What If Your Cracks Are The Map To Your Purpose... In A Time Such As This? My Guest: ME

Season 6. Year 3. We’re back.

And of course we’re kicking off in my favorite month… March. Women’s History Month. The month of queens, courage, and just enough chaos to keep us humble. And yes… Purim. Because nothing says “spiritual growth” like costumes, hidden miracles, and a plot twist.

This episode threads together something I can’t stop thinking about… the Japanese art of kintsugi… repairing broken pottery with lacquer and gold. The philosophy is simple and radical: don’t hide the cracks. Honor them. Let the seams shine! 

Which, frankly, feels very on brand for this moment in history… and for me. We talk about identity and integrity… about how antisemitism is part of a larger braided story that also includes Mizrahi and Sephardi displacement. Different shards. Same vessel. History isn’t neat. It’s fractured. But fractures don’t disqualify us from wholeness… they define how we rebuild.

Then we turn to Queen Esther. And here’s what I love most… she didn’t wake up brave. She built bravery. Slowly. Deliberately. A three-day fast. A gathered community. A sober reading of power. No theatrics… just disciplined courage. And the harder truth? Some decrees can’t be erased. They can only be countered. That reframes courage from a cinematic rush into something steadier… responsibility.

From there we get practical… because growth without application is just a cute quote on Instagram.

Alignment beats autopilot. Your time, your talent, your treasure… they should track with your values and the outcomes you actually want for your family, your city, your world. When old patterns crack… don’t panic. Break with intention. Rebuild with intention. Replace missing shards with gold, silver, platinum… better boundaries, clearer metrics, braver conversations, partnerships that widen the circle instead of shrinking it.

And we spotlight one of my favorite local examples of cultural kintsugi… the creatives, neighborhoods, and opportunity highlighted together into something stronger than what existed before. That’s what community repair looks like in real time.

If you are craving a compass for complex times… part personal growth, part history, part practical ethics… this conversation will meet you exactly where you are. And then gently… lovingly… nudge you forward.

Subscribe. Share it with the friend who needs a little gold in their cracks. And leave a review telling me the one “golden repair” you’re making next.

Season 6 is here...Miracles are hidden in plain sight, and perhaps we were born for a time such as this. 

#SchmoozeWithSuze #ViewsWithSuze #Kintsugi #Esther414 #Purim #Culture #Values #Save #Spend #Invest #Highlight #Grow #Repair

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Transcript

The Ask That Sparked A Stand

SPEAKER_00 0:00

I can't remember the moment exactly. It was following a development pitch and not one that I was giving. Someone, somewhere who had incidentally not hired me repeatedly for a job that I was in fact skilled and equipped to do, asked me to increase my donation to their organization, who had, by the way, never even responded to my resume. They were confident, they said, that I would be satisfied with their strategic plan, their messaging initiative, and their methods of communication that they were in the process of enhancing. I noticed that the job was still being posted for the third time. So there comes an opportunity where you have to decide where you stand. Is it time to spend, save, or invest in yourself? And that's what we're going to tackle today. Hi, I'm Suze, coming to you with a dose of culture, values, and global citizenship. And where we might tackle those topics, others may consider off limits. A little about me, I'm a busy gen X mom who quite frankly wanted to grow up like the Brady Bunch. But how could I be raised in the shadow of Schimmler's list? So this means I've spent a lifetime navigating these mixed messages we get hit with daily. You know those conversations where we wonder if it's safe to speak our minds. Can we share our experiences? Voice our fears and concerns. Well, too bad. I need to know, but I'm no expert, so I'm going to schmooze the experts and get their thoughts. Why? So when we engage with our kids, colleagues, or the countless committees we interact with, we can do it with competence, kindness, confidence, and maybe a bit of humor. If this sounds like your cup of coffee, welcome to Shmoose with Suzu. So I want to talk about the Japanese art of kinsugi or golden joinery, golden repair. It's the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery by mending the areas of breakage with Urushi lacquer, dusted or mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum. The method is similar to the maki technique. And as a philosophy, it treats breakage and repair as part of the history of an object rather than something to disguise. Okay? So I want you to imagine that you're holding a piece of pottery that's intricately carved, right? With story, hieroglyphic, if you will. Um, and it falls and smashes to the ground. And so what we have been trained to do is to grab the glue, right? What did they call it? The magic glue, the crazy glue. Remember, there used to be the commercial of the guy that was holding on to the steel beam with the crazy glue on his helmet. And you would glue the pottery back together because it was more important that the visual representation at the end was as though nothing had gone wrong. We match up the pieces to where they fit and we glue it with clear glue so that we can pretend it never happened, right? Sometimes the integrity of the structure of the pottery of the piece is never the same, right? Because occasionally you'll find that the missing shards, the slivers of the outside that are part of the pattern or the connected, it's even teeny tiny little fragments make a monumental difference in how those pieces fit back together. So even though it's connected and can even be used for its initial purpose, for example, a vase, there's something in the the piece that's flawed. With Kinsugi, we're taking that same structure, that vessel with the story, and instead of looking at it as something disjointed, we're highlighting that disjointed brokenness with something that's sparkly, that's beautiful, that's valuable, and the value is part of its history because before it might have just been ceramic, but now we've added gold or even platinum. So I think of this because does anyone remember the shine a light campaign? Um, there was a literal flashlight that they were handing out to shine a light on anti-Semitism. And I realized in that campaign that it was in connecting that part of my history to my present, because you know my philosophy. I follow Dr. Edith Eva Eager. We can't heal what we don't feel. So braided into my DNA, like Hala, is the pain of the pogroms, the echo of Auschwitz, the shadow of Schindler's list. Both the literal Schindler, as in the Holocaust background of my grandparents and their family and my family, of what they experienced, but also in the recognition with the portrayal, Steven Spielberg's movie Schindler's List, that for other people, this was new information. They didn't even know that that part of history existed. And by the way, I want to shine a light on another part of Jewish history. For people of the Mizrachi or the Sephardic culture, their families were not part of Eastern Europe. And so they did not have an affiliation or a knowledge intimately of the Holocaust of Auschwitz. That was not their story. In fact, they predominantly were chased out of the Arab lands of the Middle East. So braided into my DNA is the pain and the echo and the shadows. But in between, like Kinsugi, between the fight and flight is perseverance, it's tenacity and grit. It's the lacquer mixed with gold and silver and platinum. And oftentimes we hear the stories of people who come to a new country with their rubles or their jewels sewn into their coat seams or um carrying their literal gold and silver hidden on ships that crossed oceans. And that's the past that I don't want to forget, which leads us to the present, right? And in the present, when I launched this podcast, Schmooze with Suze, it was because I had done the research, or so I thought, and I had become informed and educated, or so I thought, and I was presenting a growth mindset, which meant that I was never done learning, right? The crux is in the admission that I don't know everything because I'm no expert, but I'm gonna schmooze the experts. And the reason is because I had to understand and appreciate that my informed background is what helps guide my vision. And so I started to bring in the informed backgrounds of other people because their vision is also important to my story. I want to know how we fit together, right? Back to Kinsugi, because maybe there was a part of our history where we didn't fit well. And so instead of trying to fit exactly, we need some gold or silver or platinum lacquer, somewhere between to shine a light on what we don't know because we've been in the dark. It's a lot, right? So we just entered March, Women's History Month, and upcoming is the holiday of Purim, which I've heard some call a minor holiday, and that's frankly quite annoying to me. Mostly because the story is personally one of my favorites, historically and personally. It's my story. It's one of the five scrolls, Miggy Lot in the Hebrew Bible, and later became part of the Christian Old Testament. The book relates to the story of a Jewish woman in Persia, born as Hadassah, but known as Esther, who becomes queen of Persia and thwarts a genocide of her people. Ah, so good. The story takes place during the reign of King Ahashverosh, who's known historically as Xerces in the first Persian Empire. His first queen Vashti is banished from the court for disobeying the king's orders. Already you can see that this is sort of a feminine slant novel, right? She disobeys and she's willing to go to the off with her head portion of the book and to find a new queen. He constructs a beauty pageant, this king. And all the most beautiful ladies in the land are touted before. And by the way, there's a lot of lasciviousness in the Smiggy Law. There's harems and there's handlers, and you know, it's it's very interesting, and the no detail is left unsaid. The beauty pageant finds Esther, a young Jewish woman living in Persia, is chosen as the new queen. Meanwhile, Esther's cousin Mordechai, who is a Jewish leader, discovers a plot to kill all of the Jews in the empire by Haman. That's King Ahashverosh's grand advisor. Mordechai urges Esther to use her position as queen to intervene and save their people. Esther reveals her Jewish identity to the king and begs for mercy for her people. She exposes Haman's plot and convinces the king to spare the Jews. The Jewish festival of Purim is established to celebrate the victory of the Jews of the First Persian Empire over their enemies, and Esther becomes a heroine of the Jewish people. And according to Wikipedia, they live happily ever after the end. But it's not really the end because there's two crucial plot points that I want to point out. First one, when Mordechai asks Esther to influence Ahashverosh, she says, What are you talking about? I am nobody from no place, lacking confidence in herself and her abilities, and also lacking a little bit of faith in the divine. She's terrified. And she says, No. And Mordechai relays to her a very famous line. And in the Christian Bible, it's known as Esther 414. Perhaps you were born for a time such as this. The rest of the Pasuk, the the uh line, is actually omitted, right? The beginning part of the line says, God will save the people, or the people will be saved, because God's name is not mentioned once in this Mingilan, this scroll, actually. Um we talk a little bit about Hester Panim, that God's actually hidden in this entire story. It's not mentioned once in this holy scripture. But Mordechai tells Esther, this will come to where it's supposed to come to. But perhaps you were born for this time. Maybe you were meant to be that catalyst. In that way, he asks her to have confidence in herself. That it couldn't be a coincidence. It has to be a series of divine interventions or hashkaha pratit, which is like divine personal coaching, that brought her to this place, to this time in front of this person, in this space, in this grand scheme, right? But make no mistake, Esther then prays and fasts for three days, and she asks Mordechai to ask the Jews to pray and fast for three days, to give her the strength and the courage to be able to go through that next step. So that's the first plot point. She's not this heroine like Wonder Woman, like Gal Gado, who says, Yeah, of course I got this. The second crucial plot point is that when the king um decides to allow all of this to unfold and the Jews to live, it's not that he says, Haman, you are now stopped from your plot and you all are saved forever. The king returns at a moment that he thinks Haman is assaulting the queen, and this makes him angrier, and that's why he orders Haman to be hanged on the gallows that he had prepared for Mordecai. However, he's unable to annul the formal royal decree. Because when Haman prepared that decree to create a genocide and kill all the Jews, he used the king's royal seal, which means that it couldn't be undone. So the king adds to it. He permits the Jews to join together and destroy any and all of those seeking to kill them. See, that's the part that people don't talk about as much when they tell this story. So I want to talk again about two very important things. One is the brave woman at the center of the story who has to fight to be brave, like most of us. We're feeling internal conflict, whether it's our friends or family or community. We have this guilt of responsibility. And so that thought that I should just right away jump in and give you my donation, my investment, my endowment, because I trust and I believe that 100% of 100% of the time, well, I have to take personal responsibility, right? It's my name. And so I want to ensure that we are on the same path, page, vision, values, right? So it's not just a give and walk away. We are charged with the ownership of our choices. You are responsible, whether by time, talent, or treasure, with who you are involved with. And so we should use that very wisely. When Esther says, perhaps you were born for a time such as this, when Mordecai says to Esther, perhaps you were born for a time such as this, I got that keychain for myself and three friends before I launched the podcast. Because I knew in that moment that there was something I was meant to do that was greater than just me. And it was supposed to be more than the income. It was supposed to be for an outcome. So that first point that she had to dig deep for the faith in herself and then the bravery and the strength of conviction, it wasn't organic. There's a lesson there that even if it's not there, look for it, search for it, pray for it, fast for it, ask for help from your community, from your people. Pray with me, fast with me, light me up, give me your words of wisdom and all of the, you know, good juju that you can send my way. The second point that the annulment didn't happen to the formal decree. It wasn't like now you are saved. The Jews still lost lives. And they had to take lives that day. On the 13th day of Adar, Haman's 10 sons and 500 other men are killed in Shushan. And upon hearing of this Esther request that the next day, 300 more men are killed who were part of that plot to commit genocide. Over 75,000 people are killed by the Jews who are careful to take no plunder. It's in the book. This isn't a pillaging. They're not doing this because they want to walk away with the spoils of war. They're doing this in self-defense. Mordechai and Esther send letters throughout the provinces instituting an annual commemoration of the Jewish people's redemption in a holiday called Purim. Aheshvarosh remains very powerful and continues his reign with Mordechai assuming a prominent position in his court. So what's the Takhlis? Bottom line, what's the Taklis of the story? Perhaps the story of our history that we repeat year after year, the reminder and the remembrance that we don't do this with joy and with glee, that the historical persecution, the historical self-defense, and the historical non-gaining from what we've been forced to do is a Jewish value. We don't take the things we don't want to cause any more harm than necessary. That doesn't mean we're perfect. And that goes back to the historical values, right? And that goes back to the Kinsugi. So I think about my past and I think about those parts. And sometimes it's not just that the pottery gets shattered because it falls out of your hands. Sometimes you have to throw it down. And you throw it down so that you can intentionally take out the pieces of the pattern that no longer work. And then I'm adding that lacquer with gold dust. Maybe I need to add more to fill in that space because I don't want to put any of the negative or the bad back in, the mistakes, the ones that we learned from, the one that the growth mindset brought us to, the healing what we feel, the admission of mistakes, the learning so that we can do better for ourselves, for our families, for our communities, for our city, state, country, society, globally, the world, right? That's our goals. And when I think about that Kinsugi, the pottery, right? And I think about it as part of my past. And if you picture yourself, let's say, tethered to your past by a rope, right? And it's always there. And so you hold on to that edge of the rope. And eventually it gets frayed, right? Because you're holding it. And I don't know about you, but when I'm holding on to something for a long time and I'm playing with it in my hand, it starts to unravel. And what might have been a rope that I was strongly clutching onto over time, I've learned to be more thoughtful. And so instead of clutching, I'm grasping and then slowly I'm holding until I'm eventually stroking. What's left of the frayed edges, because they're still a part of me, but they're not completely tied around my waist and folding me into a situation that I can't take myself out of or move around in. So when I thought to myself, Suze, is it time to spend, save, or invest? I said yes to all three. Find a way to spend the talents God gave me and the purpose I feel to save the values I am dedicated to by investing in myself and my community. So that's the story of Schmooz with Suze. As I launch year two, season four, I find that the message hasn't changed. The values, the vision have remained the same. My goal is to spend every day waking up by thanking my creator for returning my soul back to me so that I can try to do better today than I did yesterday and the day before. And know that he has faith in me. So even on those days that I don't have faith in myself, like Esther, I can remember that I have to maybe pause and process and plan on how I will proceed in digging deep to do just that. I want to welcome you to season four, and I look forward to hearing from you soon. And now it's time for our honorable mensch. Mensch is the Yiddish word for a person of honor or integrity who does the right thing and makes the world a better place just by being in it. This week's honorable mensch is Tony Smilegich. Some might know him as a renowned fashion and art photographer. Some might know him as the founder of Create Jacks, which was established in 2016 to highlight the arts in Jacksonville through artist spotlights. However, seeing a need, he filled it. Create Jacks grew to focus and broaden and highlight all the cultural development in our great city with an emphasis on the urban core. This ranged from developer design proposals and business openings to music festivals and artist opportunities. He has developed trust in our community, and our community has developed trust in him. Where he can find a way to highlight the helpers, where he can find ways to connect the creative consulting community, he adds and includes. You can go to the website CreateJAX to find all manners of subscriptions, submissions, rosters, event lists. Follow him on Instagram at CreateJax for all of those resources and opportunities that are designed for places and spaces to connect us because it's through the stories that we tell each other, through our shared impact, through our collective exchange of vision and ideas, of our moments of happiness and also tragedy and sorrow, that we learn what this tapestry can look like. And if you look at Tony's landscape, his portfolio of our beautiful city, you'll find that it defies any description because it supersedes any kind of super space that you could have envisioned. So I'm going to invite you to check out Create Jack's so that you can be part of this tremendous movement. If you know of someone who is the kind of mensch who should get an honorable mention, send me a note at schmoozwitzseus.org or drop me a line on Instagram. That's going to do it for us today. Thanks for sticking around. Make sure to subscribe to SchmoozwithSueze on YouTube and follow me on Instagram to get your daily dose of Hutzpah. I'm Suze, your well-informed smart ass who's not afraid to stand up and speak out. Because what's an envelope if not for pushing? Heavy, stay inspired, and inspiring.