Shabbat shalom. Shanah tovah.
So, my sister and I shared a bedroom growing up. Because she was so much older than me with an eleven-year age gap between us, everything she did seemed cool, but it was her summer beach trips with friends that felt legendary to me, filled with fun and an independence I could only imagine.
On our dresser sat a clear jar, and every time she returned home from those epic trips to the ocean, she would deposit into it a few new fragments of seaglass. I watched the layers build summer after summer - smooth browns, vibrant greens, frosted whites, and the occasional, almost miraculous flash of blue or red.
It's why I’ve always loved seaglass. But even more than the seaglass itself, I’ve always been drawn to the actions of the person committed to finding seaglass, the patient beachcomber who was able to discern beauty amid chaos. Looking back, I realize I wasn't just watching a jar fill up with discarded glass; I was bearing witness to something sacred.
The shoreline after a violent ocean storm can look chaotic; it is littered with debris, tangled seaweed, sharp shells, and driftwood. To the untrained eye, it can look like wreckage. But the beachcomber walks out into that wreckage with an entirely different intention. The beachcomber walks slowly. They bend down, looking past the mess because they know there is beauty in there just waiting to be noticed and claimed.
Sometimes when I look out at our broken world today, I feel like I am seeing that shoreline after a storm. Littered along the shore are the remnants of the storms we’ve faced: grief, conflict, confusion, and pain, and I ask myself: How did we get here? How do we live amidst this wreckage? How do we live with this broken world?
As I am prone to do, I turn to our tradition to help me wrestle with these questions. I feel the clues are like seaglass glinting up from the sand just waiting to be discovered.
Maybe the mystics hold an answer for me, for us. So, I turn to the sixteenth-century mystic Rabbi Isaac Luria who answered these questions not with a historical critique or a story of human failure, but with a profoundly different understanding of creation than the orderly story we read this morning from Genesis.
Rabbi Luria taught that at the very beginning, God was everything and everywhere. To make room for something else, for us, God lovingly had to constrict God’s self in a process known as tzimtzum. It was like God took an enormous breath in. And then into that new, raw, empty space, God breathed out brilliant, blinding divine light. Luria taught that ten cosmic containers of creation were formed to hold the light. But the light was too intense, and the vessels began to crack, and they shattered. The shattering, however, did not cause holiness to vanish; instead, the holiness splintered. The sparks of divine light fell into a million jagged fragments and tumbled down into our material world, becoming trapped inside the debris of this beautiful catastrophe. Kabbalah, Jewish mysticism teaches that we are living in the aftermath of that explosion. Every day, we are walking on holy shards of shattered glass.
Yet, this story need not be read as tragedy. It should be read as holy opportunity.
The world we live in is like that shoreline after a storm. Our task as human beings is not to pretend the world isn’t full of brokenness and jagged edges. It is to stand amidst the wreckage, refuse to look away, and begin the work of tikkun, the work of repair by finding the broken pieces of the divine hidden among our world. The fragments are in everything, but they are most often disguised as the ordinary and as the frustrating and as the painful.
When we look around and see the aftereffects of the violent storms on our world, our eyes and hearts can stay on the tangled kelp and the torn fishing nets, on our fractured society and our torn social fabric. But if we are willing to adopt the posture of the patient and curious beachcomber and see and squint, and stay committed to the seeking, we can find the broken fragments just waiting to be redeemed.
Three tools can help us find the sparks. Vulnerability, radical empathy, and small acts of repair.
Vulnerability.
We must begin by first changing how we look at ourselves. Instead of starting by looking out there for the light, we must look within. Too many of us spend so much of our time trying to present a pristine, unbroken facade to our social circles, our colleagues, and even our loved ones. We hide our grief, our doubts, and our failures because we have mistaken wholeness for perfection. But let us remember Luria’s lesson: the universe itself began with a break. If those first cosmic vessels could not hold God’s light without shattering, why would we expect our fragile human hearts to remain unbroken?
The gift of the Lurianic version of creation is its insistence that we accept the impossibility of perfection. The challenge of this new year is to stop treating our wounds as embarrassments and our struggles as secrets. To embrace vulnerability is to look at your own jagged edges and say I am still holy. It is the realization that we do not have to be flawless to be vessels for God’s light. You are worthy of God’s light, and you always have been, and you always will be.
Soon, we will stand together in this sanctuary and sound the shofar. Amidst the piercing clarity of tekiah and the frantic alarm of truah, we will hear the sad notes of shevarim. The sequence of these three broken, rolling blasts can sound to the ear like a human chest heaving, like a person catching their breath after a heavy sob, or letting out a sigh so deep it rattles the ribs. Shevarim translates quite literally as breaks or fractures.
We force ourselves to sit with this sad, broken sound on one of the holiest days of the year for a reason: to remind us that we do not leave our fractures at the sanctuary door. You brought your brokenness into this room today, tucked under your Rosh HaShanah clothes. You brought the medical diagnosis you haven't told your friends about yet. You brought the quiet feeling of drowning depression, or the deep ache of a chair that sits empty at your table this year.
The shofar doesn't demand that we fix these pieces before we praise God. The notes of shevarim simply demand that we live in honesty – at the very least to ourselves. They cry out to us to say: Look at the wreckage. Admit you are hurting. The sounds of the shofar signal to us that this holy, joyous day is big enough to hold both your highest hopes and your deepest fractures simultaneously. You can be joyous and whole and also broken, too. Just like our world.
Radical empathy.
Once we can begin to accept this about ourselves, we are then challenged to look differently at the people around us. It is easy to love what is beautiful and intact. It is profoundly difficult to look at an estranged family member or a former friend who has deeply disappointed us and see anything worth saving. Our natural instinct is to sweep away the broken shards of our failed relationships, so we don’t get cut again. The question lingers: Who have you thrown away?
But the mystic in us, the mystic who remembers our world began with a break, can see the world with different eyes, with empathetic eyes. Empathy is not some soft, sentimental feeling; it is the radical refusal to see anyone as mere debris.
But looking for the nitzotzot, the divine sparks, inside someone who has actively harmed you is a brutal task. It takes courage and a resilient self. Radical empathy requires we look past the sharp, defensive edges of the person lashing out at us. It demands that we stop asking the defensive question, “What is wrong with them?” and start asking the curious questions like “What heavy storm broke them?” And “Where is the trapped divine light trying to get out?”
If we can do this kindness for ourselves, we can do this for others.
This need not mean that we always have to forgive or even engage. But the truth is that we will never find the sparks in the wreckage if we don’t even try to look.
The same is true for how we encounter our fractured society. The fissures in our country and world are so vast that they threaten to paralyze us. The scale of the brokenness looms large. We ask: How do we even begin to mend a global landscape torn by hatred, or a culture splintered by apathy? Let us let Luria’s mythic creation story wash over us. Let it come as a breathtaking relief that we are not required to heal it all.
Small acts of repair.
As we walk the shoreline of our daily existence, we are simply required to pick up the single piece of glass sitting directly in front of us. This is what mysticism teaches us is the true meaning of tikkun olam, the repair of the world. Tikkun olam is picking up one fragment, one holy spark at a time – and then doing the same with the next step forward. Like Rabbi Torop taught us last night: yes, you are required to do something, but so are you and you and you – and me, too.
We are all capable of finding those holy sparks and doing those small acts of repair, those acts of tikkun. A small repair is the note of apology you draft three times, delete twice but finally find the courage to send anyway. A small repair is the deliberate choice to sit quietly next to a grieving friend, swallowing your urge to say “everything happens for a reason” because it doesn’t, and bravely just letting the silence sit between you. A small repair is the quiet, invisible integrity of not cutting corners even though no one would know. It’s making the right choice, especially when no one is watching simply because it is the right choice.
In this new year, don’t expect and look for a pristine, untouched, unbroken beginning. If you do, you will be disappointed. Stop cursing the brokenness in you and in the world and instead spend your sacred energy combing the sand to release the sparks. For it is through vulnerability, radical empathy, and small acts of repair that we gather together the scattered fragments of God to reshape this world.
The ultimate challenge of Rosh Hashanah is to stop waiting for a flawless life before we begin to live fully. The book of the world is written in fragments, but our task is to read it like a love letter.
I have my own jar of sea glass now. It reminds me of my role in this life as a beachcomber. But lately as I walk the shoreline of the world, I find I am drawn more and more to the ocean than the sand. I realize that there are times when we will be called upon to become the beachcomber and pick up the seaglass with its already ocean-softened edges and see it shimmer in the light. But there will also be times in this new year when we will be called upon to become the ocean itself.
When left alone, the broken edges of seaglass and holy vessels are dangerously sharp. But it is the ocean that takes that dangerous piece of glass into its depth, rolls it, tumbles it, and wraps it in a relentless embrace. The ocean doesn’t yell at the glass or punish it for being sharp. It doesn’t demand the broken glass change its shape overnight. The ocean softens it through the patient commitment of turning it over and over again, day after day, year after year. The sharp eventually becomes smooth. What was once dangerous can now be held in the palm of the hand without fear.
There are seasons in our lives when we are too exhausted to be the ocean. There are days when we are the jagged glass, snapping at everyone who gets too close because we are too raw. In those moments, we need someone to hold us in our mess and patiently soften us.
I remember a night recently when I was the one who was completely jagged. I was exhausted, overwhelmed by a tough week, and walking around with my guard up. I snapped at my husband, Jeff over something small that didn’t really matter, my stress turning my words into something sharp. He could have snapped back. He could have met my jaggedness with a jaggedness of his own. Instead, he took a breath, and stayed steady. He didn't raise his voice, and he didn't walk out of the room. He just looked at me with knowing eyes, and said, "Hey, Jill, I know you're exhausted.” He didn't lecture me. He didn't demand I apologize right that second. He just chose to not strike back. In that moment, his calmness became a patient tide. Because he refused to be a rock for me to smash against, the anger went out of me. My shoulders dropped, the fight evaporated, and I was able to take a deep, cleansing breath. He was the ocean for me when I was too sharp to save myself.
There will times in this new year when we will need our family, our friends, our community, God to be our ocean and to soften our sharp edges. And there will be other times when we will be called upon to become the ocean for someone else.
We live in a culture that acts like a hammer. It just shatters people. People are smashed into further fragments of themselves the second they stumble. To become the ocean means to offer a steady, rolling grace that refuses to abandon any piece. We heal others, we heal ourselves by becoming the environment of love and time that allows the sharpest, most defensive edges among us to finally become soft.
I invite you to look back at the ledger of your year and ask yourself: Do your daily actions sharpen the fractures of this world? Do you shatter? Or are you the patient tide that helps smooth someone else's pain?
I dream about what it would mean if we all lived our lives with hearts as wide as the ocean with a love that surrounds and softens. We have been so conditioned to believe that when our hearts are hurt, the only safe response is to shut them down because we are terrified that if we let the world’s pain in or our pain out, it will break us completely. But a closed heart does not protect you; it only keeps you isolated. Instead of shutting down, we need to believe in a different kind of biology - a spiritual anatomy. We need to trust that our hearts are fundamentally capacious and resilient enough to keep pumping even while they are breaking. I believe my heart is big enough to hold the wreckage of this world and to still find the light, and looking out at all of you, I believe that yours is, too.
And so, as we stand at the start of this new year, big, broken hearts in hand and broken glass beneath our feet, may this be our blessing:
May our eyes be blessed with the sight of the beachcomber, always able to look through the tangled debris of this life to find the hidden, shimmering holy sparks.
May our hearts be blessed with the capacity of the ocean, vast enough to hold the jagged edges of those around us, and patient enough to smooth them down with relentless, rolling grace.
And when we feel our own fractures, may we remember that the cosmic vessels themselves could not hold the light without shattering. May we be blessed to know that despite our cracks, we are still holy and still, always, full of light.
And so is our world.
In the year to come, may we each write ourselves into the Book of Life for a year of healing, a year of softness, and a year of repair.
Shabbat shalom. Shanah tovah.
