Especially in recent times, society has seemed to perfect the art of breaking things. Much that we’ve come to know and rely on has been beaten up and even busted. While it’s nature’s way that most everything eventually falls apart, spiritually speaking it’s also nature’s way for us to lean in, repair and build. We’ve got the tools, if only we’ll use them. And use them we must – especially now.
Note: These words come during the 2023 Israel-Hamas War, sparked by a terror attack on Israeli innocents that became the world’s most lethal day for Jews since the Holocaust. Because current judicial ethics rules ban me from discussing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,
I focus instead on some of the emotional and spiritual implications for us and Judaism.
For over two months, daily news reports have graphically depicted the Mideast events that began on October 7. The list of what broke, and what keeps breaking, seems endless.
And not only in the Mideast. Everyone has their list of what seems most obviously broken – domestic politics, a shared sense of objective truth, economic priorities, societal values, global climate harmony…. The list goes on and on.
But none of that is news. The real news is that, in fact, together we have the power to repair and rebuild. We tend to forget how potent this power is – because cognitively we’re more prone to note the bad than the good, because bad news makes better news, because repair sometimes is more difficult than the original breaking.
But it’s true. As Rabbi Nachman of Breslov famously taught, “If you believe you can destroy, believe that you can repair.” Both destruction and repair imply the same capacity, the same core agency: by their nature, we can’t be capable of one without the other.
This essential spiritual truth is a core message of this week’s Torah portion (Mikeitz), which on the surface continues the Joseph story as he catapults from forgotten enslaved prisoner to prime minister of Egypt.
Five years ago, I wrote what follows, which would become part of my book, A Year of Building Torah. These words feel even more poignant now amidst war, antisemitism and political breakdown. I offer them here with a “SketchNote” from Steve Silbert, my colleague at Bayit (a Jewish innovation nonprofit I helped create).
Think about what you build and how you build. We can, and nowadays we must.
David Evan Markus 