the human heart is the Ark

Sometimes I imagine my heart as an absorbent sponge, soaking in the joy and sorrow of the week. And my tears like the overflow, a release valve to soothe and purify. 

Sometimes I imagine my heart like a muscle in training, learning to expand and contract more fully, to feel both the joy and the grief more deeply. 

At my installation almost exactly 10 years ago, I offered you my heart of many rooms, with enough space, I pray, to contain our disagreements, differences and contradictions. 

What if this week, we imagine the human heart as the Ark that traveled with the Israelites in the wilderness?

We read in parashat Ki Tisa, one of the most infamous stories in all of Torah, a moment that reminds us that Torah is not linear. Despite having already received Torah in Yitro, some 12 chapters ago, we are transported back to the top of Mt. Sinai. Moses is receiving the tablets from the Holy One while the anxious, arguably impatient, Israelites are waiting down below, scheming to melt all of their precious gold into a molten idol,the golden calf. . 

Exodus 32:19reads, “As soon as Moses came near the camp and saw the calf and the dancing, he became enraged; and he hurled the tablets from his hands and shattered them at the foot of the mountain.”

About this moment, one midrash imagines that Moses descended the mountain with the tablets in hand. But when they (both Moses and the tablets) “beheld the calf and the dances, the writing fled from off the tablets, and the stone became heavy in his hands, and Moses was not able to carry himself and the tablets, and he cast them from his hand, and they were broken beneath the mount … “

As if the writing on the tablets, the letters themselves were sent back to their Source before Moses broke the tablets. Lest Moses actually smash the holy words. Eventually Moses returns to the top of the mountain, pleads for forgiveness, and the Holy One inscribes a second set of tablets with the words that were on the first set of tablets.

Rather than forget the incident ever happened, the rabbis record the teaching of Rav Yosef who says, “the tablets of the Covenant and the pieces of the broken tablets are placed in the Ark” (B.T. Menachot 99a). 

One mystical text takes it a step further:
“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 a broken heart, a beaten heart, so that it can serve as a home for the Shechinah [divine presence]. For the Shechinah only dwells within broken vessels” (Reshit Hochma, R. Eliyahu deVidash, Gate of Holiness 7; 16th C.)

Remember this always and especially this week, your broken heart, your beaten heart, it is a home for holiness in this world. It is the source of your compassion and a vessel for the Divine.

In the words of Psalm 147, 
קָרוֹב ה' לְנִשְׁבְּרֵי לֵב
“The Holy One draws close to the broken-hearted.” 

Ufros aleinu sukkat shlomecha – 
May there be a canopy of protection for everyone in Iran and Lebanon, Israel/Palestine and all who dwell on earth. 

Oseh shalom bimromav – 
May the Source of peace on High, come here on earth, urgently and in our days.