Broken. This familiar word has taken on for me of late a deeper resonance, a new dimension, which I find enables me to name, or at least call attention to, what seems to be happening now — psychologically, socially, politically, environmentally, medically, militarily — in the various worlds I inhabit, at times vicariously and at times bodily: Breaches, breakdowns, collapses and failures. Don’t get me wrong. I am able, thank God, to relish rainbows and sunsets. I love and feel loved.
But like the prophet Elijah after he’d fled into the wilderness to escape the treachery of King Ahab and Queen Jezebel and took refuge in a cave, I cannot feel the presence of God— by which I mean something like peace, safety, balance, focus, purpose — while hiding within the cave of myself. For, like Elijah, I feel the earth quaking beneath my feet and tornadoes ripping trees from the ground, and I hear fires roaring.
I need access to that Still Small Voice that Elijah finally heard, that soft wordless call that tells you in a way your innards recognize that while everything is broken beyond recognition, you may nonetheless relax, trust and allow that beyond your ability to understand or explain, all is well. “Yes,” you hear in all but words, “It’s broken, dear friend, but one way or another everything breaks. And breakdowns and bereavements offer new possibilities, entries, openings, beginnings.”
We do well to note that brokenness is the norm in the stories, legends and laws that make up the wild terrain of the Torah where our ancestors still strut and fret. They, too, find incompletion, design flaws, failures, disappointments, cruelty, war, drought, famine, deceit, betrayal. But they also find comfort, passion, love and mystery.
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A Creator deity calls everything into existence: light, sky, day, night, oceans, continents, vegetation, birds, fish, animals and finally crazed animals who believe they are not animals but rather emissaries of the divine forged in the image of their Creator, and that they are to fill and rule the world. And then, without warning or explanation, the deity hops off the throne of creation, sits back in an easy chair and just marvels at the birds and stars, the fresh majesty of a new world. And thus, the world begins, as well it might end someday, with an exhausted, depleted deity on sabbatical.
Ten generations later the Creator appears again, and we hear not “I’ve returned to finish the job,” but rather “I am grieved to my heart. I regret that I made the world. I am going to destroy everything I made with a great and terrible flood that will wipe life from the earth.” The Creator of Life has become the Lord of Death.
But then, out of the blue, in a pre-flood storm of depression and rage, the deity catches sight of a man, Noah, and something about Noah captures the deity’s heart. An intimacy — call it a covenant — the first of its kind, is formed. Noah, who will soon become the first refugee from a genocide, will find a way — I call it the “Way of the Rainbow”— to live in radical uncertainty but with a hope nurtured by a fickle creative genius, who tends to turn against all that he’s created, but who sometimes, arrested by the very effervescence of beauty, relents, relaxes and recants.
So it goes through the Torah as this impossible deity continues to play with and then abandon the creatures he’s shaped and left to their own devices. Think of Abraham atop Mount Moriah where, with a knife in hand and a fire kindled, he contemplates sacrificing his beloved son, Isaac. Hadn’t a credible voice told him to take his only son and offer him? Think of Tzipporah, the wife of Moses, seeing her husband suddenly doubled over in pain, sweat pouring from his body, trembling and silent, when she realizes the deity who has just convinced him to return to Egypt in order to liberate the Israelite slaves is now trying to kill him. As if taking a lesson from Abraham, Tzipporah reaches for a knife, circumcises their son, places the bloodied foreskin on the child’s foot and calls out, “You are to me a bridegroom of blood.” And the deity relents.
The Torah commands us to live like a fickle deity — six days of labor, production, work, and then a seventh day of surcease, retreat, stargazing and birdwatching. A full day on which to hear the music of wordless psalms, to feel the lush silence of goodness and wholeness. But then Saturday night, ready or not, we are thrust back again into the broken world, where Shabbat is a scandal, an imposed dream, which is to say a dangerous delusion.
Rebbe Nachman of Breslov, (1772–1810), truly a tortured master, tried wondrously to live the “Way of the Rainbow.” His aphorisms still offer instruction: “The whole world is a narrow bridge, and the main thing is not to be afraid at all” is one of them. Another is: “Nothing is more whole than a broken heart.” To live as if you will live forever while knowing that, ready or not, it all stops. This is the human condition. How to live well in this condition is the great human question.
This essay initially appeared in My Jewish Learning’s Shabbat newsletter Recharge on July 4, 2026. To sign up to receive Recharge each week in your inbox, click here.
