Kabbalat Shabbat Kavannah | Rabbi Roly Matalon | March 6, 2026

Shabbat shalom. Shabbat shalom.

And this week's parasitis

brings us the dramatic scene of Moshe

smashing the tablets.

We read a few weeks ago in Parhat

that God gave Moshe the tablets bearing

the ten commandments at Mount Si.

40 days later, seeing that Moshe had

failed to come down from the mountain,

the people persuaded Aaron to make a

golden calf.

When Moshe came down and saw the people

dancing around the calf,

he broke the tablets.

Eventually, Moshe went back up again to

the mountain and pleaded with God

to forgive their sin.

God granted them forgiveness

and Moshe and gave Moshe a new set of

tablets

which he placed in the ark of the

covenant and carried into the promised

land.

What happened with the broken pieces

of the first tablets?

Were they left behind?

Were they discarded or buried in the

wilderness?

Rav teaches in the Talmud

that the broken pieces of the first

tablets were placed inside the ark

and carried together with the unbroken

tablets.

I love this piece by the writer and poet

Roger Caminets

about the tablets.

He writes,

"The Brooklyn tablets were also carried

in an ark in so far as they represented

everything shattered,

everything lost. They were the law of

broken things.

The leaf torn from the stem in a storm.

A cheek touched in fondness once, but

now the name forgotten.

How they must have rumbled,

clattered on the way, even carried so

carefully through the wasteland.

How they must have rattled around

until the pieces broke into pieces.

The edges softened, crumbling, dust

collected at the bottom of the ark.

Ghosts of old letters, old laws.

In so far as a law broken is still

remembered,

these laws were obeyed. And in so far as

memory preserves the pattern of broken

things,

these bits of stone were preserved

through many journeys and ruined days.

Even they say into the promised land.

No, the broken tablets were not

discarded.

They remained part of the story.

And we're always carrying

our brokenness

alongside our wholeness,

our uncertainties

alongside our certainties, our

vulnerability alongside our strengths,

our grief alongside our hopes.

These days we are living through one of

those moments when we feel very acutely

what it means to carry both the whole

tablets and the broken ones.

The whole tablets are the certainties we

hold.

That the regime in Iran is oppressive

criminal and that it has terrorized and

murdered its own citizens. That Iran

must never possess nuclear weapons.

that Iran or its proxies must never

threaten Israel.

But alongside alongside them are the

broken tablets. A war started without a

clearly stated goal, a coherent strategy

or an exit plan. The broken tablets are

the human cost of the war. the lives

lost, the families displaced, the fear

and the uncertainty that ripple through

Israel, Iran, and across the Middle

East. Already, so many people have been

killed. Families spend their nights in

shelters.

Hundreds of thousands have been forced

to leave their homes, living in

displacement and uncertainty.

The broken pieces are also the

unpredictability

that accompanies every war.

Wars are far easier to begin than to

end. How will this unfold?

Where will it lead?

How long will it last?

Will Iran eventually descend into chaos?

What will be the cost in human lives

before this is over?

And perhaps one of the most broken of

the fragments

is the vision of a humanity able to live

without fear.

The ancient hope that somehow

we might learn to live together

on this fragile planet.

We hold on to our convictions about

justice and security, about the right of

people to live without being terrorized

and without existential threats.

At the same time, we cannot ignore the

broken pieces. We must refuse to become

numb to suffering, to grief, to the

fragility of life. The broken pieces

rattle in the ark. They remind us of the

work

that still lies ahead.

the work of striving for a world in

which human beings might someday learn

to live with greater wisdom,

greater compassion,

and less fear.

And now to remind us that we're all

created by the same God, that we all

emanate from the same place. Whether we

are on this side or that side, we're all

part of the one.

I invite you to take the booklet.

as we sing this old thousand year old

poem by Rabi Schlommo Gabir

who knew about persecution and war as

well

but never gave up

on the

most profound

of the ideas of Jewish faith which is

about the oneness of God and all there

is. on page two of the booklet Colu.