Tikkun Olam, Really?

Really?

We can fix this?

What about Leonard Cohen’s last interview where he adjures us:

“omit the slogans!”

What about his definition of a saint?

What is a saint?

A saint is someone who has achieved a remote human possibility.

It is impossible to say what that possibility is.

I think it has something to do with the energy of love.

Contact with this energy results in the exercise of a kind of balance

in the chaos of existence.

A saint does not dissolve the chaos;

if he did the world would have changed long ago.

I do not think that a saint dissolves the chaos even for himself,

for there is something arrogant and warlike

in the notion of a man setting the universe in order.

It is a kind of balance that is his glory.

He rides the drifts like an escaped ski.

His course is the caress of the hill.

His track is a drawing of the snow

in a moment of its arrangement with wind and rock.

Something in him so loves the world that he gives himself

to the laws of gravity and chance.

Far from flying with the angels,

he traces with the fidelity of a seismograph needle the state

of the solid bloody landscape.

His house is dangerous and finite, but he is at home in the world.

He can love the shape of human beings,

the fine and twisted shapes of the heart.

It is good to have among us such men,

such balancing monsters of love.

“Arrogant and warlike in the notion of a man setting the universe in order”

What about Rumi?

“Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world.

Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.”

After all the exhortations, what is left?

We are to repair the face of God, Cohen tells us, not the world! [1]

All the movements to change the world ended in violence

Genocide, racism, bigotry.

Man’s inhumanity to man begins with ideology.

So, in a post-Holocaust, post-critical, genocidal world

Where is the Tikkun? Where is the mending?

Who are the agents of fixing?

Beyond the middle-class bourgeois

Rationalizing their life style choices

With this charity or that under the slogan “Tikkun Olam”

I look in the mirror and ask

Fix who? What? And the answer stares me in the face…. Me!?

Out there, no! inside…

Now own it!

Own the fixing!

Own the past

Own the abuse

Own the hurt you inflicted and the hurt done to you

Own this bloody Holocaust yes! That too!

After all the years of obsessing

All the theology attempted

All the dead ends found

Own it all.

Own your aging

And that despite all the struggles to free yourself

Own the neediness for approval, for validation, for love

For the eye of a pretty girl

For the Rabbi’s nod.

Own your impotence

Own your failures

Own your need to be relevant

Own your need for your children and grandchildren

Own your betrayals

Own your heresy

Now own this election

Own your society’s choice

Its decision for madness

Own its blanket bombing

Own the drones in far-away places

Own Dresden and Tokyo

Own the Allies’ firebombing

Stop the Tikkun for others for the world

when you still need the fixing yourself!

Stop even the Tikkun for yourself

You spend decades fixing nothing.

Just own it.

Hold it.

Sweeten it.

Maybe that way you might denervate it from its sting.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GL1yaiLCQPM