Shabbat Shuvah, 5787

Tonight is a special Shabbat—the Sabbath between Rosh Hashanah (the Jewish new year) and Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement) also known as the High Holy Days. 

Like all New Year traditions, it’s a time a renewal and reflection, of repentance and repair, and of commitments made to do and be better in the year to come. 

There is a Hasidic teaching Rabbi Alan Lew (author of “This is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared”) loved to repeat:

“There is nothing so whole as a broken heart.”

At first, this sounds like a contradiction. We know what heartbreak feels like. It does not feel whole. It feels like something has gone catastrophically wrong: a rupture, a break; a relationship has ended, a hope has failed, a person we love is gone, or we have finally seen the harm our own choices have caused. We may arrive at the High Holy Days carrying shards of ourselves we would prefer not to examine too closely…

But Rabbi Lew asks us to distinguish between a shattered ego and a broken heart.

The ego shatters when the story we tell about ourselves can no longer be maintained: 

I am always right. 
I am in control. 
I am the injured one. 
I would never cause harm. 

When that self-image is threatened, we may become angry, defensive, or ashamed.

But a broken heart is different. A broken heart is undefended. It no longer has the strength—or the desire—to pretend. It says: 

This is what happened. 

This is what I did. 

This is what was done to me. 

This is what I cannot repair alone.

And, according to Rabbi Lew, this is not a spiritual failure. It may very well be the beginning of new kind of spiritual life.

Jewish tradition gives us an extraordinary image for this. Moses descends from Sinai carrying the first tablets of the covenant, carved by G-d. When Moses sees the Golden Calf, he throws them down, and the tablets shatter. Later, after anger, grief, pleading, and reconciliation, Moses carves a second set with his own hands.

Jewish tradition teaches that both sets were then placed in the Holy Ark: the whole tablets and the broken pieces. The remnants of the “perfect” tablets, and the ones constructed from a place of grief and repentance. 

The shattered tablets were not discarded. They were not treated as an embarrassment to be hidden outside the camp. They were carried in the very holiest place, beside the tablets that had remained whole.

Shabbat Shuvah is an invitation to our hearts:
May our hearts become like that Ark. 
May we carry what is whole in us—our generosity, courage, wisdom, and capacity to begin again. 
But we also carry the broken pieces—the promises we did not keep, the grief we could not prevent, the words we cannot call back, the selves we once believed we had to be. Our brokenness is not the whole of who we are. But neither is it refuse. When held honestly, it too can become sacred.

This is the work of teshuvah. We often translate teshuvah as “repentance” but its deeper meaning is turning or returning. 

We turn away from illusion and toward reality. 
We return toward the people we have neglected. 
We return to the truths we have avoided. 

We return to the self beneath our defenses. 
And in doing so, we discover that we have also returned to the Divine.

Forgiveness, then, is not a matter of persuading a distant deity to become merciful. Mercy is already woven into reality. The prophet Micah tells us that G-d does not retain anger forever, but delights in steadfast love; that G-d returns to us in compassion and casts our misdeeds into the depths of the sea.

Yet mercy does not require us to deny what happened. Rosh Hashanah confronts us with din—the clear, unsparing vision of judgment. We must first see. 
We must name. 
We must stop hiding. 
Only then can we experience the spaciousness of rachamim on Yom Kippur—the spirit of compassion.

This is why, during these holy days, we gently strike the heart as we confess. Some say we are punishing ourselves for our misdeeds. I see this differently. We are not punishing ourselves by beating upon our breasts. We are knocking on the doors of our hearts, crying out:

“Open, oh fragile and resilient heart of mine. 
Open to what you regret.
Open to what you have lost.
Open to the person you have harmed.
Open to the ways you, too, have been wounded.
Open to the possibility that honesty need not end in shame or humiliation.
Open to mercy. To forgiveness. To compassion. 
It is already here” 

We cannot force such an opening. 
The ego cannot muscle its way into surrender. 
We can only become willing: willing to be vulnerable, willing to relinquish control, willing to stand before the Divine without disguise.

Rabbi Lew wrote,

“Every soul needs to express itself. Every heart needs to crack itself open.”  

These are not new needs. They are among our most ancient human yearnings: to move from anger toward healing, from denial toward consciousness, from numbness toward renewal.

So perhaps the question before us is not, “How can I make myself perfect enough to be forgiven?”

Perhaps it is: “Can I become honest enough to be found?”

May we have the courage in 5787 to carry both sets of tablets: what is whole and what has shattered. 
May our hearts become holy arks, spacious enough to hold them both. 
And through the openings in those hearts, may compassion enter.

Open our hearts.

And help us begin again. 💜

 

©Nick Bantock (who else?)