Repairing What's Broken

I recently came across a delightful Japanese word, kint’suk’uroi – and realised how useful it was in helping me think about the themes of the Jewish New Year and Day of Atonement. It’s the word used for the Japanese art of repairing with gold, so that a broken artefact becomes more beautiful afterwards than it had been before it was broken.

This is the period of the Jewish year when the themes of mending what’s fractured in our lives, repairing the damage we have done to others and to ourselves, are highlighted by the tradition. This is the spiritual and psychological  work of what the tradition calls the ‘Days of Awe’.   

Judaism has its own language for this of course. Teshuvah, we are told, means to return, to repair, to restore – we may have harmed someone close to us, hurt them: are we able to have the humility, the courage, to admit this, to address this, to try to put something right in a relationship. We may have harmed a part of ourselves wittingly, or unwittingly – our bodies, our souls, our values, our vision, our integrity, our confidence, they can get damaged, battered by the stresses of everyday life. What do we need to repair, what can we repair? – these are the questions we wrestle with as the New Year approaches.

And they are hard questions. But kint’suk’uroi sets the bar higher than that – it’s an idea not just of repair (where the cracks might still show), but adding something in to make it more beautiful than it was before. With a ceramic pot this might be possible, and we may be ‘clay in the hands of the potter’ (i.e. God) as one of our medieval penitential poems puts it, but what if we have had a falling out with a friend, or a neighbour, or someone in our family, or someone at work? Are we really supposed not just to repair the relationship but make it better than it was before, more ‘beautiful’, as it were? Maybe patching things up is the best we can do. It’s a question – the kind of question we struggle with at this time of the year. 

This concept of kint’suk’uroi reminded me of a parable from the Maggid of Dubno (1740-1804) which tells of a king who had a beautiful diamond that was accidentally scratched. No jewellers were able to repair it, until one craftsman came and promised to make it even more beautiful than it had been originally. And this he did by engraving a rosebud around the imperfection - and using the scratch to make the stem.

The Dubner Maggid was an itinerant storyteller, maybe he’d been to Japan and pinched the idea – it’s not likely though – but his story is certainly a close relative of  kint’suk’uroi . Though psychologically it’s also subtly different. There’s  a difference between covering something over, covering it up, so you can’t see what’s happened, and thereby enhancing the whole object (or situation ), making it more beautiful – and keeping the scratch, the wound, visible (conscious, one could say) and part of a new picture which emerges around it, which can be built around it.

If there’s been a breakdown of trust in a relationship and yet the relationship is important enough to want to maintain it, the hurt has to be aired, it has to be acknowledged and light thrown on it, and if things go well  that old hurt might lessen in its painfulness. But it may be better not to pretend it hasn’t happened. Ideally it can become part of the next stage in the relationship. “Do you remember that time when you did that? And how upset I was? Well it’s still there, I haven’t forgotten, but I’m glad that  we have moved on, built something else...”

But there is an art in doing this – building and repairing relationships – and not everyone is an artist. Or wants to be. There’s also pleasure in destruction, in smashing up crockery, in breaking things – and sometimes relationships, situations, need to be broken, or destroyed. Where there’s abuse or injustice, oppression, victimisation, or a psychological habit that persecutes us  – the energy needs to go into breaking what’s there, not repairing it.

So where does that leave us? Brokenness, repairing damage, letting the scratches, the hurts, the wounds show - or soldering something over them. These are the metaphors I find myself playing with as we start this annual pilgrimage once more. The soul’s journey of return, or renewal (teshuvah).

The other sentiment that kint’suk’uroi reminded me of is the saying by the  Kotzker Rebbe (1787-1859): “There is nothing as whole as a broken heart”. That’s a hard one. I’m not sure I can quite inhabit it. I’m not sure I believe it - or want to believe it. It sounds as if it could be a very profound spiritual or psychological understanding – or a very trite one. I’m not sure. Maybe it depends on who says it, and when . I know it’s not something I’d ever say to someone who was broken-hearted.

It’s so paradoxical  - “There is nothing as whole as a broken heart” – so counterintuitive: if you are feeling broken-hearted - if you have lost someone you love, or you have lost your home, or your homeland, or your work, or you are seriously, maybe terminally ill, if you are feeling completely bereft, broken - is it a comfort to be told by an outsider that, “There is nothing as whole as a broken heart”? Or would you want to hit them? I don’t know.

Yes, there is an integrity to upset, fully felt; distress that overwhelms the heart; grief that rends the soul – these pain-filled states of being, of mind, are real, unquestionably, our naked humanity and fragility exposed. There is an integrity to these experiences (and we hope, we pray, that we are spared too many of them in our lives), but we don’t feel “whole” when we are going through them:  we feel empty, and despairing, and hopeless and angry. We don’t feel “whole”  with our broken heart – we feel in pieces. 

I don’t know why I wanted to talk about this. Or why I am talking about this theme in this way. I intuit - or maybe I just hope - that something in what I am saying connects to some of you, connects to what you might have struggled with this past year, or be struggling with now in your lives.

I suppose I’m trying to dig down into an aspect of teshuvah, this word that we repeat over and over at this time of the year, like  a mantra, almost until it loses any meaning. I suppose I’m drilling down into it to see what the inner dimensions of this returning, repairing, might look like, feel like. Because however many times we say it or chant it - whatever harmonious  or plaintive melodies accompany it - it’s a word on a mission, it has designs on us:  it aims to pierce us, pierce through us, penetrate our defences, our rationalisations, our laziness, our callousness, break through our sclerotic hearts, the way we harden ourselves to the sorrows of the world, the sorrows of others, the sorrows in ourselves.

When we come into synagogue through security on these High Holy Days we just have to wave our tickets, they don’t ask us - as they do sometimes (bizarrely) at airports – “Are you carrying anything explosive?”. But if they did ask us that during these days – “Are you carrying anything explosive?” - we could say: “Yes. Yes we are. We are carrying words, words like teshuvah; and they are explosive, they are meant to be explosive, to set off chain reactions of thinking and feeling inside us; they are words that threaten (and promise) to change our inner landscapes - unless they do that, they aren’t doing their job, we’re not doing our job. The words can become duds, blanks. We become duds. We become blank. We can let it all wash over us, safe from the creative dangers of getting too close to the explosive nature, the disruptive potential,  of the words we read.

In these days when explosions are a live topic for us, it may seem strange to talk about the aim of these words as being to be explosive. But one of the questions of these times is about security: where can our security can come from in fraught times? And maybe over these days ahead of us now we can start to find our security in this re-engagement with our tradition, in re-connecting to the power packed into the language, the words of our machzor (prayer book); the security that comes from rooting ourselves again within our tradition that offers and promises the opportunity for change, for renewal, for transformation; the security of discovering anew that the power, the energy, that animates all being, that animates all of life, flows in us too - in our brokenness as much as in our hopefulness.

[based on a sermon given at Selichot service at Finchley Reform Synagogue, September 16th evening]