Community Torah Corner, March 1, 2024

 

These lyrics from Leonard Cohen’s oft-quoted song “Anthem,” speak to a perennial human phenomenon: our obsession and desire for wholeness and perfection and the reality of pain and brokenness.

 

This Shabbat we will read Parshat Ki Tisa, the well-known story of Moses smashing the two tablets of the Law after the Israelites built the golden calf. This violent outburst by Moses could have resulted in the transition of leadership – perhaps to someone less reactionary. But instead, God in God’s compassion and generosity, bestows Moses with a second set of tablets. The rabbis teach that this second set was given with the caveat that Moses include both sets in the Ark. The broken pieces must sit alongside the whole tablets.

 

Why was Moses directed to do such a thing? To teach us the lesson of being a human being in this world. Life is an ark. It would be so much nicer and neater and more comfortable to only display the second set of tablets. But that first set was an important stage in the history of our people. Ultimately we learn that it’s not only the whole that is holy. What’s been broken, what’s imperfect, that’s holy too. It’s why the Hebrew word for perfection, mushlemet, comes from the same root as shalom, wholeness. Better than perfection is the potential for wholeness and maybe even peace. It is a moment when we see life beyond the garden of perfection. A life that is not perfect, but is really, really good. Holy, and sacred, and meaningful and amazing.

 

These are intensely imperfect days in our Jewish world. We are fragmented and broken, trying to continue our contemporary march from slavery to freedom. We see the signs of this: posters of hostages captured on October 7th and yahrtzeit candles remembering the many who have been killed by terrorism or in battle. It can feel nearly impossible to imagine any wholeness in our world right now. But we are blessed with the dugma in our parsha, the Torah’s sacred example of a God who ordained that the two sets live in the same ark. We are also given this command – to hold the broken pieces of this moment and the potential – and the hope – of wholeness and the perfection of peace.