Not Everything Has to Be Broken: Remembering the First Tablets
- marissasalem
- Jun 1
- 3 min read
My daughter Tal sculpted a סמל חטופים—hostage symbol—from clay, and pressed amber crystals into it. She collected the stones from the valley, then shaped it for me—her mother, who’s been printing hostage ribbons on shirts day after day.
I received it one afternoon, during a joyful after-school drum circle. Djembes echoing. Kids barefoot and wild. I joined in too. But in all the joy, we forgot the sculpture behind a soccer goal.
A friend tried to help, moved it to what she thought was a safer place.
It wasn’t. The next day, we returned to find it shattered.
We spent time combing through the מגרש, gathering every last shard. Holding the pieces like something sacred.
And I told my daughter:
When Moshe came down from the mountain on Shavuot, holding the first tablets, we weren’t ready. So he smashed them on the ground. But you know something? We kept all the pieces. Because we realized each one was so holy.
We are a people who know brokenness.
We have whole days set aside to sit in it—Tisha B’Av, Yom Kippur, Yom HaZikaron, and for most of us, these last 602 days. We mourn what’s been lost, grieve what could have been, cry for what we can’t carry anymore.
But Shavuot isn’t that day.
Shavuot is the day before the breaking.
The moment of the gift.
The wedding.
The yes.
The birthright trip.
The getting into med school.
The positive pregnancy test.
The time when everything was still whole.
Shavuot invites us to pause the cycle of trauma, of fighting, of fixing, of surviving—and simply remember what wholeness felt like.
In a world full of noise, Shavuot asks us to be quiet.
To stop schlepping the burden of the broken for a moment and let the ark rest.
Because only when we set it down can we really remember what’s inside.
The tablets were never the point. It was the spark. The clarity. The yes. The knowing.
And when everything feels cracked—our society, our politics, our families, our hearts—sometimes the deepest wisdom is to stop carrying the heavy how of “how did we get here,” and start remembering the why of “why we said yes.”
To stop fixing and start blessing.
Because here’s the thing: not everything has to be broken to be true.
Not every fight is the end. Not every crack means it’s fake.
Sometimes we throw things away—marriages, friendships, beliefs, countries—because we forget how sacred they were before they hurt us.
And Shavuot is the day we remember that moment before.
The light. The closeness. The wholeness.
And we ask ourselves, with all the empathy and all the strength:
Can I remember the first tablets חזק enough to choose yes again?
Because everything that matters—our country,our relationships,our dreams,our faith,our people—requires recommitment.
Again, and again, and again.
And we can’t recommit without first remembering the beauty that made us say yes in the first place.
Maybe we didn’t appreciate what we had.
Maybe we were careless.
Maybe we got caught up and left that precious clay סמל חטופים at the school.
Maybe we forgot how sacred it all was.
But we can’t let that guilt be the loudest voice in the room.
And we can’t keep carrying the burden of all these broken pieces forever—without, at least sometimes, tapping into the wisdom of setting it the F down for a second, and remembering how it felt before everything shattered.
On Shavuot, I bless us with the revelation of knowing what is still worth choosing again.
The vision that stirred us.
The love that moved us.The strength to hope again.
The clarity to remember before the breaking.
And the courage to pick up the pieces עוד פעם—not out of despair, but out of hope.
Because we always keep the pieces.But we must also remember the gift.
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