The Shards We Carry

Of late, and apropos of this morning’s festival of Shavuot, I find my thoughts turning to a Rabbinic midrash about the revelation at Mount Sinai, specifically, the shattering of the first set of tablets.

We know the story. When Moses ascended the mountain to receive the Torah, he stayed there for forty days and forty nights. The newly emancipated children of Israel grew restless as they waited for their leader to return, and needing something to worship, they built the Golden Calf.

When Moses descended the mountain carrying the stone tablets engraved with God’s words, he saw his people engaged in idolatry. In a fit of rage, he threw the tablets to the ground, shattering them. A second set of tablets was subsequently created and placed in the Ark of the Covenant. But what, the rabbis of the Talmud ask, happened to the shattered fragments of the first set? Were the shards left on the mountain? Like the Golden Calf itself, were they destroyed – fragments of a painful memory better left in the past? Some things, no doubt, are better left behind.

The rabbis suggest otherwise. Luhot v’shivrei luhot munahot ba-aron, states the Talmud. The tablets and the broken tablets side-by-side in the ark together. (Berakhot 8b) The image is a powerful one, as instructive as it is counterintuitive. The same God who performed the miracle of splitting the sea, who brought the plagues upon Egypt, who redeemed the Israelites from their servitude, either could not or would not put the broken pieces of the tablets back together again. As for the Israelites, who could blame them if they thought to wish away the darkest moment of their desert sojourn, if they sought to sweep the shattered remnants of the whole incident under the rug. But that is not what happened; that is not what they did. They picked up the pieces and put them in the ark. No shard left behind. They remembered the hurt and held onto the pain, even as they put one foot ahead of the other. The shards they carried step-by-step toward the Promised Land.

“Some things,” wrote Megan Devine, “cannot be fixed; they can only be carried.” In all my years as a rabbi, nobody has ever reflected to me that they have gotten over grief or transcended loss. People learn not to fix their brokenness; they carry it with them throughout their lives. For some, including many in this room today, the carrying comes by way of ritual – the daily or weekly recitation of Kaddish; the Yizkors, the yahrzeits, the memorial candles – our Jewish toolbox that provides us the language to express that which cannot be expressed. For others, the toolbox is different – not religious per se. Poetry, art, journaling, meditation, exercise, or other practices – any number of vehicles by which a person learns to carry that which cannot be fixed. Not so much to make sense of loss, but to build a scaffolding on which one can move through its stages.

Many, I know, choose to go at it alone. “I am the only one who knows what I am going through,” they say, “who feels as I feel. I can do without the well-meaning, but often hurtful ‘this too shall pass’ platitudes of others.” Others, I know, find strength in companionship. “My hurt,” they say, “may be unique to me, but there are others who have lost a spouse, a sibling, a child, a parent, a friend. They are not me, their loved ones are not mine, nor is their hurt. And yet, there is comfort in kinship. We are fellow travelers on a journey of loss, and it is good not to be alone in my existential loneliness. Nobody can fix me, not even myself, but we all carry loss, and we can all carry each other forward.

The other week a congregant shared with me that she was learning to “live in the and.” It was an odd turn of phrase; I had never heard it before. She explained that she was still shattered, and she had to go to work. She was still mourning, and life could not come to a standstill. She felt herself to be in the shadow of death, and she had to choose life. There is a reason tradition teaches that upon returning home from the cemetery to the shiva house one is required to eat what is called se’udat havra’ah, a meal of consolation or recovery. It reminds us that yes, we have lost, and we are still living. We need to eat. It is the first act in a lifetime of “living in the and.”

I spoke to another congregant this past week on the occasion of the one-year yahrzeit of her loved one. I inquired how she was holding up. She explained that one year out, things were actually worse, not better. The reality, the finality of her loved one’s passing is more inescapable, more suffocating. And yet, she went on to share all the ways she was honoring the life, not the death of the one for whom she mourned. She too, was learning to “live in the and.” Death she could not explain, and yet she pressed herself to find purpose. “Some things cannot be fixed; they can only be carried.”

Every Shavuot, we turn our attention to the book of Ruth, the righteous Moabite whose acceptance of the Jewish faith becomes a paradigm for our own acceptance of Torah. Traditional as such a reading may be, we do the story a disservice if we miss that the book is as much about trauma as it is about Torah, if we overlook who is arguably the book’s primary protagonist, Ruth’s mother-in-law, Naomi.

Let me explain. Like so many biblical stories, the book begins with a journey due to famine in the land. Naomi journeys to Moab with her husband and two sons. By the book’s third verse, Naomi’s husband is dead, and though her two sons marry local Moabite women, by the fifth verse, her sons are dead as well. This entire story will unfold in the wake of inexplicable loss. Naomi returns to her people in Bethlehem, widowed and weathered, and accompanied by her daughter-in-law Ruth. The women of Bethlehem greet her asking: “Can this be Naomi?” Naomi means “pleasant,” or “pleasing.” “Do not call me Naomi,” she replies. “Call me Mara (as in maror) because God has made my lot very bitter.” If the book of Job seeks to answer why bad things happen to good people, this story seeks to answer when bad things happen to good people, namely, how will a bereft and embittered woman navigate her grief and carry her loss? It is interesting to note that by the end of the book, Naomi’s condition has not fundamentally changed. Her husband and sons are still dead. She is still a widow. There is no Hollywood ending. Nothing has been fixed; she is still carrying her grief. But – and this is the parting image of the book – she is also carrying something else: the child born to Ruth. It is an image that does not so much provide resolution, but signals Naomi’s resolve to see beyond the horizon of her heartache. The women’s chorus, previously instructed to call her Mara, tellingly, refer to her as Naomi, but how Naomi herself feels, we are never told. Given what she has gone through, I choose to grant Naomi the courtesy of privacy for her sorrow. Ruth marries well, joins the Jewish people, and becomes great-grandmother to a king. Naomi just presses forward as best she can. It’s OK, as the title of Devine’s book counsels, if she’s not OK.

Friends, not every cloud has a silver lining. When we arrive at Yizkor, when we think of those whom we are remembering, the sorrow that their passing has left in our hearts, we are decidedly not OK. I know how lucky I am to have arrived at this stage of life with my parents, and my entire immediate family all of this world. I have much for which to be grateful. And yet, when I think of loved ones no longer living, confidants and congregants taken before their time – taken at all – I am stopped in my tracks. I wonder how it can be that this world of ours continues to turn, marked as it is with so many missing pieces. And this Shavuot in particular, I think not just of individual souls, but of the soul of our people. The sons and daughters, the husbands and wives, the brothers and sisters whose lives were taken from us on October 7 and those whose lives continue to be taken from us in the defense of Israel. As caring stakeholders in our global Jewish family, we are all carrying loss; this year we are all praying for those precious souls and for comfort for their families. This year, no Jew is OK. We are all learning to “live in the and.”

Some here at Yizkor, like Naomi, mourn a spouse or a child. Some a parent, a sibling, a lover, or a friend. “Grief,” as the saying goes, “is the price one pays for love.” Here in this room, in this moment, there are no “chin up,” “everything happens for a reason,” words to assuage our sorrows. We are here merely to find a place to give voice to our grief. We are here, perhaps, to discover that while our sorrow is ours alone, we are not alone. We are here to meditate on the qualities of those loved ones whom we remember, to remind ourselves that the qualities by which they lived can live on in our own lives if we endeavor to make it so. We are here because this year we are all sleepwalking through grief. We are committed to honor the dead by choosing life.

In the many weddings at which I have officiated these past months, I have found my thoughts lingering on the final act of every chuppah – the breaking of the glass. The shards beneath the chuppah represent the fragility and the brokenness of the Jewish people – always powerful, and acutely so since October 7. I am struck by the fact that a couple’s first step – just as I have pronounced them married – is on those shards. As with the wedding couple, as with the Israelites in the desert, so too all of us today. We carry the hurt, we hold the pain, and we hold hope for a future that may, in truth, exist beyond any of us. It can’t be fixed; it can only be carried. We take a step forward. It is not everything, but it is a place to start. And God knows, we are all in need of a place to start. The shards we carry, every step of the way, on our journey to the Promised Land.

Devine, Megan. It’s OK that You’re Not OK. Sounds True Publishing, 2021.