The Cracks That Reveal the Light

Insights from a Conversation with Rabbi Joey Rosenfeld and Rabbi Benji.

Some speak about the soul. Others, like Rabbi Joey Rosenfeld, speak from the soul. A practicing psychotherapist specializing in addiction, Rosenfeld moves in a single conversation from Aristotle to the Arizal, from the twelve steps of Alcoholics Anonymous to Lurianic Kabbalah. What strikes me most is the coherence of his references. Everything he touches points to the same conviction: beneath the surface of every life, every text, every experience, there is something deeper waiting to be uncovered, and this search is not optional but essential.

We Are All Mystics by Definition

It would be easy to assume Jewish mysticism is reserved for select scholars. Rosenfeld rejects this. Everyone, he says, is a mystic by definition, because every soul carries a point perpetually tuned to the deepest elements of reality. Regardless of background, education, or observance, a faculty within us is already attuned to the Infinite. The question is not whether we have access to that depth, but whether we have felt the urgency to look for it.

That urgency is almost always born from a crack, a loss, a moment where the functioning exterior of a life no longer holds. Mysticism, in this sense, can serve as spiritual medicine.

Rosenfeld spent a decade treating addicts in St. Louis, synthesizing Torah and twelve-step theory. Genuine spiritual opening, he found, comes only after one fully confronts their own helplessness. In Hasidic language, that is bittul, or self-nullification: not self-punishment or shame, but the profound acknowledgment that I am dependent and not self-sufficient.

Breaking That Builds

At the core of Rosenfeld's outlook is shevirat hakelim, the shattering of the vessels. In creation, God produced a structure of divine light, and it shattered. The broken pieces fell into disarray, and it is precisely among those fallen sparks that history and human experience take shape. The work of every person is to find and raise them.

What moves him is what this teaches about trauma. The instinctive response is to mourn an original wholeness now disrupted. But Jewish mysticism teaches something different: "There was never an original whole. The only original whole is God. The moment God decides to create the world means we're no longer dealing with that original whole, and therefore the traumas that come out are not destructive; they're constitutive of the very thing."

The shattered vessels are not evidence that something went wrong. They are the raw material of everything that can go right. The real work of the mystic is not to ascend to some rarefied altitude, but to descend into the broken places and discover the light there.

The Deepest Obligation

The greatest challenge facing the world today, Rosenfeld tells me, is a lack of belief in self, an unawareness of what we each carry within. Jewish mysticism asks us to re-enter the world with greater depth, and to meet others where they are broken and offer something real.