by Immanuel Suttner (Sydney, Australia)
Tikkun Chatzot (geulah ze’irah)
Once in Jerusalem
very late
I took the No. 9 bus home
and on the way
at a flashing light
saw a road gang
fixing a pot hole
that meant at least as much
as the rebuilding
of the Beyt haMikdash.
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Tikkun (fixing) chatzot (midnight) is a custom where devout Jews rise at midnight to recite prayers, mourn the loss of the temple in Jerusalem, and pray for its restoration.
Beyt haMikdash – the temple that stood in Jerusalem. Beyt (house) Mikdash (that is holy, that is consecrated)
geulah zeirah – a little redemption
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Tikkun Olam
sometimes I get a crazy desire
to fix things
not the world
for which I don’t have a license
but something like a mobile phone
into which a zealous child has stuffed
the sim card the wrong way around
and then I wrestle with the phone
like Yaakov and the malach
for hours and hours
‘til both it and i
are broken
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Tikkun olam – repairing the world
malach – angel
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Immanuel Suttner grew up in South Africa. He moved to Israel shortly before his 18th birthday, chazar bitshuva, and studied in ultra orthodox yeshivot. After three years he re-embraced secularism, and served in the IDF. Post the army he did a degree in English and Hebrew literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Suttner now resides in Sydney, Australia. Obviously the gestalt of all three countries he has lived in have found their way into his poetry. He has authored several books including Cutting Through the Mountain (1997, Viking), The African Animal Football Cup (2010), and four collections of poetry: Hidden and Revealed (2007), Ripening (2020), Becoming The Sea (2025) and Glimmers (2025).
Suttner’s work could be described as contemporary Zen with charoset, devotional poems disguised as kvetching at G-d, all mixed in with a smattering of confessional outpourings, ironic salvos at the excesses of modernity, and love poems to his late dog Ella, z”l. Several of his poems riff off Hebrew source texts, subverting them or reinterpreting them in fresh and surprising ways.
If you’d like to read more of his work, visit: Becoming the Sea, Ripening, and Hidden and Revealed
The Jewish Writing Project 