By Emily Rogal
And that in the mean time, it’s okay to not be okay. It’s okay to bring yourself, scars and all, to your community, to this community.
I don’t know a lot about art, but I do know about this one practice in Japanese pottery called kintsugi. When a piece of pottery breaks, someone takes the shards and repairs it with gold. At the end of the process, the shards are back together, but it’s clear that it’s been broken. It’s actually the broken parts that make it valuable. What does it mean to find value, to find something divine, in the things that threaten to break us? When Jacob returns to his brother in Chapter 34, the Hebrew says that he returns shalem, in peace. But, a rabbi I know once said that it could also mean “whole.” Despite his limp, Jacob is whole. This event has threatened to break him, and maybe it even has, but he is whole.
“Nachamu, nachamu, ami,” Isaiah 40:1 tells us, “Comfort, comfort, my people.” I think that a modern day version of that can be found in a quote I really like by Jamie Tworkowski that says, You’ll need coffee shops and sunsets and road trips. Airplanes and passports and new songs and old songs, but people more than anything else. You will need other people and you will need to be that other person to someone else, a living breathing screaming invitation to
believe better things.” This summer was my first summer in a Habonim Dror camp. I arrived scatter brained and confused and lost, and found a community, a home. I found people who reminded me that it’s possible to be limping and broken and scarred, and also shalem, whole. We don’t choose to be broken, or what breaks us, but we do have the choice to pull the things that break us closer and say, “I’m not going to be the same, but I will be whole.” And maybe, you can make the trip back to that barren land, and lead other people to safety, to wholeness.