There is Nothing So Whole as a Broken Heart

SERMON   EREV ROSH HASHANAH 5785   October 2, 2024

Rabbi David Edleson   Temple Sinai  South Burlington, Vermont

Rabbi Menachel Mendel of Kotzk said,

“There is nothing so whole as a broken heart.”

אין יותר שלם מלב שבור

“There is nothing so whole as a broken heart.”

My heart is broken, but I confess it does not feel very whole. 

Does yours?  

No, I feel emptied out and hollow by the year we’ve had since October Seventh.

We have all been holding so much.  

So much fear.

So much hurt.

So much loss.

So much anger.

So much disillusionment.

So much sadness.

We are bereft.

And here we are, holding this pain, together in this synagogue, as Jews have done countless times in countless places over thousands of years, feeling in our kishkes the roiling cramps of Jewish dread, the irritable bowels of trauma and memory, tasting such bitterness in our mouths that no amount apples or honey could ever make it sweet. 

As we begin the new year, I want to acknowledge that we are hurting, and gathered together in this sacred place, this sanctuary, let’s just hold this pain, and together help one another because it feels too big to hold alone.

While we are all hurting, we also need to name that we ache for different reasons.   Some of us are hurting because they feel the criticism of Israel, especially by other Jews, at a time like this is the ultimate betrayal of Jewish values.  

Others are hurting because they feel the actions of Israel, and the support of those actions by other Jews, is the ultimate betrayal of Jewish values.  Most of us are hurting because all this is just so exhausting and demoralizing.

We are hurting because we are scared.

I’m so scared. 

I’m scared about the future of the Jewish people. 

I’m scared about the survival of the State of Israel, both from external enemies, and from internal divisions.

I’m scared about the tsunami of antisemitism all around us, and about my own safety as a Jew here in Burlington.

I’m scared because there does not seem to be one place Jews can go in the world and be free from this ancient hate.

I’m scared that too many Jews will blame Israel for all the antisemitism, instead of blaming those who hate us for their bigotry.

I’m scared about what friends and congregants I’m going to lose next. I’m scared at how helpless I feel.

There is nothing so full as a broken heart.   What could that mean?

Let me tell you a story.   One Rosh Hashanah, the Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Hassidism, asked Rabbi Zev Kitzes to blow the shofar.  Rev Kitzes was elated, but then the Baal Shem Tov told him to blow it properly, he needed to learn every arcane kabbalistic secret meaning and Talmudic teaching about the blasts of the shofar. Rev Kitzes studied and studied, but the secrets wouldn’t stay in his head, so he made a plan.  He would sneak his iPhone into synagogue, and so he put notes in his NOTES app of all the things he needed to remember.  The Baal Shem Tov wouldn’t notice; he was too wound up in his prayers. 

On the morning of Rosh Hashanah, he put the phone and silent and slipped it into his pocket and headed to shul.  Sometime during the Amidah, his phone lit up in his pocket.  One of his kids must have texted him.   The light of the phone shone through his threadbare pockets and caught the eye of the Baal Shem.  One look and it was clear he had to turn it off, so when the time came for the blowing of the ram’s-horn, he had not notes. He panicked, started sweating, but his mind was a blank. He know he was going to let the Baal Shem Tov and the congregation down.  Broken-hearted, with tears running down his face, he blew the shofar without thinking on the secret meanings, thinking only about what a failure he was. 

After the service, the Baal Shem Tov ran up to him, hugged him, and said that it was the most magnificent shofar blowing he had ever heard, and that it reached all the way to heaven. Rev Kitzes knew better and apologized. The Baal Shem Tov shook his head and said, “In the palaces of the Holy One there are countless rooms, and rooms within rooms.  and there are different keys for every lock.  These are what we try to learn in our studies of kabbalah.  But there is a master key that opens all the locks on all the gates and all the rooms.  That master key is a broken heart”

We go through our lives trying so hard to be on top of things, to be competent, and to appear happy and satisfied.  We try to avoid pain, try to convince ourselves that our lives are good and meaningful, that our relationships are solid, and we try to push aside the countless things that nag at us, that trouble us.  There is a multi-billion dollar industry of personal growth and healing that seems to advise relentless positivity, affirmation, and self-love. 

But that misses a profound aspect of what it means to be a human being in this world.  The doubts, the loss, the ache of loneliness. The knowing how short our lives and the lives of those we love are.  People try very hard to talk us out of feeling bad, to cheer us up, but we know.  To be human is to know alienation, loss and death. 

The human heart is able to hold all these contradictions, the beauty and horror of humanity, and a heart that refuses to let the pain in is not whole.  To be a whole human being means we must let the pain in and not push it away over and over and over. 

The Torah tells us that Pharoah, on seeing the tremendous suffering he was causes the Israelites and his own people, kept “hardening his heart.”  He could not let himself feel the pain his actions were causing.

Later in the Torah, in the book of Deuteronomy, we are warned not to let a callous form around our hearts, and that it is our duty to sometimes tear that callous away so that we can feel more fully both the pain but also the beauty of life. 

And there is a powerful spiritual dimension to this.  When our hearts are on autopilot, when we are just doing our usual and getting through life, it is very rare for the spirit of God to break through and fill us.  The holy is very difficult to perceive and experience when we are so busy convincing ourselves that we’re fine. 

Our tradition finds great holiness in what is broken. A broken heart is also a heart that has been broken open.     As Leonard Cohen taught:  That’s how the light gets in. 

There is one more powerful example of the holiness of what is broken that I want to share from our tradition.  We know when Moses came down the mountain and saw the people worshipping a golden calf, in rage he hurled the tablets of law down and shattered them.  He felt betrayed and broken-hearted.  

Of course, he gets a second set of tablets like the first, but the rabbis ask, “what happened to the broken pieces of the first tablets?”   Their answer?  That those pieces were collected and placed in the Ark of the Covenant alongside the new ones, and that without both tablets, the law would be incomplete, and we would be incomplete.  Without the broken tablets, the ark could not hold the love of the Divine.  It takes both our brokenness and our wholeness together to let in the light of mercy and healing.  

As we start this new year, let’s acknowledge and honor the broken pieces we are carrying, and let’s gather them into the Ark of our hearts and the ark of our community that we might break open to new possibilities, and to the light of God that binds all wounds.

Shana Tova