CBI Blogs

September 30, 2024/27 Elul 5784
Cantor Laurie Weinstein

The Japanese have an artistic style called kintsugi in which a broken piece of pottery is repaired by mending the areas of breakage with a lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered precious metal…like gold. Why do this? One answer: to embrace the flawed or the imperfect. Healing human brokenness is not as easy as gold dusted glue. However, if I greet the broken hearted with an open heart, couldn’t I begin to see that my neighbor is broken like me? Through this humble act of seeing my neighbor’s struggle, perhaps we begin our narrative there and change our story moving forward. The brokenness has been recognized and repair has begun, all with the strength of humility. Humility is soft, like pure gold and needs a little agent (glue) to bind relationships with strength. Just as kintsugi beautifies broken pottery with a shimmering strand of precious metal, I too can choose to heal the brokenness I witness. I cannot mend brokenness with gold leaf, but I can take strides to bring beauty or better yet, love into the world. I can refrain from negative speech, I can smile at a stranger, I can give of my talents and time, I can be kind. While positive actions take effort, the love and light poured into the world can help to shift perceptions to positivity.