Cohen isn't suggesting we merely accept imperfection—he's proposing something far stranger: that our brokenness is the *condition* for illumination, not its obstacle. Most of us spend energy trying to seal the cracks, to present unflawed surfaces, but he's saying the light we're actually seeking needs those fractures to enter at all. When a marriage ends badly and forces you to examine your own patterns, or when professional failure strips away a false identity you'd constructed, you sometimes find clarity that prosperity never offered. The crack doesn't admit light *despite* being there; it admits light *because* it's there.