There is a Jewish idea many of us have absorbed so deeply it lives beneath our prayers, our politics, our striving and even our feelings about ourselves: the world is broken and it is our task to fix it. How does this prevalent trope serve us at this time?
One of our most powerful mythologies of brokenness comes from 16th-century Safed. In Lurianic Kabbalah, divine light poured into vessels at the beginning of creation. The light was too bright. The vessels shattered.
We live among those shards. Our task is tikkun, to lift the sparks and repair what was fractured. Brokenness is structural. Repair becomes our cosmic purpose.
An earlier mystical image speaks not of shattered vessels but of the fractured Name. The four letters of the Divine Name — Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey — is understood as a map of divine flow. Yud-Hey is transcendent perfection; Vav-Hey is an embodied presence. When holiness is not fully expressed in the world, the lower letters are described as separated from the upper. The Name of God itself is broken in metaphysical imbalance. Through mitzvot and prayer performed l’shem yichud, “for the sake of unification,” we help reunite the name of God. This is our sacred task.
Before both of these, the rabbis offered a more relational image. After the destruction of the Temple and the exile of the Jewish people, they taught, “When Israel went into exile, the Shechinah went with them” (Megillah 29a). God’s presence did not remain only in Jerusalem. It accompanied the people into displacement and vulnerability. Even presence is exiled.
Do these stories help our world today? At least one of these concepts could offer a meaningful perspective. For the generations who birthed these teachings, the answer would also be yes. These were pastoral stories crafted at times when holiness felt absent from the world. They protected God’s goodness. They gave greater meaning to action. They helped us find dignity within horrific circumstances outside of our control. If the world felt fractured, it was not because it was meaningless, or completely Godless. It was because of brokenness.
But over time, these metaphors hardened. What began as ways of describing how reality feels began to sound like claims about what reality is. The world is shattered. The Divine structure is disrupted. The Name is broken. Part of God is exiled. Divinity is in disunity. We are responsible for fixing it.
Rachel, a wonderful Kol HaLev congregant, told me, “I’m afraid if I slow down, it all falls apart.” Her important activism is grounded in a deeply Jewish commitment to tikkun olam. Yet, she feels exhausted and broken by our world.
In our work of healing the world now, when cruelty and the promulgation of fear are all around us, we might ask whether the story of fracture between us and the Divine realms is still a helpful framework. If the world — or God — is fundamentally broken, even progress can feel temporary and repair endless. Does this story leave room for a healed world? What if brokenness were real but not ultimate, describing our experience, not the nature of Being itself? What if it is not the most useful truth Judaism offers us?
Perhaps in this moment we are invited to also remember something deeper: God’s essence is profoundly present wholeness.
Shabbat offers us one model into the world beneath stories of fracture. Described as a “taste of the world to come,” it is not an accident the mystical imagination says on Shabbat the Shechinah, wandering in exile, is welcomed as “bride” in celestial union. The Divine Name — Yud-Hey and Vav-Hey — is no longer described as alienated but at rest in unity on Shabbat. We do not manipulate that unity. We do not repair it. We simply cease striving long enough to get a taste of underlying wholeness that is always there. Wholeness is not a world without pain but whose deepest layer is unbroken presence.
When I talked with my congregant Rachel about the exhaustion at the core of her activism, a subtle truth was revealed. Her perspective shifted as she remembered where her advocacy stems from. She is not fueled by manufacturing goodness from broken rubble, desperately healing what is inherently broken. She intuitively recognizes and trusts the vital presence at the bedrock of creation that aligns her with what is sacred to her and orients her sensitivity to injustice.
When we begin from wholeness in this very unfinished world, our efforts to heal become sustainable. We are not meant to hold the world alone. There is support here for us. 
Rabbi Emily Stern is spiritual leader of Kol HaLev Synagogue, a Reconstructionist community in Lutherville. She was ordained by the ALEPH Ordination Program as a rabbi and mashpia (Jewish spiritual director).
A lifelong Orioles fan, Jmore Publisher Scott Rifkin, M.D., shares a message to Orioles owner David Rubenstein.
Attorney and Barry Levinson confidante Donald Saiontz left his mark on the world, writes Michael Olesker.
When we create a world with a warm and loving connection, even when someone beloved is gone, that relationship is carried on, writes Pamela R. Weissman.
The Orioles this season have proven that money can't buy happiness, writes Michael Olesker.