Will the Real Tikkun Olam Please Stand Up

Justice in Tanakh

At the beginning of time, God’s presence filled the universe. When God decided to bring this world into being, to make room for creation, He first drew in His breath, contracting Himself. From that contraction darkness was created. And when God said, “Let there be light” (Gen. 1:3), the light that came into being filled the darkness, and ten holy vessels came forth, each filled with primordial light.

In this way God sent forth those ten vessels, like a fleet of ships, each carrying its cargo of light. Had they all arrived intact, the world would have been perfect. But the vessels were too fragile to contain such a powerful, divine light. They broke open, split asunder, and all the holy sparks were scattered like sand, like seeds, like stars. Those sparks fell everywhere, but more fell on the Holy Land than anywhere else.

That is why we were created — to gather the sparks, no matter where they are hidden. God created the world so that the descendents of Jacob could raise up the holy sparks. That is why there have been so many exiles — to release the holy sparks from the servitude of captivity. In this way the Jewish people will sift all the holy sparks from the four corners of the earth.

And when enough holy sparks have been gathered, the broken vessels will be restored, and tikkun olam,the repair of the world, awaited so long, will finally be complete. Therefore it should be the aim of everyone to raise these sparks from wherever they are imprisoned and to elevate them to holiness by the power of their soul.

...[Two American rabbinic thinkers to invoke and popularize Tikkun Olam in the 1960s were Harold Schulweis and Irving Greenberg, who saw tikkun olam as a response to God's absence during the Holocaust and to a world] “created imperfect and incomplete.” Humanity was tasked with being “an ally of God in perfecting and repairing the incomplete world (tikkun olam).” In North America, tikkun olam... made its debut around 1940... Jewish educator Alexander Dushkin invoked tikkun olam during World War II. Dushkin... insisted that the “inalienable rights” of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” had their analogy in the Torah’s description of God’s attributes... He added that while democracy “based its social relationships on the dignity of the individual” and envisioned an engaged citizenry pursuing the common good through “social service,” Jewish tradition was based upon “the conception of Man as both the child of God and the partner of the Almighty in tikkun ha-olam—the continuous task of reconstructing the world.” [In 1945,] Dushkin, the executive director of the Jewish Education Committee of New York, included [tikkun olam] among seven “Common Elements” that should be taught in Jewish schools of all denominations.

… [In early twentieth-century Palestine, the term] was adopted... to describe the most utopian manifestations of the Zionist project. To be a metaken olam, a perfecter of the world, was to embrace radical change. For example, during the Second Aliyah (1904–1914), tikkun ha-olam was used to articulate the motivations of the members of the earliest cooperative settlements. Later, it became an important [concept in the thought of] Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook… Kook declined to see a binary opposition between the material and the spiritual worlds or between Israel and the other nations, teaching that there was holiness in all of creation. Furthermore, he regarded penitence as a means to tikkun, and a reunification with God

... By the 1970s and 1980s leading agencies were responding to criticism by intensifying their efforts to transmit Jewish values, particularly by increasing support for educational and cultural endeavors. They were also articulating their social welfare and social justice agenda using terms of Jewish values… In teaching “an entire generation of federation activists to think and visualize themselves in more Judaic terms,” Greenberg helped introduce and popularize a “vocabulary” of Jewish value-concepts...Thus, by the 1980s and 90s Hebrew terms such as tzedakah and tikkun olam began to appear in federation slogans, resolutions and promotional materials.

… Shlomo Bardin... founder of the Brandeis Camp Institute [also] played an important role in reintroducing tikkun olam. [One Jewish leader recalled that during summer 1960, Bardin taught] campers that “the purpose of Judaism” could be found in four words of the second paragraph of the Aleinu prayer: l’takeyn olam b’malkhut Shaddai. Bardin insisted that it was their “task” as Jews to “fix the world.”

... Tikkun olam remained a fairly obscure term throughout the early 1960s... In 1970, determined to place greater emphasis on tzedakah and social justice, USY [the Conservative Youth movement] leaders revamped and expanded its Building Spiritual Bridges program and renamed it Tikun Olam. All of its social action and tzedakah programs were coordinated through this project, and, in 1975, an accompanying educational guide was published with the same title.

… In the 1980s, tikkun olam also began to appear in the curricula of the Reform movement. As in the Conservative movement, the discussion of tikkun olam often occurred within the context of values and character education or was linked to social action and social justice programming… An article in The Jewish Catalog, however, was most important in spreading the idea of tikkun olam throughout North America. [Historians argue that one ... major achievements of the Catalog was popularizing the] language of the havurah movement, including words like tzedakah, kavanah (intentionality) and tikkun olam.

...In 1975,... [newly-ordained Rabbi Gerald] Serotta became interested in the derivation and meaning of [tikkun olam]. Eager to find a term that could express what he believed were the core Jewish values that infused social justice activism, Serotta approached one of his teachers, Eugene Borowitz, about tracing the application of tikkun olam in rabbinic literature. He was surprised to learn that the majority of cases where tikkun olam was mentioned were associated with divorce law. This led Borowitz to suggest that he would find another rabbinic idiom, “mipnei darkhei shalom,” for the sake of social peace, more useful for his purposes. Serotta, however, was intrigued by the Talmudic passages in which tikkun olam was associated with economic justice…Tikkun olam remained an important motif for [politically liberal Jewish organizations] through­out the 1980s…

The most important figures [shaping Jewish politics around tikkun olam in the 1990s] were Leonard Fein and Michael Lerner…Fein strongly maintained that far from endangering Jewish survival by making Judaism indistinguishable from liberalism or secular humanism, tikkun olam gave purpose and meaning to Jewish survival… Michael Lerner... co-founded TIKKUN, a political and cultural journal... to help keep “the Prophetic tradition alive.”… Lerner was instrumental in stimulating a wider communal conversation about social justice in Jewish life... Liberal rabbis and other Jewish thinkers increasingly sought the paradigm of tikkun when discussing challenges that were either universal or particular to the Jewish community. The rhetoric of repair was especially well suited to the [time], as people became increasingly focused on personal meaning and spiritual seeking.

...Tikkun olam promises much and demands comparatively little in the way of sacrifice. This is its greatest strength and, perhaps, its major weakness.

- Dr. Jonathan Krasner, "The Place of Tikkun Olam in American Jewish Life", Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, 2014. http://jcpa.org/article/place-tikkun-olam-american-jewish-life1/

When G-d first summons Abraham and Sarah to set out on the journey that becomes Jewish history, [he makes them three promises: go to the land I will give you, and I will make you a nation, but]... what is the third promise?The third promise is v’nivrichu b’cha kol mispacha ha’adama (Gen 12:3) – through you all the families of the earth shall be blessed. Abraham, at the end of his life, having all that time living apart from his environment, nonetheless had a level of influence such that his neighbors turn to him and say – we recognize the Prince of G-d in our midst...

Or, [as said] in the aleinu prayer, it is the promise and the challenge l’takayn olam b’malchut Sha-dai – to perfect the world under the sovereignty of G-d. It is the last task of Jewish history, and it is the hardest task.

...The Torah is a book about us, yet it doesn’t begin with the Jewish people... [Instead, it starts as] a story about humanity as a whole. It tells a story of two orders of civilizations [Adam, and later, Noah] which began as covenants with all of mankind and how they failed... Both are explicitly founded on the concept of humanity as betzelem Elokim, ‘in the image of G-d.’ Both fail.

...The Almighty tried twice to teach humanity universal rules... They failed; because the most powerful way to teach is by particular example. If you want to instruct someone on how to be good, identify a role model and let him see how that person lives... That became the Jewish vocation; not to stand for some universal truth but to be a particular, specific living example of how to live...

...Our task is to become a particular living example of a set of universal truths, and therefore the conflict between the universal and the particular in Judaism is not a conflict at all because... it is only by being true to ourselves that we can be true to other people... Only by having the courage to be different can we be role models to the dignity of difference. That is why Tikkun Olam in my view is the special responsibility of we who are the guardians of Torah.

... We have the chance today of shaping a society built on justice and compassion... If we do it the world will be a better place; if we do it, we will be better Jews.

- R. Jonathan Sacks, "Tikkun Olam: Orthodoxy's Responsibility to Perfect G-d's World", Orthodox Union West Coast Convention Speech, 1997 http://advocacy.ou.org/tikkun-olam-orthodoxys-responsibility-to-perfect-g-ds-world/​

Once the halakhic system mandated a serious social responsibility, but the [authoritative] nature of Jewish law has given way to... aimless or haphazard performance of whatever the person of our time considers important to do. Accordingly, the Reform movement will suggest or even instruct its adherents what political measures to support, while hardly requiring any ritual obedience...

[On many] issues, we are told that solidarity with the easy left is our Jewish duty under God. But there is no coherent standard for changing Jewish law except the spirit of the times, an epoch that is hardly worthy of emulation...

We want Jews to line up with all the smug and self-confident liberals rather than stake out original and dangerous alternatives.... All this begins, I believe, with distorting tikkun olam. A teaching about compromise, sharpening, trimming and humanizing rabbinic law, a mystical doctrine about putting God's world back together again, this strange and half-understood notion becomes a huge umbrella under which our petty moral concerns and political panaceas can come in out of the rain....Our world does need repair. So do we. Our much-vaunted "spirituality" will be tested in our politics.

- R. Arnold Jacob Wolf, "Repairing Tikkun Olam," Judaism Journal, 2001.

It is... unbearable, to sit silently by while Jews, and now the general religious and secular communities, completely misuse and distort the term Tikkun Olam-- certainly not... out of any malice, but rather out of ignorance in the pursuit of virtuous goals and principles which may be applicable to general society and civilization but which have tragically become a poor substitute for authentic religious observance. This repair rhetoric has become an obsession, a catch-all credo. Everything today is Tikkun Olam... It is a senseless and meaningless misconception, its true meaning nothing like it is commonly used and purported to be.

It is not at all a centuries-old tradition, it is not a call to action, and it is not a commandment...Tikkun Olam does not even mean repairing the world in the sense of social justice. Nor in traditional sources is Tikkun Olam... even a direct human imperative or action, but rather one that is left in G-d’s hands.

We cannot, and are not instructed to, save the world, or even to repair it. Judaism teaches no such thing. Rather, we are instructed to conduct ourselves properly, to observe the Mitzvos... and in that way to contribute to society and civilization both by example and through practice and action.

For Jews those Mitzvos include not simply socially or politically correct precepts such as giving charity and engaging in political action, but also observance of the Sabbath, dietary restrictions (Kashrus), daily prayer, and other commandments... [some Jews] substitute the false panacea of... Tikkun Olam for the authenticity of true Judaism... to avoid their actual responsibilities as Jews to observe the Torah and the commandments.

... The only honest and authentic Jewish way to [engage in Tikkun Olam] is to encourage observance of the Torah across the entire spectrum of the Jewish Community. That in fact is actually what our responsibility is, nothing more and nothing less, and the rest is up to G-d...

- R. Yitzhak Aharon Korff, (Zvhil-Mezbuz Rebbe of Boston) "The fallacy, delusion and myth of Tikkun Olam,"Jewish Advocate of Boston, 2013 http://www.jns.org/latest-articles/2013/6/3/the-fallacy-delusion-and-myth-of-tikkun-olam

The term “tikkun olam” has become the shibboleth of American Jewry, and like other Jewish words such as “chutzpah” it has entered English vocabulary without translation. American politicians [such as Obama and Romney]... readily invoke it...

In medieval Jewish philosophy, probably under the influence of Arabic language and philosophy, “tikkun” was often applied to human self-development, and to the quest for human “perfection,” self-actualization or moral/spiritual improvement...

[While] tikkun is a central concept in the history of Kabbalah, [for] the kabbalists, the subject of “olam” is primarily “olam ha-sefirot,” “olam ha-elyon,” the upper world... The focus of the kabbalistic view is not primarily the social sphere, the terrestrial realm, but the divine realm...

Although he was no stranger to social action or to the teachings of the biblical prophets, Abraham Joshua Heschel did not use the term “tikkun olam” to describe either of them... Heschel advocated the application of a particularly and authentically Jewish way of thinking both to Jewish and universal social, ethical and spiritual issues. Unlike contemporary views of tikkun olam that begin with universalism drawn from non-Jewish ideologies, Heschel advocated the application of particularly Jewish... ideas to universalistic issues.

^{- R. Byron Sherwin, "Tikkun Olam: A Case of Semantic Displacement", Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, 2014}

http://jcpa.org/article/tikkun-olam-case-semantic-displacement/​