Adam Shattered: The OtherSiders
A Journey into Kabbalah, Contemporary Science and World Healing
In the beginning, the vessels of creation shattered. From that fracture, born of a forbidden taste and a soul broken open, humanity has wandered beyond Eden, still carrying sparks of the original light.
Adam Shattered : the OtherSiders follows those sparks across centuries. At its center stand Adam and Eve, the first OtherSiders, who watch the long aftermath of their choice unfold through time. Alongside them moves the contemporary story of Aliyah, a paramedic and doctoral student in Yaffo, whose ordinary life of love, work, and quiet faith opens into both grief and continuation. She becomes the latest in a long chain of hands that have held a single olive-wood staff, broken from a tree in Eden and passed from generation to generation.
Around these two poles the book opens into a larger pattern: Avraham leaving Ur, Moses at the sea, a woman teaching Hebrew in secret in Inquisition-era Toledo, a mother in a death camp, and others who kept moving the light forward. Women’s voices carry the book’s deepest intuitions, from Eve to Aliyah, feeling the connections before the equations arrive. Through their lives, the ancient teachings of Lurianic Kabbalah—tzimtzum, the shattering of the vessels, tikkun olam—meet the language of contemporary science: the Big Bang, quantum entanglement, string theory’s ten dimensions and their echo in the ten Sefirot, the hidden eleventh dimension and the hidden sefirah Da’at, neuroplasticity and t’shuvah. These parallels are offered not as proof, but as two ways of seeing the same mystery.
The Hebrew word Ivri, from which “Hebrew” comes, means “one who crosses over.” This is a novel about crossing: from exile toward repair, from shattering toward the slow work of gathering what was scattered. It is a story of love that continues after loss, of ordinary acts that matter more than they appear, and of a staff that is never retired, only passed.
For readers who feel that science and mysticism are not opposites but mirrors, and who wake in the night wondering why the world is broken and what we are meant to do about it, Adam Shattered holds both in the same steady palm.
Come. Cross over. The sparks are waiting to be gathered.
This is the journey of Adam Shattered. It is our journey, too.
Also, by Frances Tischler:
Lily Earns Her Wings (Amazon KDP, 2006)
A children's picture book exploring kindness, gratitude, and personal growth through magical realism. Available on Amazon.
