The Glass We Send to the Wilderness

Welcome to The Kosher Teruah. I'm Simon Jacob, and I'm your host for this episode from Jerusalem. Before we get started, no matter where you are, please take a moment to pray for the safe return home of all our soldiers. If you're driving in your car, please focus on the road ahead. Yehi Mishpacheh, Imu Shalayim. Did you listen to that? That sound, the one that just made the whole room cheer, is the sound of something being broken. Think about how strange that is. We wrap a glass in a napkin, we lay it down with care, and then at the single most joyful second of a Jewish life, the groom brings his heel down on it and everyone he loves cheers. The band comes in on the crack. We don't gasp, we don't sweep it up in embarrassment. We shout for joy at the shattering of the whole thing into pieces. Welcome to the Kosher Teruah, and I'm Solomon Simon Jacob. If you're hearing this the day it goes out, we are deep into the 9 days, the slow walk down towards Tisha B'Av, the saddest day on the Jewish calendar. And here's the first strange thing before we even begin. I want to talk to you about a wedding, but we could not actually hold one right now if we tried. Weddings are forbidden in these days. The whole institution of Jewish joy is switched off for the season. So think about this as an episode about a light we're standing in the dark to describe. A few weeks ago, On the 17th of Tammuz, we sat together with the day the wine stopped, the libation that went silent on the altar when Jerusalem fell. That was about wine taken away. This week, I want to follow the one glass of wine we still deliberately break at the very peak of our happiness and ask, What's it really doing there? Because we tell ourselves it's a small, sad footnote in a happy day, a moment for Jerusalem, a little bow to sorrow before we dance. That's the version most of us were handed. It's so much stranger and so much bigger than that. Hidden inside every Jewish wedding In plain sight, right under the chuppah, there is a service, an avoda, and it is built from beginning to end out of wine. Count the glasses with me. There are 3. 2 of them hold the wine of union. The couple sips from them, and afterwards that very wine is passed down to the crowd. So that people still searching might find their own match. Two cups whose whole business is joining people together. And then there's the third glass. Nobody drinks the third glass. It doesn't even hold wine. It sits on the floor empty for only one purpose: to be crushed under the groom's heel. Two cups that join and one whole vessel that we shatter into fragments. But why? At that exact moment, we take two separate people and make them one. Why do we take one whole thing and break it into pieces we will never gather up again? Hold that question because it opens onto something much larger than a wedding. Ask yourself what this season of mourning actually takes away from us. It takes weddings, the making of new unions. It takes wine, the one cup we bless and pass around the table. On Tisha B'Av, it takes away our very greeting. We're forbidden to say shalom to each other. And shalom, remember, doesn't only mean peace, it means whole. Shalem. On the day we mourn the broken city, we may not wish each other wholeness. Even the last meal before the fast, we're told to eat low to the ground and alone, not even joined together to bless. Every single thing this season strips away is an instrument of union, because the Temple, the tradition says, fell for sinat chinam, baseless hatred. The destruction we're mourning was the shattering of a people into fragments, and for 9 days we live inside that shattering on purpose. So here's where we're going today: 3 glasses, 2 goats, because that empty broken glass turns out to be a scapegoat, the twin of a ritual in the temple on Yom Kippur, and one shattered vessel that is nothing less than the Churban itself, set down in the middle of our greatest joy. A whole thing made many, held up at the exact instant we make many into one. And by the end, I want you to hear that crack, that cheer, completely differently than you did a minute ago. Not as sorrow interrupting a party, but as a people looking straight at the picture of their own brokenness and cheering because they have decided to put it back together. But we start where the wedding starts, not with the breaking, with the first cup, the wine of setting apart. So picture the chuppah. The canopy is up, 4 poles and a cloth open on all sides, a house with no walls, which is its own beautiful idea, but that's for another day. The bride has come around the groom, the crowd goes quiet, and the very first thing that happens, before the ring, before the vows, before any of it, Solomon Simon Jacob lifts a cup of wine. Not a symbol of wine, not a toast. An actual cup filled, raised, and a blessing is made over it. And only then does the ceremony truly begin. I want you to notice that because it's easy to walk right past. Of all the ways a wedding could open— with the words, with silence, with music— The tradition reaches first for wine. Before two people are joined, a glass is poured. This first cup has a name. It belongs to the part of the ceremony called erusin, or kedushin. And that word kedushin is the whole key to this chapter, so let me slow down and focus on it. We translate it loosely as betrothal, but that's a soft romantic word, and kedushin is not really a romantic word at all. Listen to the root inside it: kadosh, holy. The same root as kiddush, the blessing we make over wine every Friday night. The same root is kedusha, holiness itself, the same root as the Kaddish. And what does kadosh actually mean? Not sweet, not loving. It means set apart, designated, lifted out of the ordinary and reserved for one purpose and no other. When we call God Kadosh, we're saying apart, singular, not like anything else. When we make something hekdesh, we've taken it out of everyday use and dedicated it. So when the groom says the words "Harei at mikudeshet li," he is not saying "I adore you." He is saying something far more precise. And far more serious. You are hereby set apart for me, this one and no other. And notice the direction of it, because it matters for everything that follows. This setting apart is not separation for its own sake. You don't set someone apart to push them away. You set them apart for someone. It's the first move of a union. The two of them are lifted out of the great blur of everyone else towards each other. Keep that in your ear: even the wine of separation is secretly already the wine of joining. Over the cup, the blessing is sipped, not drained. Just taste it, and the joining has begun. That's what the first cup is. It is the wine of exclusivity, the wine of designation, the moment two people step out of the great blur of everyone else and become singularly to each other, set apart, made kadosh. And here's a detail I love. Originally, roosin and the rest of the wedding were two separate ceremonies, sometimes a full year apart. First the setting apart, then later the moving in together. Today we do them under one canopy, back to back, but we still mark them with two different cups of wine. We read the Ketubah in between, almost as a divider. Two ceremonies, two cups. The structure is right there, hiding in the choreography. Hold on to that, because the number is going to matter enormously before we're done. But stay with me on this idea of setting apart. Because this, this is where the wine world and the wedding suddenly starts speaking the same language. Here's a question winemakers actually have to sit inside a cellar and answer. You bring in the fruit at harvest, and at some point you have to decide, is this just wine, grapes, volume, something to fill the tank and blend into a decent, honest bottle that tastes like a region and a price point? Or is this something— is this a particular slope, a particular parcel, a particular row of old vines that gave you something the rest of the vineyard didn't? Something worth keeping separate. Worth bottling on its own, worth putting a name on. Because the moment you make that second choice, the moment you say this fruit from this ground does not blend away with everything else, you have done something almost exactly like kedushin. You have set it apart. You've taken it out of the anonymous blur and declared it singular. That's what terroir really is underneath all the romance we pile into that word. Terroir is an act of setting apart. It's a decision that this hillside is not interchangeable with the next one, that these grapes carry something you can't get anywhere else. And so they deserve their own name, their own bottle, their own identity. A single vineyard wine is a wine that has been sanctified in exactly the old sense of the word—lifted out of the general, reserved, made kadosh. And it's funny, the whole language of fine wine is a language of exclusivity. Grand Cru, Single Vineyard, Reserve. We are constantly saying, "This one and no other. This slope, this row, this barrel." We are constantly performing Kedushin on the fruit. So look at what the first cup under the chuppah is doing. Before anything else can happen, wine is used to say, 'Out of all the world, this one.' Setting apart is the foundation. It's the ground floor for the whole building. You cannot have a marriage or honestly a great bottle of wine until something has first been declared singular, taken out of the blur. And given a name. The couple, like the named vineyard, has just been lifted out of the general and made particular, consecrated. That's the first cup. But setting apart is only the beginning, because you can designate something, name it, reserve it, and it's still at that point a promise. A young vine in the ground, potential waiting. Kedushin sets the two apart for each other, but it doesn't yet fill the house. It doesn't yet overflow. For that, you need the second cup, and the second cup is a very different kind of wine. Where the first is narrow and exclusive, this one and no other. The second one opens up and pours outward and reaches all the way back to the Garden of Eden. That's where we're going next, from the wine of setting apart to the wine of fullness. So we're back under the chuppah, and time has passed. Not much, a few minutes of ceremony. The ring is on, The ketubah, the marriage contract, has been read out loud, and now we arrive at the second half of the wedding, the part called nissuin. The setting apart is done. This is the joining. And once again, watch what the tradition reaches for: a cup of wine, a second cup, poured fresh, lifted. And over this one, we don't say a single blessing, we say 7. These are the Sheva Brachot, the 7 blessings. If you've been to a Jewish wedding, this is the part where a parade of people—a grandfather, a brother, a rabbi, an old friend—each come up and sing one blessing over the raised cup, and the whole room answers amen. 7 voices, 7 blessings, 1 glass of wine. And I want to walk you through where those 7 blessings actually go, because most people standing there don't catch the journey, and it's breathtaking. They start at the very beginning. The first blessing reaches all the way back to creation itself. To the God who made everything for his glory, who formed the human being, who fashioned man and woman in his image. We're in the garden, we're at the dawn of the world. Then they move forward. They speak of Zion, Zion, of a barren, grieving city who one day will rejoice again as her children come home. And they end the 7th blessing, the climax, with a picture of the future, a vision of the streets of Jerusalem one day soon ringing again with sound. And it names the sounds: the voice of joy and the voice of gladness. The voice of the groom and the voice of the bride. So look at the ark, 7 blessings that begin in Eden and end in the streets of a rebuilt Jerusalem. From the first man and woman in the garden, to this man and woman right here under this canopy, to a redeemed city not yet built. The whole story of the world told over a single cup of wine in the time it takes to lift a glass. That's why I call this the cup of fullness. The first cup was narrow, exclusive—this one and no other. It was a spotlight. It pulled two people out of the crowd and made them singular. But this cup The second cup does the opposite. It opens. It takes these two singular people and pours them back outward into the whole human story, into the community, into creation, and into Jerusalem. The first cup separates them from the world. The second cup hands them back into it. But transformed now as a source of joy that spills past themselves. And notice, you cannot even say these 7 blessings alone. The first cup, the setting apart, is intimate. It's really about the two of them. But the Sheva Brachot requires a minyan, a quorum, a community. At least 10. The joy of the second cup is too big to hold privately. It structurally demands other people in the room. Fullness by definition overflows. It cannot be contained by the couple. It has to be witnessed and shared and answered with amen. And here's the piece that makes me love it. The couple doesn't drain the cups. They take sips, no more, so that there's wine left. And what happens to it? It gets passed out into the room to the guests. In many communities, there's a beautiful custom around it. The ones who are still single, still searching, drink from the leftover wine of the bride and groom. As a segula, a good sign, a little prayer that their own match should come soon. Sit with what that means. The wine of this union, barely touched by the couple, is poured straight out to seed the next one. The joy doesn't stop at the edge of the chuppah. It overflows the cup and goes looking for the next two people to join. One union pouring itself out to make another. That is fullness doing exactly what fullness does. Now, here's where this lands for me, having spent time chasing exactly this in a glass. There's a moment Every serious wine person knows it, where a wine stops being a collection of parts and becomes a whole. When it's young, you can taste the seams. There's the fruit over here, the acid over there, the tannins standing off on their own, the oak sitting on top. It's all there, but it hasn't been married yet. It hasn't resolved. And then, with the right fruit and enough patience, something happens. The seams disappear. You go to name what you're tasting and you can't take it apart anymore. The fruit and the acid and the tannins and the oak have become one continuous thing, and it just flows. And it finishes long, and it feels not like a list of flavors anymore, but like a single complete statement. That's the wine we all chase. We call it balance, we call it harmony, but really the word is fullness. It's a wine that has become whole. And here's what I want you to hear underneath that, because it's the quiet heartbeat of this whole episode. What is a great wine? It's a multitude made one. Thousands of separate berries, different rows, different barrels, sometimes different vineyards, all of it crushed together. And over time married until you can no longer find the seams. That's not just balance, that's unity. Achtut, you can taste a wine at its fullest, is many separate things that have become a single whole, and the moment you can't take it apart anymore is the moment it's most beautiful. Remember that, because in the very next chapter we're going to take the whole vessel and shatter it back into pieces. The wine has been whispering the theme all along: the most beautiful thing in the glass is the many made one. And that's the second cup exactly. The first cup was the naming. This fruit set apart, given an identity. The second cup is the fulfillment of it, the moment the promise ripens into something complete, generous, overflowing, ready to be shared with a room full of people. This is Yayin Yisameach Livav, the wine that gladdens the heart. At its absolute peak. Two cups now: consecration and fullness, setting apart and overflowing. And honestly, the ceremony could end right here. You have everything. You have the bond, you have the joy, a perfect, complete, whole celebration. The wine has resolved The story has gone from Eden all the way to the streets of Jerusalem. Except—did you catch it? Even here, at the fullest, most joyful moment, in the 7th blessing itself, the tradition slipped something in. It didn't sing about the streets of Jerusalem as they are. It sang about them as they will be. Speedily may there be heard— a future tense, a prayer, which means that even in the cup of overflowing joy, there is a quiet admission hiding in the words. Jerusalem isn't like that yet. The streets aren't ringing yet, not fully, not now. The wound is already in the room. It's woven into the blessing of joy itself. And so the ceremony does not end at two cups, because everything you've just felt— the setting apart, the fullness, the whole world from Eden to the rebuilt city, the many made one— all of it is about to be answered by a third glass. A glass with no blessing, a glass with no wine in it at all, the empty one set on the ground that the groom breaks beneath his heel. That's where we go next. So the 7 blessings are sung, the second cup is sipped and passed out into the room, and now we come to the thing everybody's secretly waiting for. The glass on the floor, the heel, the crack, the Mazal Tov. But before we break it, we want to ask a question almost nobody asks: which glass are we breaking, and what's in it? Because here's a detail that once you notice, you can't stop noticing. The glass the groom breaks is not one of the two cups we just used. You do not take a cup you sang seven blessings over, or the cup that touches the lips of the bride and groom, and crush it underfoot. That would be unthinkable. You bless that wine. It's holy. It was sipped and shared. No. The broken glass is a separate glass, a third vessel. And here's the part that's going to matter enormously: it's empty. We don't fill it. We don't pour wine into it and spill it out. It's wrapped in a napkin or a bit of foil, set down on the ground, and broken with nothing inside it. And it isn't hurled or thrown. The groom simply places his heel or his shoe and brings it down. So count them again: 2 cups of wine for joining, 1 empty glass for breaking. 3 vessels, and the third one is different in kind—not lesser, not flawed, but marked from the start for one fate. The structure of a Jewish wedding requires an empty glass whose entire reason for being is to be shattered. Now, why do that at all? Where does that come from? The oldest source is a strange and wonderful little story in the Talmud. A great sage Mar Baravina is making a wedding feast for his son. The wine is flowing. The rabbis— the rabbis, mind you— are getting a little too merry, the joy tipping over into something unmoored. And so the host does something shocking. He takes an expensive glass and breaks it in front of them. And the room goes quiet. The giddiness breaks with a glass. Another sage, Rav Ashi, does almost the same thing at his son's wedding. The lesson that Talmud draws is the verse: Rejoice with trembling. Even in your gladness, maybe especially in your gladness, keep a thread of trembling in it. Don't let joy float you off into forgetting. And over the centuries, that thread got a name and a direction. The trembling became remembering, remembering the one thing a Jew is never supposed to forget, even at the peak of personal happiness: that Jerusalem is broken. That the Temple is gone and that the world is not yet whole. And so the custom grew that as the glass is broken, the groom recites the line from Psalms: Imesh g'hech Yerushalayim. If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget its cunning. If I do not raise Jerusalem above my highest joy, 'Above my highest joy.' He says it at the highest joy of his life, and then he breaks the glass. That's the standard explanation, and it's beautiful and it's true, but I don't think it goes deep enough because it treats the broken glass as a feeling, a moment of sadness. Dropped into the happiness. And I've come to believe it's not a feeling at all. It's a machine, a sacrificial one. And to see it, I have to take you out of the wedding hall completely and into the temple on the holiest day of the year, Yom Kippur. At the center of the Yom Kippur service, there's a ritual that is genuinely one of the strangest in the whole Torah. The High Priest is brought two goats, and the Torah is emphatic that these two goats are to be identical. The tradition spells it out: the same height, the same appearance, the same value, brought at the same time, as alike as two goats can possibly be. A matched pair, twins. And then he casts lots. Two lots in a box. He draws them. And the lot decides, koralechad la Hashem, one lot for God, koralechad la'azazel, and one lot for azazel, for the wilderness. The goat marked for God is drawn near. It's offered on the altar, brought close in the most sacred sense. The goat marked for Azazel is sent in the opposite direction. The high priest lays both hands on its head and confesses over it out loud. He transfers unto this animal all the sins, all the failures, all the brokenness of the entire people. He loads it up with words, and then the goat is led away, out of the courtyard, out of the city, out into the wilderness, the midbar, the wasteland where nothing grows. And there it is cast off a cliff to its death. Carrying everything broken with it, out, away, and gone. Two identical goats, same fold, same look, same worth, a unity, a pair, and the ritual splits them. Nothing separates them but the lot, one drawn near and one cast out to carry the brokenness into the wilderness. Now come back to the chuppah and look at the 3 glasses with new eyes. 3 vessels, they could be identical—same glass, same shape. Nothing about the third one makes it deserve to be the one that breaks. It's not lesser, it's not flawed. What separates it from the other 2 is not its nature, it's its lot. Its role, its assignment. Two of them are drawn near, lifted, blessed, brought to the lips, la Hashem. And one of them is broken underfoot and cast out, la Azazel. The wedding is running the two goats ritual in glass. Two cups drawn near, and one glass sent to the wilderness. And watch the mechanism. It's identical, beat for beat. On Yom Kippur, the priest lays hands on the goat and speaks over it, loading it with the people's brokenness, and then it sends it out to be destroyed. And at the wedding, the groom speaks over the glass, Im ish gachechu shalayim, loading it with the brokenness of Jerusalem, the un-wholeness of the whole world, and then the heel comes down. Speech, then destruction. Confession, then casting out. The words pack the wound into the glass, and the heel sends it to the wilderness. The broken glass is the scapegoat of the wedding. It carries the brokenness out so that the couple can step into a home that is whole. But now I want you to look, really look, at what actually happens to that glass, because this is the picture the whole episode turns on. A single whole vessel, one thing, and in an instant Under the heel, it becomes many. A dozen shards, a scatter of fragments across the floor. Pieces you could never fit back together, never gather up whole again. One made many, whole made broken. Think about the two cups we just came from. The wine that was many made one, thousands of berries married into a single whole. And now the exact reverse. At the summit of a wedding, which is itself two people becoming one, a whole room full of people gathered into one celebration, we take a single whole thing and shatter it into scattered pieces. That is not a random image to reach for. That is the image, because there is a name in our tradition for a whole that has become shattered into scattered fragments, for people broken into pieces and driven apart. And we're going to spend the rest of this episode learning to say it. Hold the shards in your mind. We'll come back for them. Because I just told you that the broken glass is a scapegoat, and the scapegoat is a Yom Kippur ritual. Yom Kippur is the Day of Atonement, and we are sitting right now in a season of mourning. Those are two very different things. So what on earth is a machine of atonement doing at a wedding? And what is it doing in the middle of the 9 days at what is essentially a funeral for a city? That's not a hole in the story. That's the door, and we walk through it next with two keys that turn out to unlock everything. Let's stop the music for a minute and say the problem out loud plainly, because it's a real one, and if I don't name it, some sharp listener out there is going to name it for me. I just spent a whole chapter telling you that the broken glass is a scapegoat, that it runs the machinery of the two goats the Yom Kippur ritual of sending brokenness out into the wilderness. But Yom Kippur is a Day of Atonement. Its whole business is kapara, cleansing, forgiveness. It's a day that ends in relief. You confess, and at nightfall you go home lighter, forgiven, clean. And where are we sitting as this goes out? In the opposite kind of time, the 9 days of Elut, mourning, we're not getting lighter, we're sitting lower every day, walking down towards a burning city. So those are 2 different engines. Atonement is about sin and its repair. Mourning is about loss and grief. And I've told you the happiest ritual in Jewish life borrows the atonement engine and does it in the morning season. That doesn't fit. A wedding is not Yom Kippur. Except, here are the two keys. The first one is going to stop you cold, because it turns out a wedding is not like Yom Kippur. A wedding is one. I don't mean that poetically. I mean that almost technically. Listen to what a bride and groom actually do on their wedding day in traditional practice. They fast from morning until the ceremony—no food, no water—the same fast as the Day of Atonement. They confess in the afternoon prayer, the Mincha, before the Chuppah. The bride and groom recite the vidui, the confession. And not just any confession. It is word for word the very same vidui we say on Yom Kippur. The whole alphabet of it. Ashamnu, Bagadnu. The confession pulled straight out of the Day of Atonement and placed into the hour before the wedding. And in many communities, the groom puts on a kittel, a plain white robe. Now think about when else a Jew wears white like that— on Yom Kippur and in the grave. It's the same white as a burial shroud. So under the chuppah, at the height of his joy, a groom is dressed in a garment that means two things at once. Atonement and death. Put it together. The couple fasts, confesses the Yom Kippur confession, and stands there dressed for atonement and for burial. Because the tradition says that on their wedding day, a bride and groom are forgiven, every past sin wiped clean. They don't just get married, they get atoned. They begin the marriage reborn, spotless and new. So look at what happens to our problem. The scapegoat isn't a foreign object smuggled into the wedding. The wedding day is a Day of Atonement, a private personal Yom Kippur for two people. And every Yom Kippur needs its scapegoat. The broken glass is the seir la'azazel of this Yom Kippur, the vessel that carries the world's brokenness out into the wilderness in the very hour that the couple's own brokenness is being wiped clean. Of course it's there. A Day of Atonement without a scapegoat would be a strange thing. That's key number one. The atonement belongs because the day is atonement. Now, key two, and this is the one that ties the whole season together. Ask why we mourn Jerusalem the way we do. When you lose a parent, you mourn, but there's nothing to atone for. Grief for a loss isn't a sin. So if the Churban were only a loss, an atonement rite would make no sense in the mourning for it. But that's not how the tradition frames the Churban. We say at every festival, "Bimnei chataenu"—because of our sins we were exiled. And the sages are specific about which sin brought the Second Temple down. Not idolatry, not violence against God. Sinat chinam, baseless hatred, Jew against Jew, neighbor against neighbor. The Horban, they tell us, was caused by a people turning on itself, by unity coming apart. Sit with that, because it changes the whole shape of what we're mourning. The destruction wasn't only a building falling, it was a people shattering into fragments. The exile— Jews scattered to the ends of the earth— is just the outward picture of an inward break that happened first, a nation that stopped being one. And now look back at what this mourning season actually takes away from us. I listed them at the start, but hear them again with this in your ear: no weddings, no new unions, no wine, no one cup we bless and pass hand to hand. Gone. No shalom. Until Shabbat, we may not even greet each other. We may not wish each other wholeness. And the last meal before we fast, eaten low on the ground and alone. Three who ate together would normally join as one to bless the zimun. And on that meal, we refused even that. Each person separate, unjoined. Do you see it? Every single thing the season strips away is an instrument of union. The mourning isn't random deprivation. It is a controlled, deliberate experience being— of being fragmented. Because that is precisely what we lost. We don't just remember the Horban for 9 days. We live inside it. We make ourselves in miniature into a scattered, unjoined people that the destruction made us. And now, as the two keys turn together, the whole thing opens. The wedding is union made, two becoming one, a room gathered into one joy on a day that is a personal Yom Kippur of atonement and rebirth. The nine days are a union mourned A whole people made to feel its own fragmentation, atoning for the hatred that broke it apart. They are the same fabric seen from opposite sides. One is the many becoming one in joy, and the other is the one that became many in grief. Which is why— and this is the detail you can't skip— we do not hold weddings during the 9 days. Now you can feel why. All year long, the wedding lets mourning in as a guest. At the height of the union, we break the glass and remember the fracture. But in the 9 days we cannot let joy in at all. You cannot celebrate the making of a new union while the whole people is sitting shiva for the union it lost. The broken glass is mourning invited to the wedding. The 9 days are joy sent out of the house. Two directions. Of one truth. And the wine has been saying this all along in its own corner of the Torah. Remember the Nazir, the one who vows off wine to get holier? When the vow is done, the Torah makes him bring a sin offering, a chatat. And the sages ask, a sin offering for what? He was pious, and the answer stops me every time. He has to atone for the wine he denied himself, for the joy he refused. So even holy abstention isn't clean. Even setting the glass down leaves a mark that you have to answer for. Which means that these 9 days when we set our glass down, it's not simple grief either. It's grief already reaching toward repair. Mourning shaped like atonement, exactly what the season is. So the scapegoat belongs because the wedding is a Yom Kippur, and the Horban we mourn is broken unity, the very fracture the shattered glass makes visible. But that leaves the deepest question of all still open. On Yom Kippur, when the scapegoat did its work, the people knew it. They got a sat, something they could see with their own eyes, that said it worked. You're forgiven. You're whole again. At a wedding, we break the glass. We send the brokenness out. And then what? Do we get a sign? Does anything tell us the fracture is healed, the pieces gathered together, the people made one? Or do we just cheer and dance and hope. That's the last place we go. And it comes back at last to that empty glass, the cup with nothing left to pour. I want to take you back a few weeks to the 17th of Tammuz, the day the wine stopped. If you were there with me then, You'll remember the heart of it, the nesach hayayin, the wine libation. Twice a day, every day, a measure of wine poured out at the base of the altar and given completely to God. Not drunk, not kept, poured out. And on the 17th of Tammuz, when the siege closed in, that pouring stopped. The oldest, steadiest act of Jewish worship, an act of wine, went silent. And that was the wound of the whole day. Now hold that next to the third glass at the wedding and notice the one thing about it that we keep circling back to. It's empty. I used to think the empty glass was just practical. You break an empty one so no one gets hurt and nothing spills. But I've come to believe the emptiness is the entire point. Because what is a cup with no wine in it? It's a vessel that cannot pour, a libation that can't happen. The altar had wine to give twice a day forever until it didn't. And here, at the height of our joy, we set down a cup with nothing in it and we break it. The emptiness says something. It says the pouring has not yet resumed. The altar is still silent. 2,000 years later, the libation that stopped on the 17th of Tammuz has still not started again. The empty glass isn't the libation surviving, it's the monument to the libation that stopped. A cup we hold up precisely because it has nothing to pour, to confess at the peak of our happiness that the thing that broke is not yet mended. And that alone would be enough, but it goes one layer deeper, and this is where the ending lives. Back earlier in this episode, I left you with a question. On Yom Kippur, when the scapegoat carried the brokenness out to the wilderness, how did the people know it worked? Did they just hope? No. They got a sign, a real one that you could see with your eyes. There was a strip of crimson wool, and the tradition tells us that when the scapegoat reached the wilderness and the day's atonement was accepted, that crimson strip turned white. Red to white, right in front of them. It was the first made visible. Though your sins be like scarlet, they shall be white as snow. That was the confirmation. That was the receipt. The wool went white and the whole nation exhaled. It worked. We're forgiven. We're whole again. And now back to the wedding and watch the same exact instant. The groom loads the empty glass with the brokenness of Jerusalem, imesh gachech, and his heel comes down and the glass shatters. The scapegoat is sent. And what happens in that half second? The room erupts. Mazal tov! The band crashes in. People are shouting, dancing, before the shards have even settled. The joy detonates on the exact beat of the breaking. That eruption, that roar, is the wedding's crimson wool turning white. It's the same signal. It's the room declaring, "It worked. The brokenness went out. The couple is whole. Now we celebrate." The joy doesn't come in spite of the breaking. It comes because of the breaking, because the breaking was accepted. That's the comfort. That's real, and I don't want to take a drop of it from you. The joy is earned, and it is right. Here's the honest part, and I have to tell you the honest part because it's the whole reason this belongs in the 9 days. And not at a party. On Yom Kippur, the wool actually turned white. You got proof. But at the wedding, nothing turns white. Look at the floor after the mazal tov. The glass is still in pieces. Nobody kneels down and finds it made whole again. There's no crimson thread going white in anyone's hand. We shout that it worked, but we have no sign that it did. We are cheering in faith, not in confirmation. And if you want the detail that breaks my heart, it's this: the tradition itself remembers that the last 40 years of the temple, before it was destroyed, while the building stood, while the service still ran, The crimson wool stopped turning white. The sign withdrew. The scapegoat still went out every year. The people still hoped, but the confirmation stopped coming. So the truth is, we've been doing this without a receipt for a very long time. We send the brokenness out and the wool does not whiten. It hasn't for 2,000 years. So look one more time at what's actually on the floor. Not a spill, not wine poured out. Shards. One whole vessel broken into scattered fragments, pieces you cannot gather back together one by one. And by now you know the word for that: the whole made many, the people scattered into pieces and driven apart. Those shards are the Horban itself, their sinat chinam made visible. They're the exile. They're a nation scattered to the ends of the earth. And not yet fully brought home. And that's why nobody sweeps them up in triumph, because we cannot yet gather them. The pieces of that glass on the floor are the pieces of a people not yet made one. We break the glass to say that the fracture is real, and we cannot, with our own hands at that wedding, put it back together. The wine taught us the beautiful direction, the many made one. The glass shows us the wound, the one made many. And which way the story finally goes is not yet in our hands to prove. That's what the empty third glass really is, is a piece of this craft. The first two cups were wine at its most whole, a multitude married into one, sipped and shared and passed outward to make more unions. And the third is the opposite gesture entirely, not a wine at all. Just a vessel broken back into the many. Fullness, then fracture. Unity, and then scattering. Both in one ceremony, minutes apart. Because that is the whole truth about a people. We are always somewhere on the road between the shards and the seamless glass. Between being scattered and being gathered, and the wedding refuses to show you only one end of it. So the comfort and the wound turn out to be the same object seen from two sides. The joy is completely real and the proof never comes, and the people are not yet one. The broken glass holds all three at once. It refuses to be only happy, and it refuses to be only sad. It refuses even to be swept up. Which brings us all the way back to where we started, to a room full of people cheering at the sound of something breaking, and a question about why they're cheering at all. I think by now you can hear it differently. Let me bring it home. There it is again, the sound we started with: a room full of people cheering at the exact moment something breaks. At the beginning of this episode, I told you that sound was stranger than we let ourselves notice. Now I think you can hear everything that's inside it. That is the sound of a people Who once shattered, who turned on each other with baseless hatred until the whole thing came apart in their hands. The temple, the city, the unity, all of it broken into pieces and scattered to the ends of the earth. And who decided somewhere in that long dark after that they would carry the memory of that fracture into the one place it could never be ignored, to the very center of their joy. So at every wedding, the highest moment we have, two people become one, a whole room gathered into a single gladness. We set down a glass and we say, 'If I forget you, O Jerusalem,' and we break the whole thing into fragments. We hold up the picture of our own scattering at the summit of our togetherness. And then, then we cheer. We cheer because the joy is true. The union is real. The couple is whole. Their slate is clean. The wine of their gladness is already pouring out into the room to make the next match and the one after that. All of that is earned. And today, deep in the 9 days, walking down towards Tishabav, I want you to hold how real it is. That is the comfort, and the comfort is not a trick. And still The shards stay scattered. That's the part I won't smooth over because we are standing in the one season that won't let me. Nobody kneels down after the Mazal Tov and gathers the pieces back into one glass. The wool does not turn white. We send the brokenness out and we cheer that it worked. But we have no receipt, and the people are not yet one, and Jerusalem is not yet whole. That's why this very week we cannot even hold a wedding at all, why we set aside our wine and swallow the word shalom and eat alone on the ground, because the fracture we act out With one small glass at a wedding is the fracture we are still living inside. So we do the bravest thing this tradition knows how to do. We look straight at the broken pieces and we refuse to believe they are the end of the story. We break the glass and we cheer over the fragments. Not because the wound is healed, but as a vow. A vow to gather what was scattered, to make the many one again, to turn sinat chinam back into love that rebuilds a city. The cheer is not denial. The cheer is defiance. It is a people promising over the shards that this is not how it ends. That's the whole secret of the three glasses. Two cups of union sipped, and one poured out into the crowd to seed the next joining, and one whole glass broken to pieces we cannot yet gather. The 17th of Tammuz stopped the wine on the altar. The empty glass says that it has not started again. And every wedding since has held those shards up at the height of love and cheered as a promise to make the scattered people whole. So here's what I'll leave you with. When these 9 days are over, when Tisha B'Av has passed and the morning lifts, This year you can start drinking wine for Shabbat. Open a good bottle, something from the hills of Jerusalem if you can. Pour it full and drink it down, and let it gladden your heart the way wine was made to. And notice when you do You're not drinking it alone. That wine only ever really works when it's shared, one cup around one table. That's the whole cure right there in your hand. And the next time you're at a wedding and the room goes quiet and the heel comes down and everyone you love erupts into that cheer. Don't just shout Mazal Tov and reach for the dancing. Take a half a second first and look at the floor, because those scattered pieces are us. Every exile, every falling out, every fracture we have not yet healed. And the cheer going up around them is the oldest promise we know how to make. I'll leave you with the one word this season tries to take from us, the word we are forbidden this week to even say to one another: shalom. We translate it to peace. But you know by now that it reaches further than that. It means whole. Shalem. So hold those two together and hear where they've been driving the entire time. Shalom, the greeting we swallow, the wholeness we are still missing. Whole, what the shattered glass is waiting to become. What every scattered shard on the floor is reaching towards. And the name of that mending— the thing the sipped cup and the shared wine and the broken glass and the two goats and the burning city have all been pointing at from the very first pour— unity. May we be gathered, may we be whole, may we speedily and in our days be one. This is Solomon Simon Jacob again, your host of today's episode of the Kosher Teruah. Please subscribe via your podcast provider to be informed of our new episodes as they are released. If you are new to the Kosher Teruah, please check out our many past episodes.