“I come back, always, to the metaphoric response of the Kabbalah—the mystical branch of Judaism that inspired Leonard Cohen’s broken “Hallelujah.”
That, in the beginning, all of creation was a vessel filled with divine light. That it broke apart, and now the shards of holiness are strewn all around us.
Sometimes it’s too dark to see them, sometimes we’re too distracted by pain or conflict. But our task is simple—to bend down, dig them out, pick them up. And in so doing, to perceive that light can emerge from darkness, death gives way to rebirth, the soul descends to this riven world for the sake of learning how to ascend. And to realize that we all notice different shards; I might see a lump of coal, but you spot the gold glimmering beneath.
Note the modesty of this vision. Note that it doesn’t promise Utopia. On the contrary, it teaches the impossibility of utopias, and by implication that we should cherish what we have, we shouldn’t cast it aside in favor of an unobtainable perfection. But we can bring the bittersweet tradition to our respective domains, to the corners of the world over which we have some small influence.”
— Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole by Susan Cain
