I am an advocate for acknowledging brokenness. Like everyone I’ve ever met, I sometimes feel broken. Even when life seems to be humming along nicely, there are moments, hours, days, when I feel broken.

Moshe Rabbeinu—Moses our Teacher—understood this. He knew what it was like to create brokenness and to experience brokenness.

When he came down from Mount Sinai with the two tablets God had inscribed, and saw the golden calf Aaron fashioned and the people worshipping it, he smashed the tablets on the ground.

But Moses got a second chance with a second set of tablets, and we are told in a midrash that the Ark of the Covenant held both sets of tablets, the broken ones and the whole ones.

Rabbi Menachem Creditor wrote, “This is one of our tradition’s most powerful teachings about what it means to be human. Within the aron kodesh of the human heart, the holy ark that travels with us, rest our experiences of wholeness and our experiences of brokenness. We carry the moments when life fulfilled its promise, and we carry the moments when the world shattered before our eyes. Neither set of tablets is discarded. Both become part of the sacred story.”

And although I have always loved that story and its message for us humans, there is a modern midrash that moves me even more deeply, imagining what happened to the fragments that were too small.

When the tablets shattered, Moses gathered the pieces he could hold. But so much was left behind. He didn’t know what to do; his feet were surrounded by dust and tiny shards from the broken rock.

So God caused a giant wind to blow, and the fragments were picked up and blown around the world as a fine dust, encircling the globe, leaving a bright film that covers the entire world.

Everywhere you turn, everywhere you look, there is a tiny bit of dust, created from the first tablets, the ones that were etched by God.

The broken tablets were never restored to their original form. Some pieces were kept safe with the new tablets, and some became the raw material for something new, something different.

Rebbe Nachman of Bratslav once said: “We need to start over every day. And sometimes many times each day.”

I too am starting anew. A little over a year ago, I was asked to create an adult Jewish education program for an organization. But the program didn’t flourish as hoped, and after ten months I found myself unemployed.

So I started over.

Last week I launched The Jewish Open Tent, built from the teaching, learning, successes, disappointments, and hard-earned wisdom of the past decade.

Like the dust from the first tablets, the fragments of our lives do not disappear. They settle into us. They become part of who we are, catching the light in unexpected places.

Each of us carries both broken tablets and whole ones. Each of us has a sacred story to tell.

Today, I begin again.