July 16, 2022
Author(s): Rabbi Wes Gardenswartz,
Parshat Balak
July 16, 2022 — 17 Tammuz 5782
A Kiddush Cup Made of Broken Pieces
Temple Emanuel, Newton, MA
Rabbi David Wolpe tells the story of the time that Ralph Waldo Emerson went to church one Sunday morning and was displeased with the minister’s sermon. The minister revealed nothing of his own life story, Emerson complained. He just talked about ideas and texts. Tell me how your life experience connects with my life experience connects with our life experience.
In that spirit, I want to talk about the fact that two weeks ago, on July 3, Shira and I were in Italy for the wedding of our son Nat to his husband Davide. I share this with you not just to talk about the wedding, which was joyful and beautiful, but for a way in which a struggle I had on that day might connect with your own version of a similar struggle. What do I mean?
On the one hand, it was a blessing beyond measure to see your adult child stand with his beloved under the wedding canopy. Every Shabbat we pray that our Bar and Bat Mitzvah, in their own time, will stand with their beloved under the chuppah. Usually this blessing goes whoosh, over their head. In fact, if they are listening at all, when I get to the wedding canopy part, most of our b’nei mitzvah look at me quizzically like: what did you just say? Wedding? I am 13. At 13 they don’t get it. But at 33 they do. This was Nat and Davide’s time, and they, and all their friends and family, felt profoundly blessed in that moment.
That’s on the one hand. And yet, on the other hand, in the weeks leading up to the wedding, Nat and Davide, and my entire family, were acutely aware of the real risk that the rights of LGBTQ plus families are in jeopardy after the Dobbs case which reversed Roe v. Wade. The disturbing concurrence of Justice Clarence Thomas has been widely taken to mean that this super empowered Conservative Supreme Court, which took away the rights of women to reproductive freedom that they had enjoyed for 50 years, might do the same with same sex marriage. In 2015, the Supreme Court, in Obergefell v. Hodges, ruled that the fundamental right to marry is guaranteed to same-sex couples by both the Due Process Clause and the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. This case requires all fifty states and the District of Columbia to perform and recognize the marriages of same sex couples on the same terms and conditions as the marriages of heterosexual couples. But Obergefell was decided 5 to 4, and the Court is now obviously very different. The Thomas concurrence has been interpreted to suggest that Obergefell might be in danger of being reversed just like Roe was reversed; and that same sex rights could be taken away just like the right of reproductive freedom was taken away.
Lest anyone think that this concern is overwrought, the Attorney General of Texas, Ken Paxton, has signaled that he is willing to revisit laws in Texas which had forbidden same sex intimacy, laws which were struck down by the Supreme Court in 2003. Attorney General Paxton said his state is “willing and able” to defend any state law prohibiting same sex marriage and same sex intimacy. I read this sobering news days before Nat and Davide’s wedding.
What am I to do with Texas while I am in Lake Como? What am I to do with Clarence Thomas and Ken Paxton while Shira and I are standing under the chuppah with Nat and Davide?
In our family text threads before the wedding, we wondered out loud whether we would all move to Israel should the Supreme Court invalidate same sex marriage; and we wondered out loud whether, even if we could build a new life together in Israel, where same sex families like ours can be safe, what are our commitments to other LGBTQ families in America, particularly in red states like Texas. These disturbing and open questions were rattling around in my head, my heart, my soul in what should have been a day of perfect wedding blessing.
To come back to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s critique of the preacher, I share this story with you not because you have my family’s particular challenge, but because all of us have our own version of this challenge. You are on vacation at the Cape, or the Berkshires, or Nantucket, or New Hampshire or Vermont. You are at the beach. You are at a pond. The sun is shining. You are on a hike. The nature is gorgeous. You are at a barbeque, eating a delicious meal, opening up a fine bottle of wine, spending time with loved ones. You are happy to be alive. And when the moment is over, when the hike is over, when the lovely dinner is over, you go to your iPad and read the news, and it is confusing: how do I integrate these horrifying headlines with my reality? How can I enjoy a private moment with my friends and family when the world is so messed up? How can I be happy now when the future is so uncertain? How do I square the joy of my world with the pain of the world?
This dissonance lives every day. There is no day in which it does not live. There is no place in which it does not live. All I need to say is two words. Highland Park. Highland Park is Newton. Highland Park is to Illinois what Newton is to the Commonwealth. Which means that if it can happen there, it can happen here. How do we function in a world where a 4th of July parade is fatal? These mass shootings continue to happen without relief. The ubiquity of sudden, random violence casts a pall on everything.
Recently Bradley Beal, a basketball player for the Washington Wizards, signed a contract that will pay him 251 million dollars over five years. A reporter at the press conference announcing this contract asked a question that should have been a slow pitch down the middle. The reporter asked: Mr. Beal, how do you feel about your new contract? Bradley Beal paused, and his response was textured. He said look, I am married. I have a wife. I have two small children with a third on the way. I am black. This contract gives my family generational wealth of the kind that families that look like mine have not had. And yet, I am from St. Louis. And from July 1 to July 5, in St. Louis, there have been 22 mass shootings. 22 mass shootings in 5 days in the town I come from. So how am I supposed to enjoy my contract when the world is so broken?
That is every person’s question, each in our own way. How am I supposed to enjoy what is right with my world when the world is so broken? And that is what I was wrestling with at Nat and Davide’s wedding, even as I was feeling deeply the blessing of being at Nat and Davide’s wedding.
A helpful response to the dissonance of our time comes from an iconic moment at a Jewish wedding: the shattering of the glass at the end of the ceremony. Why the shattering of the glass? In weddings today, including Nat and Davide’s wedding, there is a new tweak to this very old ritual.
In previous generations, when the groom would step on the glass, that was it. Mazal Tov. The couple, the parents, the bridesmaids and the groomsmen all recessed, and no one thought about the shattered glass. It was swept away in the dustbin of history. But not anymore.
Now it is the fashion that the glass is in a bag, like this, and after the glass is shattered, it is repurposed. The shattered pieces are turned into a kiddush cup, and the newly married couple can make kiddush on Shabbat with the kiddush cup that comes from the glass that was broken under their chuppah.
The end of the perfect wedding ceremony—and every wedding ceremony is perfect—leans into a kiddush cup of broken pieces. Why?
There is a great mosaic artist who grew up here, Mia Schon, who does mosaic art in Israel and Boston. She once gave a lecture at Temple Emanuel where she explained how mosaic art is comprised of three steps. One, something is whole and perfect. Two, what was whole and perfect breaks. It is reduced to broken fragments. Three, mosaic art takes these broken fragments and repurposes them, putting them together in new and unexpected ways to create something beautiful and holy.
That is what a newly married couple does in the uncertain world in which we live. We don’t know what will be with Clarence Thomas’s dissent. We don’t know what will be in Texas, and what effect what happens in Texas will have on gay couples throughout the country. And yet, in the face of that uncertainty, Nat and Davide will make kiddush with a kiddush cup of broken pieces. There is uncertainty in the world. It just is. What do we do? We sanctify time. We gather loved ones around a Shabbat dinner table. We affirm life, love, future, home, hearth. We do that every day, every week, no matter what comes.
On a perfect day in Lake Como, every day in Newton, what will your kiddush cup of broken pieces look like? How can your broken pieces turn into wholeness and holiness? Shabbat shalom.