more whole

For the past three months, the community has been engaged in an ongoing art project. With the guidance of Rabbi Gila Ruskin, we are making a mosaic mural about the modim prayer, instructing us to express our gratitude in the evening, morning and afternoon. It is a prayer about daily miracles and each session begins by sharing personal intentions and naming miracles in our life. So far more than 100 people have nipped, sorted, and glued stones, tiles, and pieces of broken plates. I have loved observing the eclectic groups of people who have gathered to create this mosaic. Teens and elders, new members and founding members. Housemates and people who have never sat at a table together. It has been so soothing to make something beautiful out of literal brokenness. 

After weeks of watching others carve out the time to sit and mosaic, I decided it was finally my turn to jump in. I brought to the mosaic a collection of my most beloved broken bowls. A bowl I bought when I was 20 in Istanbul and another from my sabbatical trip to Cordoba, and another my father had given me from Rhodes. All handmade, colorfully painted with intricate designs. It felt so good to have somewhere to put these sacred shards. 

One of these bowls was a salt cellar, another a serving dish and another held some family heirlooms. (I know the mosaic includes other people's family heirlooms as well. My bowls are now glued up against Abby’s grandmother’s teapot.) 

I was kind of crushed when they each broke. And each time it happened I gave them to Gila, knowing she could make them into a mosaic. But never did I imagine that I would be the one to actually get to make the mosaic. It’s been surprisingly meaningful to find a use for something that no longer serves its original purpose. To see these broken parts within a larger whole. 

By last night I started to feel like this is an even better use for these ceramic momentos. Forever sacred art in the synagogue. Somehow it's even more satisfying to have a place to put the broken thing than it would be if the bowls had stayed whole. The process has reminded me of the Rambam’s teaching that teshuvah has the potential to bring people closer together than they were before, because the process of repair is itself deeply connective. And even more, the need to do teshuvah reveals holiness that would not have otherwise been possible. 

As we learn in Hilchot Teshuvah, 
מָקוֹם שֶׁבַּעֲלֵי תְּשׁוּבָה עוֹמְדִין אֵין צַדִּיקִים גְּמוּרִין יְכוֹלִין לַעֲמֹד בּוֹ.
The spiritual place of one who does teshuvah is not accessible to someone who is entirely righteous (which isn’t possible anyway!) (7:4). 

This mosaic offers a kind of teshuvah for these bowls and for those of us creating the art together. 

The mosaic is nearly done - and stepping back, the practice has captured the essence of my experience of Kol Tzedek. It connects to the teachings of the mishkan, when everyone was instructed to bring colorful precious stones to decorate the mishkan and there is much abundance that Moses has to tell them to stop, explaining we have more than enough to create something beautiful.  It connects to larger conversations we had at the congregational meeting about the history of Jewish West Philly, how to be good neighbors and embody repair and reparations with the legacy Black community of Kingsessing in the wake of centuries of broken systems. And most profoundly, it reminded me of the teaching of the Kotzker Rebbe, “There is nothing more whole than a broken heart.”