About the horrific events that unfolded on October 7, 2023, and in their wake the pulverizing of Gaza, Israel’s most notorious poet, Aharon Shabtai, writes with more sorrow than rage. At 86, Shabtai works in the folds of the directly admonitory mode of his previous political poems, but with an uncompromised desire to combat what Abraham Joshua Heschel called the “coalition of callousness.” In an earlier, 1944 essay “The Meaning of This War,” Heschel had written: “Tanks and planes cannot redeem humanity…. The war will outlast the victory of arms if we fail to conquer the infamy of the soul…. The greatest task of our time is to take the souls of men out of the pit.” Some seventy-five years later, in his poem “Tikkun,” Shabtai confronts us with
the horror
the calamity
the disgrace,
the rubble of folly
and religion’s stupidities,
the dimness of vision
and violence of despair
and knows that none of that will be
repaired by an officer,
a bomb or a plane,
and not by still more blood…
The Hebrew word tikkun means, simply, “repair,” but it is best known beyond spoken Hebrew as a kabbalistic term that has seeped into the popular imagination. In that context it alludes to course corrections of consciousness that lead to tikkun olam—repair, mending, or even healing of a broken world. Rooted in the tradition of the biblical prophets, and critical to classic rabbinic considerations of social viability and harmony, tikkun has, arguably, become a core Jewish concept that calls for working toward a more compassionate social fabric, in part by identifying and combatting injustice.
Shabtai’s poem was written on October 10, three days after the slaughter of some 1,200 people (the vast majority of them civilians) and as the decimation of Gaza by the IDF was just beginning. Eighteen months later, Israeli hostages are still being held in underground warrens, and the Palestinian death toll has climbed past 50,000, the vast majority among them civilians as well (and a third of them children). An American president has put forward hideous fantasies of flattened Gaza turned into a “Riveria” at the cul-de-sacked end of the Mediterranean, and talk of population transfers of Palestinians to Sudan and Somalia—once the stuff of far-right and even banned political parties in Israel—has crept into mainstream mouths on the mainstream news.
Soon after “Tikkun” was published in one of Israel’s leading daily papers, it went viral among the dwindling minority of Israelis who were open to hearing such things. The poem, it’s worth pointing out, performs a double translation even before its precipitation into the original: it translates the broadly prophetic and messianic kabbalistic concept into a register accessible to anyone who still holds within themselves the image of a shared humanity and common decency; and in doing so, it renders articulate a muffled, inchoate sense of despair out of which hope and, somehow, repair might come.
Born of a spark from the fire that gave rise to the Hebrew, this translation into English seeks—breath by breath and phoneme by phoneme—to extend that chain of transmission, that sense of linkage and rippling responsibility. How to make the stacked abstraction at the start of the poem come alive in the face of the actual lives lost, ruined, displaced, deferred, and denied? How to bring the envisioned alternatives into the realm of the capillary and palpable? How to account for the grotesque asymmetries involved—the catastrophic destruction on the one hand and, on the other, the microcosmic thinking and feeling that true resolution would entail?
Only wisdom of the heart could mend it
only the surgeon, the doctor,
the good teacher, the teachers
the medic—an Arab, a Jew— …
someone carrying a sandwich
and walking along a street,
someone opening their eyes,…
someone listening
someone learning and wise …
The deep-seated pathos of the poem affords startling perspective—and similar questions of scale haunt much of Shabtai’s recent work, the best of which appears in his new book, Requiem. The twenty-one lines of “Curriculum Vitae,” for instance, describe the arc of a lifetime with chilling economy:
When I was born,
the Shoah was just waking up.
“Good morning,
chubby little boy,”
she said to me…
The poet gets out of bed, years pass, and suddenly darkness is falling
… and here
the Shoah is back,
leaning over me, and saying:
“Good evening,
learned old man,
enough with the reading—
shut your eyes.”
How is the Shoah back? Is it the slaughter of October 7th’s al-Aqsa Flood? The corruption and rot of the poet’s own society? Its thirst for vengeance in Gaza? All of the above? In the hyperbolic “Parable of the State” we find a neighbor, “Milman, from across the way / on the second floor—” who’s said to have died of exhaustion after having killed tens of thousands of flies with a swatter he’d taken off its nail:
he crushed them against the wall,
the window panes,
the floor, the shutters,
mounds of them piled up
every day,
and every month—
However caustic, the mourning here and throughout Requiem is at once precisely directed and somehow general. The loss seems almost total.
Translating the elemental force of Shabtai’s poems during this monstrous war has itself become a kind of tikkun, providing both sentence and solace: sentence because Shabtai confronts us not as what Heschel called a “singing saint” or “moralizing poet,” but as “an assaulter of the mind,” and with what we regularly prefer not to see. And yet, there is that solace, because his poems are powered by a hard-won leverage and fiendish sympathy that give at least this poet-translator hope for all that poetry can still bear witness to—in any language, and even in the bleakest dark.
