The Broken and the Whole

My son and his firstborn made two round loaves of challah for erev Rosh Hashanah which, with extra potency, fell on shabbos this year. The loaves were a deep golden brown and shiny from egg wash. They sat in their perfection in the middle of a long table of thirteen, an auspicious number, awaiting the bruchas for the beginning of the new year. After that, as is the custom, the loaves were passed around the table, torn into hunks, and cannibalized. Nothing remains in its original form for very long. Bread is meant to be eaten. Life is meant to be lived. The whole and the broken.

Photo courtesy of Isaac Kaufman

Around the table, seven adults, two college freshmen, and four teenagers came together in celebration. Marriage, divorce, loss, young people struggling to find their way, middle aged men who knew each other as kids laughing and storytelling, all gathered at the table to break that bread. During the sharing of the chicken and roast potatoes, the tomatoes and cucumbers from my grandson’s garden, we left our brokenness behind, dipping apples in honey to taste the sweetness in the promise of a year of blessing to come. We sat back and marveled at our good fortune. Abundance, friendship, parents and children, husbands and wives. And we prayed, if not in the ancient language, then at least in our own vernacular whispered in the obscure recesses of our hearts. We prayed to be inscribed in the Book of Life, an enormous ledger with pages of fine print maintained in my mind by Leonard Cohen intoning who by fire, who by water. The lyrics are all very real to me now as my friends say a final goodbye to this plane and my college roommate has recently been diagnosed with Parkinson’s. I see clearly that this meal will end, that the thread will be severed. Suddenly, it’s not an if but a when. Somehow you don’t know that until you know that and it’s not sad as such. It’s the realest thing there is. The piece that is me will be broken off the loaf and crumbs will fall to the floor. Until then though, until then, it must be my practice, my devotion, to notice the wholeness. The wholeness is always there like the riverbed under the rapids. My Buddhist friends say…

Waking up this morning, I smile

Twenty-four brand-new hours are before me.

I vow to live fully in each moment

and to look at all beings with eyes of compassion.

In services the following morning, I scan the room in the Minnesota synagogue and realize I’m beginning to know some of the regulars. More people reach out to welcome me without needing to confirm whose mother I am or whose grandmother I am. They sit in a graceful semicircle at the Friends Meeting House, no marble, no stained glass, no iconography of any kind. Just three dozen people, mostly women, offering an oasis of wholeness in the broken world. So different from my childhood religious experience in the vast echoing space on Central Park West where rows and rows of congregants faced the old rabbi glowering down from the elevated bimah.  Back in Minneapolis, after we eat lunch together, I help with the scraping of the dishes, the sponging of the tables, the ongoing maintenance of the wholeness, putting everything back where it belongs. Then on Sunday, we gather again at Minnehaha Creek to perform tashlich, the ritual of tossing our demons, our shards and splinters into running water. 

Minnesota is a good place to make tashlich because you can hardly move two feet in any direction without falling headlong into a body of water. There are about twenty of us in a circle under a tree plus four dogs unburdened by regret. The sunny mid-seventies day is a gift, literally divine. Instead of the traditional casting bread upon the waters, we now use the more environmentally friendly bird seed. We sprinkle it into the creek feeling lighter afterwards, feeling like some mist has cleared in our awareness allowing the blessing of the day to flow freely. But we don’t delude ourselves. We know there will be brokenness in the year ahead. And because we know that, we open our hearts a little more fully and our arms a little wider to embrace what it means to be human and in doing so we feel closer to whole.

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Many Voices, will appear on the last Sunday of each month and will feature contributions from the community of paid subscribers. This month, we will offer author and poet Frank Gioia’s memoir piece, “All In.” In this narrative, Gioia explores male friendships on the streets of Brooklyn and in the military. PLEASE CONSIDER UPGRADING to a paid subscription to support seventysomething, have access to the archives, and become a contributor to and a reader of Many Voices. Your ideas are always welcome.

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Copies of my 2019 essay collection, Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement, are available directly from me (signed) or from Amazon or your local bookseller.

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