A Poem for Shavuot: Avraham Shlonsky’s “From Impasse to Repair”

…and when you grow weary from striving and stumbling,
and from days of ankles buckling from the fight-
go then toward night helped up by your two hands
like two arms of ladder's height.

And do not be ashamed if those wiser than you
shake their heads and sneer: "A dream!"
The angels have already stretched taut your sky,
in their ascending and descending stream.

And behold:
All the shores have grown quiet.
All the ships have arrived.
All the masts have solidified
   the forest of silences.
And in the hidden chambers of darkness
Again your secrets will take wing,
and the quandaries will swing
   from impasse to repair.

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For the past six and a half years, since the tragic death of my father, David Zierler, I have been offering a weekly Hebrew poem teaching in his memory, of relevance to grief, prayer or other matters of the day. In the immediate lead-up to Shavuot, and in preparation for our traditional practice of Tikkun Leil Shavuot, once a set, kabbalistically inspired regimen of study for Shavuot night, but in our current practice, a night of diverse kinds of learning, I present a late poem by Avraham Shlonsky that directly addresses the connection between text and tikkun, between revelation and repair, between striving and resolution.

The poem begins with an ellipsis, as if mid-stream or mid-struggle. As night approaches, the poet, either talking to a worn-out, discouraged disciple or to himself, stretches his arms upward to ascend the revelatory ladder even further, an allusion to the story of Jacob's ladder in Genesis 28, which is further developed in the second stanza.

The image of hands coming to one's aid and arms reaching the height of a ladder זְרוֹעוֹת שֶׁל גֹּבַהּ הַסֻּלָּם reflects the value of manual labor in Shlonsky's view, but also the biblical usage of this word זְרוֹעוֹת. God's salvation in the Exodus story comes, after all, via a זרועה נטויה - an outstretched arm. Given the allusion to Jacob's dream, one thinks as well of the other meanings of the root זרע that appear in that scene: God's promise to Jacob in Genesis 28:14 that his descendants זַרְעֲךָ֙ will be like the dust of the earth, spreading in every direction, and that "all the families of the earth shall bless themselves by him and his descendants וּבְזַרְעֶֽךָ."

In the debate scenario depicted in the poem, the "wiser ones" seem poised to dismiss these ambitious notions and reachings as the stuff of mere dreams. But as Jacob teaches us in Genesis 28, a dream is no mere flimsy thing. It is the stuff of divine revelation, the night yielding the panorama and perspective of the heavens.

In the last stanza, as befitting a night-time scene, all seems to grow quiet, and less conflicted. The imagery here is no longer vertical (ascending ladders), but horizontal (ships arriving at a shoreline, or as Rashi explains Genesis 28:12, the image of angels accompanying Jacob on his way.) It is against this seemingly quiet nighttime backdrop that the poet's sense of mysterious possibility once again gathers strength and takes flight.

In prescribing the "Tikkun," a set menu of all-night study for Shavuot, the Kabbalists had in mind several goals: to rectify the people's past mistake of sleeping through the dawn of revelation; to adorn the bride on the wedding night of God and the Jewish people^[1]; to mystically unite the Torah student with God and prepare, as it were, to receive the Torah again.

In Shlonsky's secular mystical rendition of a night-time Tikkun, the poet imagines the seemingly impossible: after a long period of struggle and stumbling, and against the dark backdrop, the existential condition of תיקו (the term for a Talmudic debate that has reached an impasse) finally moves, as if messianically, from תיקו to תיקון, from irresolution to repair.

These days, when there are so many open questions and hanging problems, all straining to be resolved, I take comfort from the wide-eyed, big-dream aspirations of both these versions of Tikkun. It may seem crazy to imagine that the recitation of a liturgical set piece or the study of Torah or the writing of a poem can do anything real to repair the world. Yet, there is profundity and great hope in the ambition and the idea: that we can receive the Torah once again; that we can prepare ourselves better this time; that in an atmosphere of newness and possibility (rather than jadedness and cynicism), amid the dark quiet of a new day, we can actually see something novel, important, paradigm-shifting; that lessons can be learned, problems can be solved, and the human and the Jewish condition can indeed move from impasse to repair.

Read the poem in English and Hebrew

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[1] See, for example, Zohar Emor 34 and 35 (via Sefaria). See also the שני לוחות הברית, עשרת הדברות, מסכת שבועות, נר מצוה י״ג-י״ד.