Tikkun Olam-Misgivings

“Saul  Naumann  (Richard  Gere)  is  a  somewhat  controlling  Jewish husband and father. A Religious Studies professor at UC Berkeley, Saul wrote his graduate thesis on the Kabbalah. Because  he  was  a  devout  Jew,  his  wife  Miriam  (Juliette  Binoche) converted to Judaism when they married, and he nurtured  his  son  Aaron  (Max  Minghella)  into  a  traditional  studious Jew like himself.”

“Miriam  lives  a  secret  life  throughout  her  entire  marriage  to  Saul, trying to fulfill the religious idea she learned from him, tikkun  olam,  or  "repairing  the  world"  and  "reuniting  its  shards." She takes this meaning literally and slowly collects trinkets she finds beautiful (sometimes breaking into people's houses and stealing them) and storing them in a warehouse, trying to hold the light of God in them.”

Filmography, Spelling Bee

Maybe this talk is enough

Maybe we need another moratorium

Like I had suggested for the “God” word

Maybe it is too old already, too lame

After all those who appropriate the

Lurianic Myth As a Metaphor for Renewal

and social justice

Worn out and tired

Suffering from chronic fatigue.

Really? Tikkun Olam… after the Tremendum?

Where the Olam was destroyed

And we are merely awaking from a spiritual coma

(Where was Tikkun in Auschwitz?)

Who was the sacrificial lamb?

Who needs it now?

Accepting out own inner demons…

And from there accepting the “broken shards”

As the Holy Ari called the pre-­‐historic catastrophe

Where too much Divine Light was a cosmic error

That reverberates holo-­‐graphically in time and space

To our own time

To our broken selves.

But here we must leave 16th century Safed

In its cute setting in the green hills of Judea

And the Ari’s wonderful program of “Tikkun Olam”

In which an could influence the divine

That somehow the adept could in fact change the cosmic One

And bring down blessing and “fix” the catastrophic error The cosmic flaw,

Through human effort, magically.

Here we must depart

Unfortunately

After 300 years of madness

Industry

Capitalism

And the technology of mass killing

Whereby human greed and power

Has grown like a heroin addiction

And the value of human life has diminished to almost nothing.

So where to now?

Where do we turn?

As we face this dark demonic side of the divine?

In this post-­‐Holocaust, post-­‐Hiroshima

Nightmarish landscape of grayness?

It came to me today…

Shards of broken glass

(Once “quelippot”)

Reflect light differently

The sunlight in its purity becomes diffused

And each ray is reflected by a different shard

A different color of the spectrum

To produce a kaleidoscope of colors.

Maybe what is needed now is

…the opposite of conformity

And frumkeit

And a sea of men in black… shockeling in unison

Maybe the only reversal to this madness

Is pure individual shattered lights

Each different

Each reflecting a different color of the spectrum

Each dancing to its own niggun

For in the multiplicity of color

New rainbow from the shards of old glass

Old ideas, myths and metaphors

A new Torah

A new Song

the beauty of the light on the shards

the beauty of brokenness

the beauty of failure and fragmentation

this is en-­‐soulment in a new key

C# minor.