Tikkun Olam
It helps both God and the world. Rabbi Jackie Tabick traces the background to this concept of healing
Tikkun Olam has become the new buzz word for the Jewish community… or at least, for the less orthodox groupings it has. Certainly, our own community has adopted it as one of our main themes for the year. What does it mean? Well the root t-k-n means something like ‘to make straight, right or firm, or prepare, set in order, mend or repair.’ And the word Olam means ‘world, university or eternity’. It is usually translated these days as ‘Repairing the world’, but from the history of the use of the expression, we can see that there are deeper nuances within the phrase other than ‘just’ the social justice meanings commonly associated with it today, especially among our young people.
It is not a term that occurs in the Bible. It first appears as part of a mystical meditation, thought to have been used during the second century bce. This meditation found its way into the liturgy as the Aleynu prayer, first into the Rosh Hashanah service and then, after the victims of a murder libel in Blois in 1171 who sang the words on the way to the stake, it was adopted in their honour into the daily and Shabbat services as well. The phrase occurs in the second paragraph, ‘letakeyn olamb; malchut shadai’, to ‘repair the world under the sovereignty of God’. This then is a prayer that very much acknowledges God as the sovereign over the whole of existence, and it calls to us to submit ourselves to this God and to remove all the impurities in the world that delay the coming of what we now call the Messianic era.
It next occurs in the second century ce document, the Mishnah, where it seems to be used to suggest that the social order should be ameliorated to help vulnerable people. Later, in a sixth century text, it is used to mean that God established the world through the stability of a natural system, which provides rain.
But it really comes into its own in sixteenth century Sefat, amongst the mystics who gathered there under the leadership of Isaac Luria. He taught a revolutionary new description of creation, where God first contracts into the Divine self to make room for the finite world, and then tries to pour some of the divine essence into the created world through a series of vessels; only they prove too weak to hold this Divine essence and they shatter, leaving, as it were, shards all over the earth. Trapped below these shards are little pools of divine light, and the most wonderful empowering part of this Lurianic creation myth is the notion that we can repair this botched Divine attempt at creation if we carry out mitzvot, either in the form of ritual or ethical acts. Tikkun Olam, the repairing of Eternity, is, in this system, the name given to those acts of freeing the divine essence that both make God feel happier and more fulfilled and also make the world a better place.
So when you hear of our community looking to implement our Tikkun Olam programme, do remember, it is not just about social justice, or helping the environment, or seeking inclusivity for the vulnerable in our society; it is all that and more, because:
- from the Aleynu, with its emphasis on the elimination of evil and the bringing about of the messianic future, we learn of our need to spot what is evil in our society, and try to remedy the causes of that evil, acknowledging as we do that we are made in the Divine image and that we are obligated to do that which God demands of us;
- from the Mishnaic understanding of Tikkun Olam we learn about the needs of social justice, for the creation of a workable social and religious system that does not discriminate against the vulnerable members of society;
- from the Midrashic we learn about the emphasis on the physical needs of the world, a link to our modern environmental concerns;
- and finally, from the Lurianic system we are challenged to understand that what we do as individuals counts; not only can our actions help God to feel better, they can save the world.
Jackie Tabick is rabbi at Weybridge Reform Synagogue. This article was first published in HaDerech, the magazine of the North West Surrey Synagogue, in Summer 2009.
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