How to Fix a Shattered Glass

How to Fix a Shattered Glass

On Shabbat Shuvah, a group of neighborhood mothers and their daughters had the honor of hearing a class given by Rabbanit Yael Eliyahu.
And she shared an image that I can’t stop thinking about:
“Imagine that you dropped a glass, and it shattered into a thousand pieces. You could use an entire bottle of glue, but the glass will never ever look like it once did. It will look like a thousand shards stuck together.
“Now imagine that there was a way to put that glass back together again so that it would be perfect again. As though it had never fallen at all!
“Teshuva is that magical glue.
“Teshuva is one of God’s greatest gifts to us because after we do teshuva, it is like we never did anything wrong. Like that glass you dropped is still sitting on the shelf, perfect.”

4 comments

  1. Putting the glass back perfectly, as before, better than before, is a symbol of human’s being anti-fragile — we get better when broken, because we do teshuva and grow from the experience.

  2. Blima Spetner

    Kintsugi is a Japanese art form in which breaks and repairs are treated as part of the object’s history. Broken ceramics are carefully mended by artisans with a lacquer resin mixed with powdered gold, silver or platinum. The repairs are visible — yet somehow beautiful.
    kintsugi teaches that broken objects are not something to hide that through the brokenness comes a new beautiful wholeness
    https://qz.com/1347017/the-japanese-art-principle-that-teaches-us-to-expose-our-failures-not-cover-them-up/

  3. And as we’ve witnessed over and over in life, that glass becomes more beautiful than it ever was before it shattered.

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