Tikkun Olam. It’s an obscure Jewish concept which translates to “repairing the world” and is often bandied about by liberal Jews to mean something it doesn’t.
What it means: perfecting one’s observance of the commandments.
What it doesn’t mean: you see things that bother you and try to make them right according to your personal compass.
Nope. Doesn’t mean that. It means every Jew doing his share to repair the world by doing his best to do the commandments as prescribed by God as set forth in the Torah.
It means: not turning lights on and off on Shabbos.
It means: not eating pork and shellfish or meat and milk.
For instance.
And now I’m going to say a bunch of things you won’t like. When liberals twist Jewish concepts to support a personal agenda, religion has nothing to do with it. They’ve taken something created by God and recreated it in their own image. Which makes no sense.
Religion is theist. It’s God-centric. If you can make it into anything you want, then it is no longer created by God, no longer divine. It’s man made.
Now Jews are allowed to interpret God’s word, as set forth in the Torah. But not everyone is allowed to do that. Only the people who received the tradition in an unbroken chain from Moses at Sinai and onward get to decide things for the rest of us peons. They get to decide, for instance, what foods we can and cannot eat.
The reason they get to decide these things is that they are the closest thing to God when it comes to understanding what God meant when He transmitted the Torah and made the Jews the beneficiaries of His word. What’s important here, you see, is carrying out the commandments the way God intended and not as we’d like them to be.
So, I might really like cheeseburgers, but I don’t get to decide it’s okay for me to eat them and that the really important thing is gun control. These are not the kinds of decisions that are in our hands as Jews.
Face the facts: I am never going to be allowed to have that cheeseburger. It is not ever going to be in man’s hands to say that the cheeseburger thing isn’t as important as how we, for instance, treat gay people or black people or Arabs.
See what I mean? You’re really not going to like what I’m saying here.
Tough. This blog is going to be truthful. Painfully truthful at times. And here is the truth:
The reason we were given the commandments, as Jews, was to make us “holy.” But “holy” is a poor descriptor for the Hebrew word, “Kadosh.” Kadosh doesn’t really mean “holy.” It means “separate.” When we do the commandments as set forth in the Torah, we Jews separate ourselves from the other nations of the world.
We wall ourselves off by, for instance, not eating cheeseburgers.
That is what makes us different from other people. And it is this difference, understand it or not, that we strive for in our observance. Not to be more like other people, more diverse, more tolerant, more open, more gender fluid. No.
We are striving to be separate from society, separated out of society by dint of observing the mitzvot, the commandments. It is what has preserved us as a people. It is what made us outlive all our enemies, Philistines, Canaanites, Egyptians, Romans, Greeks, Babylonians, and so forth, down through the ages.
Think of us as being in a bubble, one big Bubble Boy. And when we’re exposed to stuff, we get contaminated and die.It is being separate that has kept us Jewish.It’s what makes us God-centric, rather than me-centric, or Western norms-centric. And it means marrying Jews and having Jewish children if we are so blessed.
It means continuity.
Because the word of God is immutable. And I will never taste a cheeseburger or a lobster.
Like diamonds, these things are forever.
They ain’t never gonna change.
Because some things cannot be interpreted to mean anything else, cannot be twisted to suit. Not even by liberal Jews.
They just are. Because God made them that way. The commandments, that is.
Now here’s another phrase I’ve seen/heard tossed around by at least one prominent liberal: “sinat chinam” which translates to “baseless hatred.” The Temples were destroyed because of “sinat chinam.” The three weeks that lead up to the 9th of Av when it all went down are sad and bitter and we try to do our “tikkun” by being gentler with others and working on ourselves as people. That time is now.
So we avoid gossip and speaking ill of others. We try to avoid indulging in Sinat Chinam.
But Sinat Chinam, like Tikkun Olam, means something specific. It does not mean hating people for the color of their skin, or their religion, for instance. It doesn’t mean hating people because of the way they look or because of their sexual orientation. It means hating them for no reason at all.
We hate them baselessly. Needlessly. It’s hatred for the sake of hate.
If I say, “I hate gay people,” or, “I hate blondes,” that is the opposite of baseless hatred. The opposite of Sinat Chinam, because I have described a reason for my hate. I hate someone because that someone is gay, or blonde, or whatever descriptor I have chosen.
Again, we don’t get to just make stuff up and stick it onto the Torah. The Torah IS NOT A STICKER ALBUM. Baseless hatred is hating someone for no reason.
It isn’t whatever you decide it is. It is whatever God decided it is, as interpreted by the people He decided could make that interpretation. Sinat Chinam is about indulging in hatred for hatred’s sake. It is about forgetting our higher purpose as human beings, about forgetting the commandments.
It’s about forgetting to do Tikkun Olam.
And Tikkun Olam, applied, means that when I wake up in the morning, I’m going to wash my hands a certain way and say a bunch of blessings. Because the Torah says so and I’m a Jew. And I’m going to do those things meticulously, and with love. Because it is what will keep my children and my children’s children, Jewish.
Tikkun Olam means I’m going to do my share to fix the world by keeping kosher and not cooking food on Shabbos (as opposed to fighting for gay marriage, abortion, civil rights, gun control, and whatever social justice issue floats your boat). Because these social justice issues have nothing to do with Tikkun Olam just as hating blondes has nothing to do with Sinat Chinam.
It is our personal observance of the commandments, refraining from ingesting pork or not touching a scissors on Shabbos, that makes us holy and separate. Along with the fun stuff like giving charity and cooking a meal for your neighbor when she’s just had a baby.
But when we twist concepts like Tikkun Olam and Sinat Chinam into unrecognizable pretzels, trying to make them fit particular social justice issues and situations, we have completely removed God and Judaism from the equation. And that is a wasted effort. It’s about trying to squish God into our own very limited human construct. And in so doing, we’re no longer doing God’s will and separating ourselves out from the nations of the world. We’re no longer kodesh, holy.
As Jews we are supposed to believe that the Torah, which represents God’s word, can be used to understand any and every situation we encounter throughout time. At the same time, we are supposed to acknowledge that the Torah is immutable. We don’t get to bend or twist it to suit a personal agenda. Because that would make it man-made and rob us of the possibility of striving for the divine, of striving to be godly.
And robbing ourselves of that would rob us of all purpose and make our lives, here on this earth, utterly pointless.
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