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Rant Number 565 3 December 2013
Once I saw him
He was washing the world
Unseeing, Nightlong
One and Endless. Real.
Mysterious verses by the tragic German poet Paul Celan. (With a few liberties in translation…mea culpa...) Perhaps inspired by an alluring Kabbalistic doctrine, Tikkun Olam – Fixing or rebuilding the world.
Who is the cosmic fixer? Naturally, he is the One, the Creator. But how did he create the world in the first place? According to Rabbi Isaac Luria’s mystical system, there are three stages. First, the divine self-contraction or self-limitation that allows a world to emerge. Second, the breaking of the vessels – things go a bit wrong. Third, Tikkun Olam. It means repairing the broken creation. Restoring to the Creator the shards of divine light that had gone astray.
Professor Dawkins, I can hear you snigger. How could the omnipotent Maker, the Holy One permit the spoiling of his own product? Why did the sparks of light fly off wrongly? Was he incompetent? Unwilling? Huh! Mercifully, matter for another rant. The priest’s task is more practical and relatively unmysterious – the mending job.
Tikkun Olam comes down to doing simple, straightforward good deeds. You volunteer to dig wells for native peoples in a third world country. Help with a soup kitchen for the homeless in affluent London. Campaign online against badger cull. Visit a sick, lonely person. Agitate against fracking. Or for more good schools…You name it. Any benevolent, charitable action counts as repairing the world. Fixing what had gone wrong. And you don’t have to be a conscious believer in Kabbalah or Sufism or Mormonism. By virtue of being a creature, a human being, when you do good you objectively work for a better world – actually, rebuilding reality.
Of course, some fixing receives well-nigh universal approval. Who would ever object to your helping a disabled person with house chores? Or defending a woman against yobs on a train? Uncontroversial repairing. But what about abortion? Is that working for a better world or for a worse one? Saving the unborn or a denial of women’s choice? Or take demonstrating against nuclear deterrence. Working for peace or leaving the UK defenceless against aggression? The Creator’s will is not always clearly discernible, it seems.
Inevitably some will show some ambiguity in their good works. In a recent lecture Michael Barnett has described how many progressive American Jews keenly embraceTikkun Olam. They are no Cabbalists, just humanitarians. They travel abroad and engage in projects to relieve human suffering. Admirable stuff. They appear far less enthusiastic, apparently, in being involved in HR - human rights work. Why? Because they feel that the idea of HR has been ‘hijacked’, as they put it. Used as a stick with which to beat the state of Israel. To have Israel condemned by various UN-sponsored documents, conferences the like. They won’t therefore touch HR-related projects. So, arguably the most pervasively embraced instrument for social and individual activism in our world, the concept of HR, is scorned by people otherwise much committed to helping others.
(The priest frankly believes that no type of HR ideology should ever contradict divine mandates. Sounds dogmatic but…here he stands, he can do no other.)
Controversy over what counts as doing good opens up another, even trickier dimension. Paul Celan’s sublime, ineffable line about a Kabbalistic God ‘da wunsch er die Welt’ – washing the world – suggests ritualistic notions in an exquisitely religious or cultic sense. ‘Washing’ implies a ritual cleansing or purification. Mainline Christianity conceives purity largely in a sacramental or ethical sense but, say, in Islam the notion of ‘purifying’ has a much wider application. Indeed, even political implications. Sayyid Qutb, the famous Egyptian theoretician of radical Islam, for example peppers his writings with words like ‘purifying’, ‘cleansing’ and so on. Often he means a world purified of polytheism – I agree with that – but also importing other, more debatable notions like aggressive, offensive Jihad – you get my drift.
Radical Islam aside, there are clear, fundamental monotheistic teachings accessible to all religious persons in their Scriptures. They make it impossible for sincere believers not to see the present Western world other than as deeply mired in filth. This is not homiletic rhetoric or exaggeration but plain fact. Unless you live on an ivory tower or are blind and dumb and have never travelled in the London Underground or are degraded, you must be acquainted with this filth. Immensely sad but…it is a broken, fragmented and soiled world out there. The good Rabbi Isaac Luria was perfectly prescient.
The question arises therefore how to ‘wash it’. How to cleanse the Augean stables the formerly Christian world has now become. A question basically related to fixing or rebuilding reality – Tikkun Olam. Strictly speaking it is the Creator himself who does the work – though Kabbalistic explanations are most nebulous - but his human creatures also ‘help’, so to speak.
In Judaism Rabbis speak of prayer and following the traditional rituals of their religion. Christians are lucky. The doctrine of the Incarnation is the connecting and saving link between the Father and his Creation. God sends his Logos, his only son into the world to mend, to repair, to heal what had been broken and restore humanity to the unbroken happiness of the Garden of Eden. That is the message of Christmas, what the Feast of the Nativity of Jesus Christ is all about. St Paul indeed speaks boldly of Christians being ‘co-workers-‘ with God in that work of holy fixing, of restoration.
Paul Celan, the unhappy bard, ends his short poem with a tremendous message of infinite hope for me as a Christian. The Endless One became ‘vernichtet’. Annihilated. Made nothing, like Christ on the Cross. And the poem closes with three words:
‘Licht war. Rettung.’
Light was. Salvation.
Revd Frank Julian Gelli
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