Tikkun: A Journey Through a Labyrinth of Narrow Spaces and Darkness

To watch Tikkun, a 2015 Israeli film in Yiddish and Hebrew, written and directed by Avishai Sivan, is to enter a world of repression and depression, a world of narrow enclosures, a world of light and dark that becomes increasingly darker. Sivan's film invites us into a vision of the life of the Haredi, Orthodox Jews living in the Mea Shearim neighborhood of old Jerusalem. We see this world through the eyes of Haim Aaron, a Yeshiva student who, unlike the other devout young men with whom he studies, descends into depression, a world where everything natural, the “God-given” natural world, must be renounced. Human bodily yearnings must be abandoned as an offense against God, and God must be loved, “with all your heart and all your soul and all your strength,” as the Biblical verse Deuteronomy 6:5 commands.

The title reverberates with a mystical vision of the relationship of the human soul and God, and is crucial to understanding the suffering of the main character. In Hebrew Tikkun means repair, and evokes the phrase employed by the sixteenth-century ce Kabbalist mystic Isaac Luria, Tikkun Olam, to repair the world. The underlying philosophy of the concept of this repair is complex. But Haim Aaron is trapped by a simplistic notion of his obligations, struggling to control desire, to renounce jouissance, thereby intensifying the rigors of what Freud so aptly termed “civilization and its discontents.” The character's experience of Haredi pietism requires that he deny physicality and renounce the body, and yet love the God who created humans so embodied. He believes he has to repair the world, which is damaged by his sinful desire, but, paradoxically, in doing so, he renounces God's act of creation itself.

Mea Shearim means one hundred gates. The camera wanders with Haim Aaron through the neighborhood's narrow winding streets and interior corridors. And though every narrow street, every byway, every corridor, becomes a gate, each gate seems to