Rosh Hashana 2022:Nothing so whole as a broken heart

Rabbi Margaret

I stand before you tonight with a broken heart.  A year ago when I chanted, “On Rosh Hashana it is written and on Yom Kippur it is sealed, who shall live and who shall die…” never in a million years did I imagine that at the next Rosh Hashana I would look out and Mickey Chalfin wouldn’t be in the front row — my sweet, beautiful, funny Mickey, who loved what and who he loved so much — whether it was Bob Dylan or a chocolate malt or Pulga or this beautiful community or al achat kamma v’chamma — as in the minor case so much more so in the major case — me.  My heart is torn open.  I am bereft.

And I look around at any circle I am in these days: this one, also widowed, this one with a sick child, this one abandoned, this one mourning the death of a parent.  This one caring for a dying friend.  This one seriously ill.  This one worn down from the particular ways that the burdens of COVID fell on his life.  This one jobless.  This one directionless.  This one overwhelmed.  This one frightened.  This one agonizing about refugees in Poland, in Tijuana.  This one standing vigil as ancient trees are felled.

Kisa-Gotami, mourning the death of her child, was instructed by the Buddha to bring back a handful of mustard seeds.  The seeds, she was instructed, must come from houses never touched by death.  Needless to say, Kisa-Gotami came back empty-handed.  

Here too, I expect, few of of us have a lot of mustard seeds to contribute.

“There is nothing so whole as a broken heart,” the Kotzker Rebbe famously said.  To which I answer, “What is so great about a broken heart?”  Really, why would anyone want a broken heart?

I learned a Yiddish word, a hasidische word: tzubrokhenkeit — the state of heartbrokenness, the practice, one might even say, of allowing one’s heart to break.  Or maybe better, since one never chooses to break one’s own heart, the practice of not hurrying to patch up a shattered heart as quickly as possible.  The practice of letting what is broken stay broken for awhile.  

What’s so great about a broken heart?

The word SHALOM means “whole,” like a whole pie, like making a merchant whole by paying your bill.  God is oseh shalom — maker of wholeness.  Maker of Peace. We pray for peace in every service.  We don’t pray for shattering.  

But we don’t need to.  Because shattering comes so easily.   It seems, in contrast to peace, so natural, so endemic, so pervasive. 

God, in order to make a world, had to contract to make space for that world.  To contract, God poured Godself into clay vessels.  And the vessels shattered, scattering broken clay shards impregnated with nitzutzot, sparks of Divine Essence, everywhere.   This is (a very simplified version of) the story of creation as rendered by the Holy AR’I, Rabbi Yitzhak Luria, the kabbalistic master.  

So brokenness is built into the very existence of existence.  Brokenness is matter.  Brokenness is particles. Brokenness is entropy.  Brokenness is chaos.  Brokenness is fragments. 

Moshe Rabbeinu sat atop Mount Sinai for forty days and forty nights, while God inscribed tablets of the law with black fire on white fire.  At the end Moses took these amazing tablets in hand and, as he was heading back down the mountain to bring the law to the people, he heard the sound of revelry and debauchery.  The people were worshiping a golden calf.   He threw down the tablets, carved by God, written in God’s own hand, and shattered them.  

At God’s command Moses carved a new set of tablets and the Divine Hand re-inscribed the Law.  “Hew for yourself two tablets of stone like the first…and I will write on the tablets the words that were on the first tablets, which you broke, and you shall put them in the ark.  (Deut. 10:1-2)  That “them” is understood by the rabbis to say that both the broken shards from the first set of tablets and the replacement set were placed in the holy ark together and carried with the Israelites everywhere they went.  It’s a beautiful, poignant image: the people shlepping the broken tablets with them as they traversed the desert.

The Reshit Chochmah teaches:

The Zohar teaches that the human heart is the Ark. And it is known that in the Ark were stored both the Tablets and the Broken Tablets. Similarly, a person's heart must be full of Torah... and similarly, a person's heart must be a broken heart, a beaten heart, so that it can serve as a home for the Shechinah. For the Shechinah [divine presence] only dwells within broken vessels, which are the poor, whose heart is a broken and lowly heart. And whoever has a haughty heart propels the Shechinah away from him, as it is said in Proverbs, “A g’vah lev is an abomination to HASHEM.”  (16:5)

(Reshit Hochma, R. Eliyahu deVidash, Gate of Holiness 7; 16th C.)

But why?  Why must a person’s heart be a broken heart, a beaten heart, so that it can serve as a home for the Shechinah?   Why would the Shechinah dwell only in broken vessels?  That sounds so miserable.  How could this be the preferred dwelling of the Divine Presence?  

I wonder if there is a clue in the antonym: g’vah lev — an elevated heart, a haughty heart?  Haughty as in height.  Maybe an elevated heart thinks it has perspective.  Maybe it thinks it sees the big picture.  Maybe it thinks it understands.  Maybe it thinks it knows what to do.  Maybe it thinks it can do what it knows to do.  Maybe it thinks it is in charge.

A heart with height, with perspective, with understanding and capacity, would be great.  If it was correct.  

I have walked around much of my life with a g’vah lev.  And maybe sometimes I really did have perspective and understanding.  But a g’vah lev is an entitled heart.  It thinks it knows what is needed.  It thinks it is needed.  It feels important.  A g’vah lev is a First World heart.  

Heartbreak topples the entitled heart from its heights.  The broken heart is leveled.  It is down in the soil, scattered on the ground.  It does not know what the world needs.  It hardly knows what it wants for breakfast.  

Many of us feel heartbroken about aspects of our public world.  Many of us mourn what feels like the gruesome death of much that we have valued in the public realm.  Many of us feel heartbroken as well by the damage done to the natural world, now so evident in extreme heat waves and floods and extinctions.  Maybe a heartbroken community, a heartbroken culture, is not such a bad thing.

I wonder what it would be like to intentionally practice tzubrochenkeit in these realms?  What would it be like to stay in the heartbreak, in the shatteredness, to not quickly take charge and try to sew it up with programs and projects and campaigns?  What would it be like to lay aside haughtiness, to climb down from elevated heights of knowing and doing?

The promise of a broken heart is that Shechinah will dwell there.  There is space in the broken heart.  It is possible — and I hope I am not torturing a metaphor here — that the more we think we know, the more important we think we are, the less room there is for Shechinah to flow in and reside.  The more space we take up, the less is available for the Oseh Shalom, for the true Maker of Wholeness. 

It is possible that in our shatteredness — and I am no fan of shatteredness.  I loved my joyful, loving home and my sweet life with Mickey Chalfin —but it is just maybe possible that in accepting heartbreak, since it happens anyhow — in allowing what is broken to remain broken for awhile — in not hurrying to seize back control— maybe there is space for holy love.

Mickey used to say, “I don’t believe in God.  But I believe in love.  And Margaret believes the same thing.  She just uses different words.”  That’s kind of pretty much true.  I believe in love.  And I think that love and Shechinah — the tender, local, immanent, indwelling aspect of the Holy Divine — are probably very close to each other.  And so it might be said that haughtiness of heart propels Shechinah away from it, because it has all the answers, because it replaces tenderness with power, because there is no room for love.  It might even be said that a haughty heart, by repelling Shechinah, repels peace.  Because God is Oseh Shalom, Maker of peace.  Maybe we can’t have love and control in the same heart.

And so, heartbroken friends, perhaps in being lowered from our heights, from our knowing, from our control of how the world operates, perhaps something beyond our own perspective will find space to dwell.  And none of this for me replaces Mickey Chalfin, or any of your beloveds, or the confidence of our youth, or the way I want the world to be.  But so it is.  We are, many of us, heartbroken.  And maybe by staying there for awhile, being with our shattered hearts, feeling ourselves humbled and broken and close to the ground, maybe peace and wholeness will flow in and flow through us and flow out of us into our heartbroken world.  Maybe.

And in this way I can understand the Kotzker, that nothing is as whole as a broken heart.