The Three Weeks

by Kendra Walz

The Torah tells us that things inevitably fall apart, sometimes over and over again.

In Exodus, when Moses saw that the Jews had built a golden calf, he took the stone tablets he had just received from God and smashed them into pieces on the ground. God proceeded to give him a new set of tablets, yet the Jews still gathered up all the broken pieces of the original set and have stored them side by side with the new set ever since.

It is easy to assume that Moses broke the tablets in a fit of rage, that the Jews breaking the commandment of committing idolatry so quickly frustrated him to the point where he just threw the commandments down and stormed off. However, Judaism shows us that the repeating cycle of things falling apart and coming back together is inevitable and necessary.

When things fall apart, it should not be treated as a catastrophic ending or as a mistake.

When things fall apart, it should not be treated as a catastrophic ending or as a mistake. The process of things falling apart should be treated as allowing space for new things to grow. The destruction of the Second Temple is a prime example of this. While the Jews faced a devastating collapse at the heart of their Holy Land, we moved on and created a thriving diasporic community. While it is okay to keep parts of our broken past close to us, as the Israelites did with the original tablets and as the Jews did with Jerusalem, Judaism teaches that it is inevitable that things fall apart so we can grow. Breaking things is seen over and over again in Jewish tradition; we break the matzo during the Passover Seder, we break a glass during a wedding, and the Jewish people as a whole have been broken and scattered throughout the world. But the destruction is never the end of the story, as sometimes the loss of something precious to us can make way for us to grow as a people, as a community, and as individuals.

Kendra has a background in non-profit management and grant administration. She graduated with an MBA in International Business from the University of Hartford in 2026. She volunteers with multiple Jewish organizations in the Greater Hartford area, and Israel, and has been published in the Jewish feminist magazine, Lilith.