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What Ten is Teaching; Luchot & Loss: The Broken and the Whole


עשרה מי יודע?  עשרה אני יודע - עשרה דבריא Who knows ten? I know ten: 10 commandments

What is ten? 

For the past few weeks (perhaps months) I have been frantically searching for the path that I am supposed to travel, guidebook I am supposed to follow, or plan I am supposed to implement to commemorate ten years since our tiny, beautiful premature daughter, Emuna Bracha Esther, was born and then, five heart-wrenching days later, passed away.  On the morning of her birthday, in the fog of very little sleep and an early morning siren, “I do know ten” from the pesach seder song started playing on loop in my head and I thought, what if I try to use the עשרה דבריא, the Aseret Hadibrot (Ten commandments), to give me some direction to reflect on this milestone moment.


With Shavuot just around the corner, the Aseret Hadibrot specifically and Torah in general are central themes and within them lie lessons I have learned in the past ten years.  The Aseret Hadibrot begin אנכי ה' אלוקך (I am the Lord your God) with perhaps the clearest directive of them all – basic belief in G-d and in the fact that there is no one in control other than Him.  Emuna taught me countless lessons in faith, shifting my life's trajectory in multiple ways.  I often reflect on the experience of being in the NICU - surrounded by an entire room full of machines that were aimed to keep Emuna alive but at the end of the day they could not accomplish what G-d created my body to do. I remember one of the other mothers sitting next to me there who pointed out that Emuna’s initials were א-ב-א (Abba, meaning father) and then pointed upward as yet another reminder.  It is so easy for us to feel reliant on external factors or on our own selves and abilities, that we can easily forget Who is really in charge. 


The second half of the Dibrot discusses the way we treat each other.  Chazal teach that לֹא תִרְצָח, not being kind is equivalent to killing a person.  At the end of the day the only thing that actually feels clear to me is to try our best to treat each other kindly.   Naomi Shemer, Israel’s national poetess, wrote "אנשים טובים באמצע הדרך" - there are the people who we find in the middle of our journeys’, some who have traveled similar paths and share their wisdom, some who exemplify kindness at moments that we need it most, and those who have not left our sides through all the ups and the downs, and because of all these people אפשר לצעוד, we can walk through whatever life throws our way.  Emuna has taught me to look for these people and to try my best to be one.


While it was nice to try and give my thoughts some structure, something wasn't sitting right or enough with me.  I kept searching for more, for the perfect thing to think or feel or do, and I kept falling short.  


In the midst of trying to contextualize, understand, and clearly assign meaning to the past decade in Emuna's wake, a wise person in my life, looked me in the eye and said the following: "I'm not sure there has to be anything cerebral about just being an אמא with a broken (always mending, still broken) heart. Just allowing yourself to be brokenhearted is also important."


Suddenly perhaps the strongest connection to the Aseret Hadibrot flashed in front me…brokenness.


The Mefarshim write extensively about why Moshe broke the luchot, and Chassidish and modern texts explore the “value” of brokenness—what it does to a person, a people, how we can emerge stronger when we are forced to put the pieces together again and create something beautiful.  And these are all correct and meaningful things that I have Baruch Hashem experienced over the past decade.  But for this moment my focus is on the brokenness itself.  


When something is broken you can feel the vastness of its reach.  It davka can’t be contained; it reaches everything and everywhere.  I’m not coming to draw a comparison between grief and the Torah; but I am wondering whether there is something deep about the fact that in the moment of the broken luchot Hashem is sending us the message that Torah is something that permeates all aspects of our lives; enters every crevice, every move, mitzvot and sin, happy and pain, tragedy and triumph.


The Gemara in Baba Batra (14b) writes מְלַמֵּד שֶׁהַלּוּחוֹת וְשִׁבְרֵי לוּחוֹת מוּנָּחִין בָּאָרוֹן.

Teaching that the whole luchot and the broken luchot lay next to each other in the Aron.


The broken luchot were not put back together, not hidden, not forgotten. Brokenness is not something that can be erased. Am Yisrael's most broken moment—just weeks after Shavuot—and our personal broken moments, both as a people (like the horrors we have been experiencing since October 7) and as individuals in our grief, are themselves things we must treat as holy. Although we may want to forget, contextualize, or create something beautiful from these experiences (and we do all those things), the lesson of the broken luchot tells us that even our most broken moments are holy in and of themselves—placed in the aron and not to be tampered with.


But laying them side by side also gives us permission for another truth: the whole and broken can sit separately. Not every moment of wholeness needs to be touched by the broken; we are allowed to simply be in the whole sometimes. Going into Shavuot, the epitome of wholeness, and as we cope with living during a war, it is important to allow ourselves to bask in those unadulterated moments as well.


And so this year, against the backdrop of a country and people that have never felt so broken, as I reflect on 10 years since Emuna, I am grateful for the lessons I've learned, for the most beautiful family in the most beautiful country, for the charge to live life to its fullest despite not being in control, and to act with kindness and recognize the kindness in others. I am also trying to allow space for the brokenness, כמו שהוא—resisting the need to fix, feel good, or reconcile. I am also trying to give myself permission to exist fully in moments of wholeness, to simply embrace the joy and beauty when they come. 


And so in my heart, they can lie side by side: the broken and the whole, equally treated as the holiest things we have.


Cheryl Frankel Burnat spearheaded the creation of Birkat Emunah, Eden's mikvah resource for those facing the challenges of loss and infertility, to mark 5 years after Emuna's passing, as part of holding space for the pain and loss. It is one expression of holding the broken while continuing in life, which we hope will help many others as well.

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