pick themselves back up. They learn that falling is okay, even celebrated. What do we do when a baby walks and then falls? We clap; we celebrate their effort and the falls that help them learn. No child walks immediately, and no child learns how to walk if their parents are constantly picking them up or catching them before they fall. Imagine after a baby’s first attempt and fall, a parent swooping in and saying “we’ll try again in a month, you’re obviously not ready.” Children have a built-in resilience, a tolerance for falling and failing; and it is this ability that allows them to grow, learn, and develop.

Over the past year, we have been much like the baby learning to walk for the first time. We have been finding our footing in a world that has been completely changed and forever altered by the events of October 7th. There have been countless times where we have felt like we are tripping or stumbling, often from obstacles placed before us in the form of attacks on Israel and attacks on our community here. And we have fallen down in exhaustion, in pain, in heart ache – with no one there to pick us up. On Rosh Hashanah, I talked about our communal response to this moment, and how we will act differently in this coming year.

Today, on Yom Kippur, I want to address our personal response. While we do gather together in community, on this day we stand alone as individuals before God – it is a day for personal reflection. How do we emerge from this awful year with our sense of self intact? How do we escape from the overwhelming fear and anxiety? How do we cope with the pain and hurt that we have experienced? These are questions we are all asking in a variety of ways. How can I do this? How can I not do this? How will this year be different? How do we heal our brokenness? Brokenness. We are broken.

We are emerging from a year of crisis for our community, for Israel, and for the Jewish people. The Hebrew word for crisis is mashber – which comes from the same root as shavur – which means “broken.” There is the potential to be broken and stay broken by moments of crisis. But Rabbi Jonathan Sacks z”l teaches that the word mashber has another meaning. This other meaning? “A birthing stool.”[1] As he writes: “In Hebrew, crises are not just opportunities; they are birthpangs. Something new is being born. That’s why Jews have survived every crisis in 4,000 years and emerged even stronger than they were before.”[2]

There are three primary ways in which people can respond to a crisis, a period of difficulty, or even a trauma. The first, and understandable reaction, is to be completely broken by the experience; in the aftermath, we are shattered and unable to continue – the trauma creates an unrecoverable break. The second way is often characterized as resilience; we find a way to bounce back, and we emerge as we were before; despite the knocks and challenges we emerge unchanged. But there is another way: A person gets knocked down and suffers difficulty, they may be broken and scarred, but through the experience they emerge stronger than they were before – they are not the same as they were – there is growth, someone new emerges.

This is not to say that the crisis or trauma are ever positive experiences, they are not. Nietzsche’s famous quote: “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,” fails to account for the fact that it might almost kill us. It can push us to the very brink. These moments often take a tremendous toll on the people experiencing them, and the pain may never go away. However, there is a growing field in psychology that does not look at how to support and treat posttraumatic stress, but instead considers what conditions might allow for the potential of posttraumatic growth. Studies have actually suggested that people facing hardship are more likely to experience posttraumatic growth than posttraumatic stress disorder.[3] This field recognizes that no matter how much we may try to protect ourselves or our children, we are going to face moments that we experience as being traumatic. Moments that break us.

The potential for growth is not immediate, it takes time, but eventually there is the possibility for something new to grow out of the brokenness. Richard Tedeschi, one of the founders of the field, suggests: “People develop new understandings of themselves, the world they live in, how to relate to other people, the kind of future they might have and a better understanding of how to live life”.[4] The challenge for us in this moment is to begin to take the steps to grow personally out of the trauma and crisis that has defined these last twelve months.

I have always been fascinated by the Japanese art of kintsugi. This art form seeks to repair broken pottery, creating something new in the process. Rather than trying to repair the cracks and hide the fissures that exist, the artist uses lacquer mixed with powdered gold to enhance the cracks and integrate them into something new and often more beautiful than the original. The message is beautiful and profound. We may assume that a smashed piece of pottery has reached the end of its useful life, but kintsugi comes to offer a way for something new and more beautiful to emerge. And on a deeper level, kintsugi doesn’t merely recognize brokenness, it celebrates it – adorning the cracks in gold.

In a similar vein, our modern-day prophet Leonard Cohen, whose words we heard in “Who by Fire” this morning, famously sang: “Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack, a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.” It is through the brokenness that the light can enter. But it is also a reminder of the need to allow the light in so that we can truly see and be seen.

To that end, I need to own the fact that this is not an easy sermon to deliver, and it was not an easy sermon to write. In considering the impact of October 7th and the ensuing year on us as individuals, I was forced to hold a mirror up to myself and consider the way that this year has affected me, something I had not allowed myself to do up until this point. I will be honest, following October 7th as I do in most cases, I jumped straight to action. I threw myself into the doing and left no time or space for introspection or to consider the toll that this year was taking on me.

I need to admit and own that this year has broken me. The cracks began on October 7th as I tried to digest incomprehensible news and immediately feared for my family and friends in Israel. I broke when we attempted to talk to our own children about what was happening, to try to explain the inexplicable. How could we talk to them about hostages, terrorists, safe rooms, bomb shelters, and the very real fear we had for our people in Israel? But how could we not? And I knew in the conversations they were losing a piece of their innocence.

I broke when we opened space at Temple Shir Tikva for our teenagers to share their experiences; so many stories of antisemitism, hate, othering, and their very real fear of wearing their Jewish symbols outside of the home and Temple. I broke when we arrived at summer camp and got to embrace the Israeli counselors we had been worrying about over this past year. You could immediately see in their eyes the way this year has changed them. They carried a weight, a sadness, an ache. I broke when Micol woke me in the middle of the night to tell me that six hostages had been murdered, and that amongst them was Hersh Goldberg-Polin. Through his parents’ outreach it felt like we knew him. Through them we loved him, we loved them. I broke as I held my weeping wife in my arms that night. I broke when I had to physically stop her from waking up our 8-year-old son to hold him. So many breaks. So many cracks.

I know that we can all think about the ways, the moments, the experiences that have cracked and broken us over this past year. The pain and the trauma are real and they are overwhelming. The question for us now is what to do with the brokenness – will it be the knockout blow from which we never recover; or will it be something from which we find ways to grow and emerge stronger, more resilient, clearer in who we are. How will we adorn our cracks in gold and let the light in?

I know that this is not easy, and it is certainly not easy when we are still very much in it. But we are the people of the mashber, the birthing stool, who have allowed something new to be birthed out of moments of crisis. The field of posttraumatic growth offers us ways in which we might take these first, small steps.

The first step may well be to simply allow ourselves to feel the pain and trauma of this past year.

With this much loss and pain, we need to allow ourselves time and space to mourn and grieve. For the growth to even be possible we must acknowledge the hurt and sorrow over what has been lost. Mourning for the losses in Israel, the losses for the Jewish community, the losses for the innocents in Gaza, the loss of our sense of safety and acceptance, and the very personal losses we have all experienced. It is healing to cry, to let the tears fall and to allow ourselves to feel sadness.

For many, our instinct is to resist grief, to choke back the tears, to experience that all too familiar lump in our throat, and the pain that comes with pushing it down. My friends and I used to share our best tips for holding back tears; a favorite was to stare at a bright light. We all know so many tricks to stop ourselves from crying, but how many of us truly know how to experience pain and sorrow in all of its wholeness? Here’s what we know: holding back tears and swallowing sadness only makes it worse. It inevitably exacerbates and prolongs our pain. Carl Jung used to say: what you resist, persists. And worse than prolonging sadness, we’re preventing joy and stopping ourselves from growing. Professor Tal Ben Shahar advises: If I don’t give myself permission to fully experience sadness, I’m preventing myself from experiencing joy. This reminds me of Golda Meir’s poignant quote: “Those who don’t know how to weep with their whole heart don’t know how to laugh either.”

We must allow ourselves the kindness of weeping with our whole heart. In the Jewish commandment v’ahavta lerecha kemocha – you shall love your neighbor as yourself,[5] we always focus on the obligations to our neighbor; but we forget the fundamental commandment to love ourselves. While there is always a place, and a mandate, for kindness towards the world (and this can help with posttraumatic growth), at this moment, we need to show kindness towards ourselves.

Imagine if we were as kind to ourselves as we are to the baby learning to walk. We would not focus on our failures or berate ourselves for our brokenness. Instead, we would give ourselves the time to find our balance. We would celebrate being able to slowly put one foot in front of the other. We would not be disheartened by falling or failing, but would recognize in those experiences that we have the strength to pick ourselves up and try again. We would allow ourselves to embark on a path of recovery and growth.

The research suggests that posttraumatic growth is twice as likely as PTSD; but the same research says that in order for it to happen, we must know that it’s possible. We need to know that out of this moment of trauma and crisis we can grow into something new. Internalizing the message of the mashber – the birthing stool, that something new can be born out of crisis. Appreciating our own breaks and cracks, not as signs of weakness, but as the places where we can let the light in to illuminate something new and beautiful. Remembering that just like when we were children, we have the ability to pick ourselves up, to dust ourselves off, and to try again. Because that’s how we learn. Because that’s who we are.

As we seek to emerge from this moment of crisis and pain, of trauma and brokenness – I believe the shofar can be our model. We begin with a tekiah, a long blast, representative of our wholeness in our prior life. In the shevarim (from that same Hebrew root meaning broken), we hear in those three breaks the cracks beginning to form. In the teruah, the breaks have multiplied. Nine broken blasts. Shattered shards echoing in our ears. But out of these experiences, in the final blast, something new is born; the tekiah gedolah. Similar to that initial blast, but longer and stronger – it is different and unique. Powerful and whole, but born out of the brokenness.

Right now, we sit together in teruah. In our brokenness, our short, choked blasts. But our cracks, however jagged, can let the light in again. We can be whole again. We can find joy again. We can laugh again. And we can dance again. Our cracks are not the end, but the beginning of something new. Something beautiful.

Tekiah

Shevarim

Teruah

Tekiah Gedola

Shana Tova.

[1] Mishnah Arachin 1:4 is an example of mashber used in this context.

[2] Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, “Letters to the Next Generation: Reflections for Yom Kippur” p10.

[3] Tal Ben Shahar “Happier, No Matter What: Cultivating Hope, Resilience, and Purpose in Hard Times” p.4

[4] https://www.apa.org/monitor/2016/11/growth-trauma

[5] Leviticus 19:18