Has tikkun olam run its course?

Tikkun olam. Depending on your age and location, this phrase may mean absolutely nothing to you, or everything. I – a 42-year-old British Jew who grew up in a Progressive congregation in London – encountered it for the first time in 2020, in an Instagram post. “Tikkun olam means repair the world,” it read, adding that this was a central tenet of Judaism. How did I not know this, I wondered? My interest was immediately piqued. As it turns out, tikkun olam is a hugely contentious topic. Not only is it questionable that the phrase does, in fact, mean “repair the world”, but even among people who believe this, their interpretations for how this should be done varies greatly.

Not only is it questionable that the phrase does, in fact, mean “repair the world”, but even among people who believe this, their interpretations for how this should be done varies greatly

Tikkun olam took hold in America in the 1960s and 1970s. “We started having a new burst of energy around Judaism that was basically focused on social justice,” explains Jo Ellen Green Kaiser, former managing editor of Tikkun magazine and co-editor of Righteous Indignation: A Jewish Call for Justice. “People saw the energy that black folks were having in the Christian church and Catholic folks were having around immigration, and they wanted to have some kind of religious, spiritual, social justice kind of experience.”

It was an exciting time to be an American Jew; legendary leaders emerged, such as Abraham Joshua Heschel, who became a leading figure in the American civil rights movement. Famously, when asked if he’d found time to pray in Selma, where he marched alongside Martin Luther King, Rabbi Heschel responded: “I prayed with my feet.” Another such leader was Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, founder of the Renewal movement, which Green Kaiser says was “one of the leading arbiters” of tikkun olam. “He was very much in that tradition of [rabbis who] married a Hasidic type of charismatic practice, with a social justice format,” she says. “A lot of people made their way back into Jewish life who had been very disaffiliated… It was very enticing to people, because they could have an extremely spiritual experience that was also very progressive.”

In the years since, tikkun olam has cemented its place as a cornerstone of Jewish-American identity. A 2012 study found that 72 per cent of American Jews consider tikkun olam to be a “somewhat or very important value” influencing their political beliefs and activities. “It’s sort of everywhere in America, from cradle to grave,” says Jonathan Neumann, author of To Heal The World?: How the Jewish Left Corrupts Judaism and Endangers Israel. Neumann first encountered the phrase about 15 years ago, and after moving to the US, was shocked at how pervasive it was. “It’s so extraordinary how in such a short space of time, particularly Jewishly speaking, everyone has sort of come to believe that tikkun olam is this central tenet of Judaism,” he says, telling me about some friends in the UK Jewish youth movement who started jokingly referring to it as “chicken or lamb” after attending a conference in Boston where “every speaker essentially would just refer to this notion no matter what they were talking about”.

While it might have passed me by, tikkun olam is far from a purely American-Jewish phenomenon. Not only has it seeped out into wider American society – quoted by presidents from Clinton to Obama – but it’s also influenced discourse in the rest of the Jewish diaspora and Israel. When asked on a podcast what Israel and the diaspora had in common, Israel’s former minister of diaspora affairs, Nachman Shai, replied: “We want, all I believe, to make the world a better place. That’s the famous tikkun olam.” Meanwhile, in the UK, tikkun olam has entered the vernacular of our highest rabbinical office. Speaking at Limmud in 2014, Chief Rabbi Sir Ephraim Mirvis pronounced: “We must engage with our fellow Jews, reaching out to them with love and to the outside world with tikkun olam. That is the only way of preserving our Jewish values” – and while he never used the phrase directly, Rabbi Sacks’ book To Heal A Fractured World appears to have at least been prompted by the term.

For me it’s a major pillar. I think it’s part of the soul of Judaism to understand ourselves intricately entwined with others

For Rabbi Rebecca Birk, who leads Finchley Progressive Synagogue (full disclosure: the congregation where I grew up), tikkun olam is central to her Jewish world view. “For me it’s a major pillar. I think it’s part of the soul of Judaism to understand ourselves intricately entwined with others,” she tells me. “The phrase ‘mipnei tikkun ha-olam’ is found in the Mishna, which dates from 200CE – and it referred to social welfare and improving the situation for the disadvantaged. In the 16th century Isaac Luria brought it into Kabbalistic thinking – of divine shards of light, and you’re trying to repair and make better and find those shards again – and that is my understanding of tikkun olam, which is improvement and repair; the world is broken and it’s an intensely Jewish responsibility to respond, to bear witness, to be involved.”

For critics such as Neumann, however, tikkun olam is a curious interloper. “This idea that tikkun olam means Jewish social justice [is] patently nonsense from a traditionalist point of view,” he says. “I mean literally I guess the words mean ‘repair the world’ or ‘heal the world’ or something like that, but each word individually has a number of possible meanings; olam can mean world, it can mean the whole cosmos, it can just mean the wider community, it can also mean eternity.”

Neumann points out that the exact phrase ‘tikkun olam’ never actually appears anywhere in the Jewish canon. Instead, he explains: “It’s just sort of derivatives of the same word that happen to appear in a bunch of different places, but they have no connection to one another, nor is there any notion that they should do, across these various areas of thought in Judaism.”

A commonly cited source is the Aleinu prayer, but Neumann and others believe this might be due to a grammatical error. “I’ve seen a compelling argument that it’s actually a corrupted Hebrew,” he tells me: In Yemenite siddurs it is ‘l’tachen’ with a Kaf rather than a Qof, meaning ‘to establish’.

Another potential source is Lurianic Kabbalah, which posits that vessels containing God’s divine light were shattered during the creation of the world, and it is man’s duty to repair them through fulfilling mitzvot and commandments. Alternatively, various tractates of Talmud, mostly concerned with closing loopholes in divorce law.

But it’s not just the etymology of the phrase that’s in doubt; the very idea of what it means to “repair the world” has also been distorted over time.

“It’s very important to remember that tikkun olam is a political ideology,” says Neumann. “It’s less about charity and voluntary grassroots things than it is about advocating for comprehensive change at the highest possible levels.” Or at least, it was. Because while the originators of the movement and later key proponents, such as Rabbi Micheal Lerner who founded Tikkun magazine, understood the term as an expression of their radical, left-wing politics, that’s not how it was adopted by the wider American public.

“The people who started doing this were very, very invested in their Jewish identity and in Jewish practice. They were shomer Shabbat, they were kosher, they were doing their Jewish practice, and this was a way of deepening that practice by connecting their Judaism with the social justice work they were already doing,” explains Green Kaiser. The problem was, its appeal to many American Jews was as a form of “Jewish-lite,” she says. “Like, oh, I don’t have to keep kosher, I don’t have to go to synagogue, I don’t have to follow all these rituals, if I’m just a good enough person, then I’m a good Jew.”

Today, while the phrase tikkun olam is a mainstay of the lexicon of American (and increasingly international) Jewry, the ideology finds itself in somewhat of a no man’s land. For the Jewish mainstream, its original meaning has largely been lost. “Now unfortunately, tikkun olam is more like something that congregations and synagogues think that they have to say,” says Green Kaiser. “The original idea of tikkun olam was, change the world for the better. This was not about going to the local food pantry, this was about: how can we reimagine poverty or how can we reimagine racism? Now, most of the people that say they’re doing tikkun olam, it’s more like social service. So it’s become something really different.”

To find people who still use the term with its originally-intended revolutionary force, you have to look to anti-Zionist Jews. Notably, when Jewish Voice for Peace

To find people who still use the term with its originally-intended revolutionary force, you have to look to anti-Zionist Jews. Notably, when Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) occupied the rotunda of the Cannon House Office Building on Capitol Hill in July 2024 they unveiled a banner which read “TIKKUN OLAM = FREE PALESTINE.” But even in these radically left-wing circles, the phrase has largely fallen out of fashion. “There’s always been criticisms on the margins of that movement that the phrase tikkun olam is too chauvinist because it’s Hebrew,” explains Neumann. “It’s too exclusivist and too particularist and so on, and if we’re doing universalist work why do we have this phrase?”

Debate around tikkun olam is nothing new – there have long been calls to put it on a 20-year hiatus – but since October 7, it is once again in the spotlight; Jewish activist Amelia Adams (who posts on Instagram under the handle @neuroticjewishgay) recently included it on a list titled ‘Words I can’t stand post 10/7’. But while Kaiser Green and Neumann agree that October 7 undoubtedly did nothing to help its cause – with convictions against it on both sides hardening – they also agree that its decline was already in motion.

For Green Kaiser, the intifadas were key in changing the landscape of American Jewry in a way that made tikkun olam lose its true shape. “When people started focusing more attention on Israel, they started having a tension between what it meant to be progressive social justice-y and what it meant to be Jewish,” she says. “What ended up happening is that a lot of that social justice fervour kind of moved away from politics per se and moved into climate change and other kinds of social justice work that wasn’t as explicitly capital-P political.” Now, she says, “mainstream organisations are more internally focused, and more focused on Jewish identity per se”.

For Neumann, the idea was always destined to fail. “I think the ideology of tikkun olam itself has kind of laid the groundwork for its own kind of abnegation over decades,” he tells me. “Fundamentally the ideology is universalist: the mission of the Jews in the world is the same as it is for everybody else – which is to repair the world with left-wing politics. So ultimately there’s nothing really that makes the Jews any different from anybody else; their purpose and their destiny are the same as that of the rest of humanity – and that’s not really a recipe for the Jewish future.

“Obviously I’d love to imagine that my book has had some role in that,” he adds, “but I think the book actually spoke to a zeitgeist and contributed to a phenomenon that was already taking place.”

So is it safe to say that tikkun olam has run its course? That might be a push.