Beth Schafer
We use the word “trauma” a lot these days. It shows up in casual conversation the way “stressed” or “tired” used to. I want to be careful here, because there is real trauma in this world, the kind that reshapes a nervous system and a life, and nothing in this message is meant to minimize that.
But somewhere along the way, “trauma” became the word we reach for to describe almost anything that ever hurt us. And underneath that word choice is something true: almost every one of us is carrying some kind of break. A disappointment. A rupture. A wound we received, or a wound we caused. Some of what cracked us was done to us. Some of it, if we look closely, we did ourselves.
We are in the middle of Elul now, the month that leads us toward the new year, and Elul has one job: to walk us back toward those fissures on purpose. Not to relive them. Not to reopen them until they bleed again. Elul is not interested in re-traumatizing anyone. It asks something quieter, and harder. It asks us to look at the break with curiosity instead of shame. To ask what that moment made of us, not only what it took from us.
There is a Japanese practice called kintsugi. When a piece of pottery breaks, the potter doesn’t throw it away, and doesn’t hide the crack either. The break is repaired with gold, so the fracture becomes the most visible part of the piece, sometimes the most beautiful part. The bowl isn’t beautiful in spite of having been broken. It’s beautiful because of how it was mended, and because it never pretends the break didn’t happen.
That is a hard practice to live by. Most of us would rather seal our cracks shut and turn the piece so no one sees the seam. But this season is asking something else of us: to hold up the parts of our story we’ve been quietly avoiding, the ones that still haunt us sideways when we least expect them, and to ask whether there’s any gold we’re willing to pour into them. Peace with a wound is not the same as pretending it never opened.
This week’s portion, Ki Tavo, holds a version of this practice inside its ritual law. When a farmer brings the first fruits of the harvest to the altar, the Torah doesn’t let them offer a simple thank you. It requires a recitation: “My father was a wandering Aramean.” And from there the story doesn’t skip anything. It moves straight through slavery, through affliction, through the cry that rose up out of Egypt, before it ever arrives at the fruit in your hands. The Torah could have written a liturgy of pure gratitude. Instead, it insists that the offering carry the wandering and the suffering inside it, because the harvest doesn’t mean what it means without the broken road that led there. That is kintsugi, written thousands of years before the word existed. The crack isn’t hidden from the offering. It is the offering.
I wrote a song called “Repair” out of this same instinct, the idea that our scars don’t have to disappear to be at peace, that the fractures can hold something true and even something beautiful, if we’re willing to stay with them instead of turning away. You can listen and see the words here.
Shabbat Shalom and wishes for a meaningful Elul,
Beth
