Tikkun olam
Tikkun olam is a religious concept in Judaism, which refers to various forms of action intended to repair and improve the world.
In classical rabbinic literature, the phrase referred to legal enactments intended to preserve the social order. In the Aleinu, it refers to the eradication of idolatry. In Lurianic Kabbalah, the "repair" is mystical: to return the sparks of Divine light to their source, employing ritual performance.
In the modern era, particularly among the post-Haskalah movements, tikkun olam has come to refer to the pursuit of social justice, or "the establishment of Godly qualities throughout the world", based on the idea that "Jews bear responsibility not only for their own moral, spiritual, and material welfare, but also for the welfare of society at large".
History
In the Mishnah
The earliest use of the term tikkun olam appears in the Mishnah in the phrase "for the sake of repairing the world", with the meaning of amending the law to keep society well-functioning.Several legal enactments appear in this passage, with "for the sake of repairing the world" given as justification:
- One cannot convene a court in another place to nullify a get.
- One must fully specify the names of the husband and wife on a divorce document.
- A widow can collect her ketubah even without a formal oath.
- Witnesses must sign the divorce document.
- Prozbul was instituted.
- If an enslaver set aside an enslaved person as a designated repayment for his debts, the enslaved person is freed, but the responsibility to repay the debt is transferred to them.
- If two people enslave one person, and one enslaver frees that person, the formerly enslaved person is forced to repay the second enslaver his share of the value of the enslavement.
- Captives are not redeemed for more than their monetary value.
- Captives are not aided in their attempts to escape.
- Torah scrolls, tefillin, and mezuzot are not purchased from non-Jews for more than their value.
- When a husband made a vow requiring him to divorce his wife, they were then allowed to remarry.
- One who sold their field to a Gentile must purchase and bring the first fruits from that field.
In ''Aleinu''
A conception of tikkun olam is also found in the Aleinu, a concluding part of most Jewish congregational prayer, which, in contrast to the Mishnah's usage, focuses on the end of time. The Aleinu beseeches God:In other words, when all the people of the world abandon false gods, and recognize God, the world will have been perfected.
Among modern liberal Jewish movements, a common, but more modern, understanding of this phrase is that we share a partnership with God, and are instructed to take the steps towards improving the state of the world, and helping others, which simultaneously brings more honor to God's sovereignty.
Some scholars have argued that the Aleinu prayer is actually not a valid source for the concept of tikkun olam, claiming that the original prayer used a homonym "l'takhen", meaning "to establish" ; this wording is still used by Yemenite Jews. However, among European Jews, Aleinu has used the word "to fix" since at least the first recorded texts in the 11th–12th centuries. Thus, Aleinu's influence on the concept of tikkun olam can date to at least this time.
Maimonides
Over the course of Jewish intellectual history, tikkun olam has at times referred to eschatological concerns, as in Aleinu, and at times to practical concerns, as in the Mishnah, but in either context, it refers to some kind of social change or process that is for the betterment of Jews or Gentiles, or the world. Whether that happens primarily within Jewish society, or primarily in relation to the nations of the world, whether that happens primarily through acts of justice and kindness, or equally through ritual observance, whether primarily through internal work of an individual or through external deeds, is something that changes from one source to the next. For example, Talmudic scholar and eminent philosopher of the Middle Ages Maimonides saw tikkun olam as fully inclusive of all these dimensions when he wrote: "Through wisdom, which is Torah, and the elevation of character, which is acts of kindness, and observing the Torah's commandments, which are the sacrifices, one continuously brings tikkun olam improvement of the world, and the ordering of reality." Yet, he also saw justice as a fundamental component, as, for example, when he wrote, "Every judge who judges truth unto its truth, even for one hour, it's as if he fixed the whole world entirely / tikein et kol ha'olam kulo and caused the Shekhinah to rest upon Israel."Lurianic Kabbalah
dwells on the role of prayer and ritual in tikkun of the upper worlds. According to this vision of the world, God contracted part of God's infinite light to create the world. The vessels of the first universe, the World of Chaos, shattered and their shards became sparks of light trapped within the next universe, the World of Rectification. Prayer, especially contemplation of various aspects of the divinity, releases these sparks of God's light and allows them to reunite with God's essence. The "rectification" is two-fold: the gathering of light and of souls, to be achieved by human beings through the contemplative performance of religious acts. The goal of such repair, which can only be effected by humans, is to separate what is holy from the created world, thus depriving the physical world of its very existence, destroying the material universe. This restores all things to a world before disaster within the Godhead.According to Moshe Chaim Luzzatto, in his book, Derech Hashem, the physical world is connected to spiritual realms above that influence the physical world, and Jews have the ability, through physical deeds and free will, to direct and control these spiritual forces. God's desire in creation was that God's creations would ultimately recognize God's unity and overcome evil; this will constitute the perfection of creation. While the Jews have the Torah now, and are aware of God's unity, some believe that when all of humanity recognizes this fact, the rectification will be complete.
In recent years, Jewish thinkers and activists have used Lurianic Kabbalah to elevate the full range of ethical and ritual mitzvot into acts of tikkun olam. The belief that not only does prayer lift divine sparks, but so do all of the mitzvot, including those traditionally understood as ethical, was already a part of Kabbalah, but the contemporary emphasis serves the purpose of finding a mystical depth and spiritual energy in ethical mitzvot. The application of the Lurianic vision to improving the world can be seen in Jewish blogs, High Holiday sermons, and on-line Jewish learning resource centers.
The association between the Lurianic conception of tikkun and ethical action assigns an ultimate significance to even small acts of kindness and small improvements of social policy. However, if this is done in a manner that separates the concept of tikkun olam from its other meanings as found in rabbinic literature and the Aleinu prayer, there is a risk of privileging actions that have no real religious significance and represent personal agendas more than Judaism itself.
The application of Lurianic Kabbalah to ethical mitzvot and social action is particularly striking because Lurianic Kabbalah saw itself as repairing dimensions within the spiritual and mystical worlds, rather than this world and its social relations. Author Lawrence Fine points to two features of Lurianic Kabbalah that have made it adaptable to ethical mitzvot and social action. First, he points out that a generation recovering from the tragedy of the Holocaust resonates with the imagery of shattered vessels. Second, both Lurianic Kabbalah and ethical understandings of tikkun olam emphasize the role of human responsibility and action.
Modern developments
The original context of the Aleinu prayer, in the Rosh Hashanah liturgy, is accompanied by the hope that "all will form a single union to do Your will with a whole heart". In many contexts this is interpreted to be a call to universalism and justice for all mankind – sentiments which are common throughout Jewish liturgy. For example, in the American Conservative movement's prayer book, Siddur Sim Shalom, "A Prayer for Our Country", elaborates on this passage: "May citizens of all races and creeds forge a common bond in true harmony to banish all hatred and bigotry" and "uniting all people in peace and freedom and helping them to fulfill the vision of your prophet: 'Nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they experience war anymore. Both lines express wholeheartedly the idea of universal equality, freedom, and peace for all.In the liberal movements of Judaism, most especially in the United States, this sentiment is especially embedded in the idea of acting compassionately for all people, as for example in the 1975 New Union prayer book, used by the movement for Reform Judaism Gates of Prayer, which includes the text, "You have taught us to uphold the falling, to heal the sick, to free the captive, to comfort all who suffer pain". These aspects of Judaism already have a traditional name however, gemilut chasadim, and some have criticized the tendency to emphasize social action as a kind of disregard for other aspects of Judaism traditionally connected to tikkun olam, like learning, prayer, repentance, and ritual commandments.
Perhaps the first Jewish thinker to use the phrase "tikkun olam" in the modern sense of "fixing the world" by building a just society was Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook. According to Jewish scholar Lawrence Fine, the first use of the phrase tikkun olam in modern Jewish history in the United States was by Brandeis-Bardin Camp Institute founder Shlomo Bardin in the 1950s. Bardin interpreted the Aleinu prayer, specifically the expression le-taken olam be-malchut shaddai, as a responsibility for Jewish people to work towards a better world. However, while Bardin was a significant popularizer of the term, one also finds it being used in similar manner in the late 1930s and early 1940s by Alexander Dushkin and Mordecai Kaplan. As left-leaning progressive Jewish organizations started entering the mainstream in the 1970s and 1980s, the phrase tikkun olam began to gain more traction. The phrase has since been adopted by a variety of Jewish organizations, to mean anything from direct service to general philanthropy. It was presented to a wide international audience — itself an indication of how widely tikkun olam had now permeated American Jewish life — when Mordecai Waxman used the phrase in a speech during Pope John Paul II's visit to the United States in September 1987.