Gathering the shards: what I learned about resilience from my son's wedding

Do you remember seeing the ‘invisible gorilla’ video that went viral several years ago? A man in a gorilla suit somehow manages to go unnoticed. People watch two teams passing a basketball and are told to count the passes made by one team. Midway through, a person in a gorilla suit walks into the frame, stops, beats its chest, and exits, and, somehow, half of the people don’t even notice!

Something similar happened to me last month, at my son’s wedding. One of the highlights of the ceremony that several guests mentioned was the unveiling and blowing of an enormous shofar after the groom had stomped on the glass.

How did I not notice the enormous shofar?

Amid the shouts of ‘mazal tov!’, the music and dancing, the rush of friends onto the chuppah to embrace the couple, and the emotions of the moment (they did it! they’re married!), and while paying close attention to the shards of glass that had escaped the napkin and were being carefully collected by my husband and the rabbi, I didn’t notice the shofar.

Afterwards, I found myself reflecting on the beautiful custom of taking the shards and refashioning them into a glass mezuzah case. The symbolism of the broken glass is already multilayered. On the one hand, we smash the glass as a sign of mourning for the destruction of Jerusalem and the millennial exile of the Jewish people. On the other hand, the sound of shattering glass means that the wedding ceremony is complete, and it’s time for the new couple to celebrate this change of status with their friends and family. The idea of taking these shards and making them into a ritual object that is both a work of art and a memento of the wedding led me to rethink the metaphors I use to talk about resilience.

It also led me to reflect on something I have rarely written about, Kabbalah. Specifically, Lurianic Kabbalah, a subject I touched upon many years ago in my MA dissertation on the French Jewish poet Edmond Jabès. Jabès’s The Book of Questions uses imagery inspired by Rabbi Isaac Luria’s notion of tzimtzum, God’s act of self-contraction to make space for the world.

According to Luria, before creation, the world was filled with the divine presence. But God, being Infinite, left no ‘room’ for anything else, so God withdrew, self-contracted, to make space for creation.

When God said, ‘Let there be light’, vessels filled with divine light emanated into the world. But the vessels were not strong enough to contain the light, and they shattered, scattering holy sparks everywhere. Our task is to gather the sparks from the shattered vessels, and when this has been accomplished, we will witness tikkun olam, the mending of the world.

It struck me that Lurianic Kabbalah offers a different way to visualize resilience. One way to express resilience is to compare a fragile glass ornament with a rubber ball. Drop the first and it is destroyed, shattered into a myriad of fragments. It is not resilient. Drop the other from the same height and it remains intact and bounces back. The rubber ball is resilient.

Is a rubber ball the best visual metaphor for resilience? (AI image generated by Gemini)

But the beautiful custom of gathering the shards at a wedding and fashioning the fragments into a mezuzah case suggests a different way of thinking about resilience.  It reminds me both of Lurianic kabbalah, and of the Japanese art of Kintsugi (literally, gold seams)—a traditional repair method that takes the broken or chipped parts of cherished vessels, glues them back together with lacquer, and paints the seams with gold or silver powder. 

Rather than trying to hide the imperfections, the gold highlights the crack that has been repaired.

Photo by Matt Perkins on Unpslash.

The mezuzah custom could be said to be Kintsugi on steroids – not just repairing one or two cracks but taking a shattered vessel and forging it into something new and whole, without hiding its previous state.

Mezuzah case photo one of many on Etsy 

In the last three years, Jews and Israelis have tried to remind ourselves and each other that we are a resilient people; in the words of Rabbi Sacks, addressing a different challenge, ‘We are a super resilient people. The more pressure we’ve been under, the stronger we’ve become.’

But perhaps we need the metaphor of a mezuzah case fashioned from the fragments of a broken glass to remind us that even when we have been shattered and fragmented, we can find creative, new ways to mend our broken hearts and communities.

Resilience doesn’t need to mean the ability to revert to a previous state of wholeness. In the words of cardiologist Dr Tara Narula, resilience is ‘the ability to retain your wonder, joy, excitement, investment, engagement in life despite what happens to you.’ You might never go back to where you were before, and that’s ok, because ‘you're going to move in a different direction.’

Or, in the words of the Kotzker Rebbe:

 ‘There is nothing so whole as a broken heart.’

And, as Leonard Cohen sang:

‘There’s a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.’