Monday, November 16, 2009

Seeing beyond the broken pieces

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An amazing article by a friend of mine, a former fellow attendee of a local Chabad House, now studying at Mayanot in Eretz Yisroel. Very good stuff. An excerpt:
I had made up my mind. I grabbed the discarded pieces out of the garbage can, and I began to reconstruct my new puzzle, gluing piece by piece. By the end of the class, I had a new masterpiece. A well-loved, painfully delicate, perfectly imperfect masterpiece. It wasn't a mistake anymore. It was art. It was whole.

Most of us tend to miss the forest for the trees. What we observe, we see as isolated and disconnected. Instead of hearing a song in the noise around us, we hear a series of clangs and screams and vibrations. Instead of seeing a dance, we see a kick, a turn of the head, and a raised arm. The thing is, a kick is just a kick, and a clang is just a clang. A hand doesn't do much good if there's no arm to extend it, and the arm is useless if there are no legs to walk it. Nothing in this world can function on its own. Alone, every single thing in existence is nothing. And yet, if any one morsel of this universe were missing, our world, too, would be nothing.

Everything, be it a ceramic shard, a bang on a drum, the palm of a hand, or a human being, is one part of a whole. Sometimes, it takes first being broken to realize what the whole entity is. For the hamsa plate to become complete, it had to first crack into pieces. It hurts when you scrape your knee; suddenly, you're missing a part of it. The heart aches and yearns for years before you find the other half of your soul it previously thought to be its own entity.

Read on.


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(source)

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