What do we do with our broken pieces? So many of us hide away our hurts, shy away from them, feel shame over them. The term “toxic positivity,” has been surfacing a lot in my social media world. It is the impulse that we have to encourage others to look on the bright side, stay positive, and remind themselves that, “other people have it a lot worse.” While accessing positive energy is an essential element of a balanced mental wellbeing, denying our hurts and minimizing our suffering does more harm than good. In fact, it’s downright damaging. When people offer these words of encouragement, what they’re really saying is, “your brokenness reminds me of my own brokenness and that makes me uncomfortable.”
In parshat Ki Tisa the Israelites make some major mistakes; namely, the Golden Calf Incident. When Moses returns from his intensive time on Mt. Sinai and sees what the Israelites have done, he smashes the two tablets of law in anger. What did the Israelites do with those broken tablets? They kept them. They placed them in the ark with the new tablets of the covenant and carried them around the desert. They kept their broken pieces as a reminder of the travesty of the incident that broke the covenant, but also as a way of honoring that mistake and incorporating it into their identity. We are made up of many broken pieces. They are a part of us that make us who we are, and they are some of our best teachers. Leonard Cohen usually says it best, so I’ll end with his words on the subject: “There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.”