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Wholeness, Brokenness, and Tikkun Olam
Contributed by Noraa Kaplan

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Wholeness is the value dearest to the Jewish heart. Our word for peace, shalom, comes from shalem, a root meaning ‘whole.’ We are commanded to love “with our whole hearts, our whole spirits, and our whole selves.” (Deuteronomy 6:5) This desire for wholeness reflects our fascination with Hashem’s absolute Oneness. But even Hashem has been broken.
Kabbalah teaches that before the world was created, there was an infinite but formless, perfect but empty expanse of divine light. In order to make room for the physical world where we live, Hashem contracted His infinity and poured His light into divine vessels. But the finite vessels could not hold the infinite light, so they shattered, leaving countless sparks, shards of the divine scattered across the world. Humanity was put on earth to find these sparks of light and put them back together through the pursuit of justice, in a process called tikkun olam, repairing the world.
How can we reconcile the fundamental brokenness of the universe with Hashem’s wholeness? The Chasidic master, the Kotzker Rebbe has a cryptic answer: “there is nothing so whole as a broken heart.” One time a student asked him about a line of the Shema, “And these words which I am teaching you today shall be upon your heart.” (Deuteronomy 6:6) The student asked why the words should be “upon your heart” and not “in your heart.” The Kotzker Rebbe answered, “Our hearts are too hard to put anything inside of them. Instead, we place the words on top of them, so that when they break, the words can fall inside.” 
Heartbreak is more than a painful experience—it is the way we teach our hardened hearts to let love in. Receiving love is by no means an easy task when the world has told you that you don’t deserve it. In the Talmud, Rabbi Yochanan said that bringing love to the lonely is as difficult as parting the Red Sea. Just as our ancestors needed the courage to walk into the sea before it parted, heartbreak challenges those of us who are used to denying ourselves love to take the leap of faith and let it in. The vulnerable and broken heart is willing to accept love and other miracles. 
This is not to say that suffering is good, or that reveling in heartbreak and bitterness will help us reach individual enlightenment. In fact, the Talmud teaches that the Shechinah does not rest upon a person in a state of sorrow, only upon those experiencing the joy of a mitzvah. Suffering is only useful insofar as it radicalizes us and brings us closer to our communities. As Rabbi Tirzah Firestone writes, “If your own suffering does not serve to unite you with the suffering of others, if your own imprisonment does not join you with others in prison, if you in your smallness remain alone, then your pain will have been for naught.” Suffering allows us to let divine love in, but joy is what brings us closer to Hashem. In other words, heartbreak is what allows us to be repaired, but the radical joy we find in resistance is what allows us to repair the world. In turn, resistance mends our broken hearts, as “bandaging the broken- hearted, and proclaiming freedom to the captives and liberation to the prisoners” (Isaiah 61:1) go hand in hand. 
The Lubavitcher Rebbe said: “If you see what needs to be repaired and how to repair it, then you have found a piece of the world that has been left for you to complete. But if you only see what is wrong, then it is you yourself that needs repair.” Without a vision of what a world without prisons might look like, without a plan to overthrow the police, all we can learn from the carceral state is despair. If we cannot yet imagine a better world and how to go about building it, we need to prioritize our own healing and growth. Before we can liberate each other from this broken world, we must liberate ourselves from hopelessness. 

Eat the afikomen. Some say the following after eating it:

זֵכֶר לְקָרְבָּן פֶּסַח הָנֶאֱכַל עַל הָשוֹׁבַע
Zecher le-korban Pesach ha-ne’echal al ha-suva
In memory of the paschal sacrifice that was eaten until one was satisfied.
 
haggadah Section: Tzafun
Source: Min Ha-Meitzar: An Abolitionist Haggadah from the Narrow Place by Noraa Kaplan

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