Rabbi Marc E. Berkson - Yom Kippur Morning -- 5767
The Broken And The Whole
As we celebrate over the course of a year, we clearly recognize every Jewish holiday’s agricultural roots and historical connections. We also understand that, in celebrating them, we find ways to commemorate and reenact or relive the actual historic/religious experience. We all know Pesach as our springtime festival with green as its primary color. Commemorating our liberation from bondage, we, ourselves, go forth into freedom as we relive the Exodus. Shavuot follows fifty days later as our festival of first fruits. Occurring as spring becomes summer, we celebrate revelation, once again putting ourselves at the foot of Mt. Sinai. And autumn brings our harvest festival of Sukkot. We live in booths filled with the produce of the harvest—those same booths in which we dwelt during our years of wandering in the wilderness.
These Yamim Nora’im, these High Holy Days however? Perhaps Rosh Hashanah as the creation of the world with its observance on the seventh month paralleling the observance of Shabbat on the seventh day. Perhaps. But Yom Kippur? A real seasonal/agricultural linkage? A true historic connection? It was a gap begging the ancient rabbis to be filled. And we already know so much of the story. Moses had ascended Mt. Sinai to receive the stone tablets containing the Torah; for forty days he had been away from the children of Israel. In his absence and in their fear, the people engage in idol worship. God, furious, sends Moses back down to witness their behavior. As he descends the mountain, he hears their singing; as he approaches the camp, he sees the Israelites dancing around the golden calf. To the golden calf, the people proclaim, “This is the god who brought us up out of Egypt!” The text tells us that, in his anger, Moses hurls the tablets from his hand shattering them at the foot of the mountain. Others say the tablets slipped from his hands in sadness. Still others tell us that carrying the tablets were easy for Moses when he thought he was bringing them to a people anxious to receive them; when he realized that his efforts were for naught, the tablets became far too heavy for him and they dropped, their shattered fragments reflecting Moses’ shattered heart.
But the story does not end here; if it did, we would not be here reading it this morning. God wants to destroy the people; Moses intercedes to save them. And thus Moses ascends the mountain once again, this second time on Rosh Hodesh Elul, on the first day of Elul, the first day of the last month of the Hebrew year. Again, he spends forty days atop the mountain. Which means he returns to the people on the 10th day of the next month, the 10th day of Tishri, the 10th day of the New Year, on Yom Kippur. Thus does Yom Kippur become another day of revelation, the day of the giving of the second set of tablets. Yet more. For, as Rabbi Arthur Green has pointed out, “this is the occasion when Moses cries out to God to see God’s glory and is hidden in the cleft on Sinai’s rock as the glory passes by. In that moment, God’s thirteen attributes of mercy are called out. The recitation of these becomes a verbal talisman of atonement, and their frequent repetition forms the core of our penitential liturgy throughout this season and especially on Yom Kippur.”
The rabbis firmly establish Yom Kippur’s connection to sacred history. They even give it a seasonal connection if you will. But two more pieces of the story remain. Atop Sinai, Moses discovers that the second set of tablets would not be like the first. Surely, they would contain the same words. The first set of tablets had been all God’s work; in some way, God’s finger had inscribed or burned in every letter on both sides of the tablets. Moses could not sit passively to receive the second set. He had much work to do. In fact, he had to carve every letter himself as God revealed the Torah to him. Torah was no longer a gift of love from God. While God still loved us, God now expected us to work in partnership. As one commentator wrote of the second set, it “was written with a greater knowledge of human weakness, at the hand of an imperfect human being, rather than by a perfect deity.”
In the meantime, down below, the people sincerely seek repentance. In Moses’ absence, they fast from sunrise to sunset. And they gather together all the shattered fragments of the broken tablets. Upon Moses’ return, the intact second set of the tablets are placed into the aron, into the ark, along with all the broken pieces of the original set of tablets. The Israelites were then to carry with them the two sets of tablets—the broken and the whole—in the Ark of the Covenant during their forty years in the wilderness. They brought both sets together with them into the Promised Land and they remained together in the ark in the Temple in Jerusalem.
The whole and the broken, side by side, in the Ark of the Covenant. That aron ha-brit, that Ark of the Covenant, was also known as the aron ha-edut, as the Ark of Witness. And thus a witness, a lesson for us—that the whole and the broken side by side in all of us and we carry both with us on our own journeys. And perhaps no one knows this better than an alcoholic. Rabbi Twerski tells of one man with thirty years of sobriety recalling his withdrawal symptoms after his last binge. He shares his words. “I can remember the terrifying hallucinations, being tied to the bed with leather straps, struggling to escape from the frightening monstrosities that were threatening me, my back in mortal pain from convulsions, clawing with my fingernails at the restrains, until my fingers bled. I remember this so well, and may I never forget it.” That memory constitutes the broken he carries with the whole. And he carries the broken with him so that he can remain whole.
Or take another man celebrating his twenty-fifth anniversary of sobriety. Explaining how he has stayed off of alcohol, he says, “The man I once was drank, and the man I once was will drink again. I am sober today because I am not the same person who drank. If I ever go back to being that person, I will drink again.” The broken pieces are the man who once drank. He knows that he carries those broken pieces within him. He, too, knows what he must do to stay whole.
One might also say that, for both of these men, those broken pieces still retain some sense of holiness. Just as the fragments of the original set of tablets remained in the ark and thus retained holiness even after they were broken, so, too, do we as human beings. Perhaps that is how they began their journeys with AA. That there is a power greater than themselves to which to turn for help and support. For us, that power is God—and that God loves us and that, even broken, we are holy—and that God is waiting for us, begging for us to reach out.
For that matter, the whole and the broken have to exist within any one of us to experience full forgiveness. As I said last night, we only know that forgiveness is complete when both the perpetrator of the sin and the victim of the sin find themselves in a parallel situation to the one in which the perpetrator blew it but now resists the wrongdoing. Our process of forgiveness necessarily implies not forgetting the wrongdoing, the sin, but remembering it. Neither may forget the wrong done, neither the perpetrator nor the victim; by remembering it and not doing it again, the relationship is restored. In other words, forgiveness means carrying the broken pieces with you; you may never forget them. By holding onto the broken pieces, you become whole and you bring wholeness to a broken relationship.
Yet perhaps it is Bay Area Jewish teacher and psychotherapist Estelle Frankel who best understands the broken and the whole we each carry inside. I first heard of her from a colleague, from Rabbi Paula Marcus, in a sermon a couple of years ago. Dr. Frankel combines modern therapy with Jewish tradition in her book Sacred Therapy where she writes:
The two revelations at Sinai can be seen as symbolizing the inevitable stages we go through in our spiritual development. The first tablets, like the initial visions we have for our lives, frequently shatter, especially when they are based on naively idealistic assumptions….Yet if we learn from out mistakes and find ways to pick up the broken pieces of shattered dreams, we can go on to re-create our lives out of the rubble of our initial failures….The myth of the broken tablets teaches us that when we abandon old pathways, it is important that we hold on to the beauty and essence of the dreams we once held dear…for ultimately the whole and the broken live side by side in all of us.
For Frankel, the broken pieces of those shattered dreams can become stepping stones to a new wholeness. In his new book, Overcoming Life’s Disappointments, Rabbi Harold Kushner shares how Dr. Frankel used the story of Moses and the shattered tablets to help heal a patient who had trouble accepting the world’s imperfections and its unreadiness to support her dreams. As she approached her 40th birthday, she was angry and felt like a failure. Let me let Rabbi Kushner now explain the therapy or better, the ritual, that Dr. Frankel used to free this woman of the conviction that the world should be fair. She had the woman write down all of her childhood dreams of how she imagined her life would unfold, dreams of marriage and family, professional success and recognition. She then placed that document of dreams into a beautiful vase which she owned and treasured. Then, in Dr. Frankel’s presence, she smashed the vase and burned the paper. Dr. Frankel explained that “smashing the vase, something she had been deeply attached to for a long time, became a powerful symbol of letting go of the past and allowing life to bring change. In grieving over her lost hopes and dreams, she began to feel more ready to accept her real, though imperfect, life.” The woman then took the broken pieces of the vase home with her and made them into a mosaic to serve as a reminder of how she had once dreamed, of how she had been disappointed and how she had overcome that disappointment, and how she was prepared to play the cards that life had dealt rather than wishing that her life had turned out differently.
Rabbi Kushner uses Moses as the paradigm in his book of someone who finds dream after dream disappointed and then finds ways to overcome that disappointment. The shattered tablets reflected his shattered dream of forging a nation of former slaves into a people who would follow God’s laws without hesitation. Another rabbinic tradition has Moses, himself, gathering up the broken pieces to place inside the ark with the second set of tablets. He will still dream, but a different dream, a more realistic dream.
But I still prefer the image of the people gathering the broken fragments of the tablets. For that is what we do this day, this Yom Kippur. There are broken fragments and pieces all around us—the fragments of broken dreams and of broken relationships, the pieces of broken loves and broken lives, the fragments of who we were and who we wanted to become. We gather all of those pieces and fragments to carry with us as we begin anew—as we turn to page 338 in our Mahzors to continue with the ritual surrounding keriat ha-torah, the ritual surrounding the reading of the Torah this day of the giving of the second tablets, with Moses hidden in the cleft on Sinai’s rock as God’s glory passes by….