For a printable PDF please click here: parshat Ki Tissa broken tablets 5779
We all live between the first and the second tablets We all live in the moment of that shattering In the midst of the fragmentation Of the rupture Of the regret We all dream of the return to the ideal To the start To the whole To the moment before the deceit and the betrayal We all want to forget the dance around the calf We want to ignore the anger and disenchantment etched on the face of the Divine We all dream of the fairy-tale life we had imagined Before we disillusioned ourselves and others Before we ate from the tree and paradise was lost Before we killed Hevel – the nothingness within Before we threw our brother in the pit for the sin of expectant privilege Or played a deception on our father for the sin of transcendent ideals Before we became so convinced that the imperialism of our truth became impenetrable affording us a blindness that can’t see beyond or past or through Before we donned the clothes of God Himself Before we became the stiff-necked people whose incapacity to paradigm shift led to the worship of the static and the stagnant- money, self interest, Rabbinic authority or even idolatry As ends rather than as means And now we are here in the moment after the before and annihilation is imminent
But the message of the Divine is other
It’s liberating and debilitating all at once It’s transformative and elevating It calls us to live between destruction and redemption Brokenness and wholeness To house within ourselves the tablets shattered and restored The ideal and the real The acceptance and regret The authoritative and the autonomous It beckons us to follow in His path To reimagine and recreate To redeem and reframe To build resilience and transformation Rather than destruction and oblivion And in the face of a promise broken, a relationship betrayed, an ideal pulled apart by human frailty We are called upon to return to our source, find meaning in our downfall and flourish in our limitations and inadequacies Riddled with imperfections we’re given the space to be who we are And in our pit, our downfall, feel the countenance of the Divine So even in fragmentation lies the vestiges of wholeness and even in destruction lies the seeds of redemption And that is where God begins His return to Self and we begin ours to Him
שובו אלי ואשובה אליכם – return to me and I will return to you Oscillating between everything that is human and Divine, ideal and real, redeeming and fragmenting is the essence of all It is there in the sanctuary of God the frailty of humanity remains shattered and yet quite literally basks in the light of the Divine