Anarchy Of Dreams Poem by gershon hepner

Restoring order
after anarchy of dreams
requires a warder
to confine all stupid schemes
within a cell,
from which there should be no parole
till dreamers tell
the world that they have got no goal.

Inspired by an article by Hillel Halkin in the July-August,2008 issue of Commentary (“How Not to Repair the World”) . He discusses the concept of tikkun olam as distorted in a new book called Righteous Indignation: A Jewish Call for Justice, by Rabbi Or N. Rose, Jo Ellen Green Kaiser, Margie Klein:

“It is critical to recognize how central social justice is to Jewish consciousness, ” writes Sidney Schwartz of the Institute for Jewish Leadership and Values in Righteous Indignation’s opening essay. In Mosaic law, in biblical prophecy, and in rabbinic jurisprudence alike, the idea that God is well-served by decent and equitable relations among human beings is basic. This is not an invention of American Jewish liberalism, not of the German reform and Jewish socialist movements that preceded it and bequeathed to it many of their attitudes.
But there are different conceptions of what social justice is and requires, within Judaism no less than outside it. In stating that the “prophetic legacy is why the Jewish people were put on this earth…to be agents for the repair of the entire world, ” Schwartz dismisses most of post-biblical Jewish history. For, to a great extent, rabbinic Judaism, though it never openly admitted as much, developed as a means of containing and redirecting the prophetic legacy, whose grand vision of a utopian tikkun olam had brought the Jewish people to the verge of ruin.
Rabbinic Judaism emerges into the light of history toward the end of the Second Temple, which was destroyed in the great revolt against ROME OF 67–70c.e. This revolt, and the similarly failed Bar-Kokhba rebellion of 132–135 C.E., were Jewish catastrophes of a magnitude that was not to be repeated until the Holocaust. When they were over, the Jews of Palestine had lost their temple, their last vestiges of independence, hundreds of thousands of lives, and a large number of their homes and villages, and had been banished from Jerusalem, to which they would not return in significant number for nearly two millennia.
The root cause of this was precisely the prophetic legacy. It was the apocalyptic messianism of the biblical prophets, particularly the later ones, that encouraged the Jews of Palestine to embark on two courageous but hopeless adventures that challenged the might of the Roman Empire…The rabbis of the period after the destruction of the Temple and the collapse of the Bar-Kokhba rebellion had to rally a beaten and demoralized people. Jewish messianism––the greater tikkun olam––had failed on a colossal scale. It was rabbinic insight that sucha people did not need more and better visions…It needed laws, organization, authority, routines, a regulating system of halakha (a literal translation of which might be “a way of doing things”) to repair the destruction wrought by the anarchy of dreams. It needed the less tikkun olam, a conception of the public interest.

7/7/08