Adina Roth – Director  of Jewish Life

The cracks that let the light in
Parshat Ki Tisa

This week at school, we were privileged to host two combat soldiers who were wounded in the initial Hamas incursion into Israel. Itay Sagy and Yuval Fatiev came to share their stories with our students with a profound message of hope. Each of them was seriously wounded, and they carry the physical scars of the battlefield on them. Yet their message was profound – an affirmation audacious optimism. They repeated more than once, with an echo of Deuteronomy, “choose life”. They lost friends on the battlefield and carry emotional scars but a spirit rose up from both of them that was truly inspiring for our Year 11 students. This same week, we heard from the amazing Paul Dillon about the rising numbers of students with mental health challenges in Australia. While we may not be fighting physical wars, there is no doubt that our students have their fair share of battles. It was powerful for our students to listen to Yuval and Itay communicate the way they confront the pain of their own stories with so much light. 

What enables people to experience such suffering and yet carry so much hope and even joy?

Parshat Ki Tisa recalls the dramatic moment of national trauma when having just received the Torah and heard God’s voice at Mount Sinai, the Israelites build a golden calf and worship it. Moses comes down the mountain carrying the Ten Commandments, which have been both sculpted and written on by God. The sight of his people revelling in front of an idol comes into clearer view, and Moshe becomes angry, hurls the tablets and breaks them. From a moment of near perfection and wholeness, the vision of our people lies in tatters at the foot of the mountain. As the story goes, Moses is eventually able to build a new set of tablets which he takes up the mountain for God to write on again. Thank God for second chances! It is fascinating that brokenness is inscribed into our national story of becoming. We are not the people of ‘happily ever after.’ We are more the people of “there’s a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in”. I am not just superimposing the ever-brilliant Leonard Cohen onto the book of Shemot. The Rabbis in Tractate Brachot tell us something fascinating about the Tablets: the fixed tablets and the broken tablets were carried together in the Holy Ark. In other words, we did not simply re-do the tablets and pretend that the shattering of the first had not happened. Rather, we incorporated the broken tablets into our story as a complementary partner to the whole; equal contributors to the spiritual life and soul of the people – the cracked and the complete.

When I looked at Itay and Yuval, I could see they had been through something immensely traumatic. Yet, somehow they were able to carry the pieces of brokenness, their vulnerable humanity, alongside a joy, an optimism, even a sass!  This is what it must surely mean when we are told in Deuteronomy, “And you shall choose life, u’vecharta ba’chayim”. Choosing life means we stride forward, with hearts that are broken and whole, carrying sadness and joy.

Both Itay and Sagy said that they live life differently since their near-death moments. Itay said, he has ambitions and goals but he is now deeply focused on making the journey towards his goals as important as the goals themselves. Yuval said that he felt he had been re-born after his injury and he regards life as an opportunity. They both live the idea  that ‘the broken and the whole are carried together in the ark’. We all left a little changed from hearing them, reminded that our hearts open and light enters not in spite of the cracks and the struggles of life, but maybe because of them.  

Shabbat Shalom