Imagine you are walking along a quiet stretch of Miami Beach just after sunrise. The air is cool and the horizon soft with possibility. As you approach a wooden table resting gently on the sand, you notice a large circular pool of water. The water is perfectly clear, like a lens waiting to reveal something you cannot yet name.
Next to the pool sit two glass buckets filled with identical cubes. At least, that is what they appear to be from a distance. But, as often happens in life, the truth reveals itself only when you draw closer. One bucket holds ice cubes while the other holds glass cubes.
On the table lies a small wooden mallet. You are invited to participate.
You reach for an ice cube first. It melts slightly in your hand, leaving a glistening trace on your fingertips. When you drop it into the water, it floats effortlessly.
Then you pick up one of the glass cubes. It feels entirely different in your palm, dense and steady. You tap it lightly with the mallet. A delicate web of fractures blooms inside the cube. Not outward destruction, but inward transformation. You let it fall into the water and watch it sink, slowly and inevitably, finding its place beneath the surface.
Over the next few minutes, you see the floating ice and the sinking glass living side by side. Minutes turn to hours. The ice dissolves completely, disappearing into the larger body of water. But the glass remains. When sunlight hits the fractured glass at just the right angle, light bursts into rainbows, scattering color across the pool and dancing on the table like a whispered promise.
Over the next days, the entire installation becomes a constellation of shifting prisms. What began as simple cubes now radiate an unexpected beauty. Brokenness has become brilliance.
I often think about the first rainbow in Genesis.—After the Flood, God showed Noah a rainbow in the sky and promised that forevermore, a rainbow would follow suffering. A covenant of hope, revealed only when light passes through water. Only after the world has endured fracture. Rainbows are not decorations; they are reminders that even in the aftermath of devastation, beauty can still emerge.
Striking the glass cubes reminds me of the shattered glass at a Jewish wedding. A moment that holds both memory and promise. The past is broken; the future is unbreakable.
This installation becomes a meditation on how we see ourselves and one another. From afar, the ice cubes and glass cubes appear exactly the same. Just as in Exodus the twelve spies all looked alike, yet only two saw the Promised Land with faith. Just as Joseph’s brothers all looked the same to their father, yet ten were hollowed by envy while one carried vision.
Here is the deeper truth revealed by the pool: the difference between the ice cube and the fractured glass cube is the difference between those who lack faith in God, Torah, and Israel and those whose faith gives them inner strength, resilience, and radiant purpose. One group floats temporarily on air; the other, though cracked, refracts divine light.
Some of us float for a while on emptiness. Others crack under pressure and yet shine through the fractures.
The secret is this: the fractures are not the end. They are the beginning of radiance. Our broken places are not voids; they are prisms. When we bring our own cracked selves into the divine sunlight, we begin to shine in colors we never knew we carried.
So come closer. Pick up an ice cube. Pick up a glass cube. Strike it gently. Watch what happens in your hands. See what dissolves. See what remains. What endures is a latent light born of pain, awakened by fracture, and blossoming into a rainbow of beauty and compassion.
Melted doubts drift off.
Fractures bloom in hidden hearts—
Rainbows born from pain.
ספקות נמסו.
שֶבֶר יִפְרַח בְּחֶבְיוֹן לֵב—
קֶשֶׁת תֵּלֵד מִכְאֹב.
