Back to Question of the Week Back to Archives Q: Can you tell me where the notion of "tikkun olam" comes from? Thanks. Carl
		A: When people today use the phrase "tikkun olam" (literally: "fixing the world"), they usually are referring to a set of ideas and actions in the realms of social justice, kindness to others, and environmental health that are intended to make the world a better place. This use of the term "tikkun olam" is the result of a fairly recent mixing of two streams of Jewish thought. The first of those streams is Biblical: the insistence on the part of the prophets of Israel that oppression of the weak -- of the poor, "the widow, the orphan, and the stranger" -- was not only sinful, but was tantamount to idolatrous rebellion against the living God. The prophets insisted that it was possible for human beings to have a just and loving, covenantal relationship with each other and with the land. (For one beginning of the strand of environmental awareness, see the discussion of land-Sabbaths in Leviticus 25 above.) But the Bible never uses the phrase "tikkun olam." That phrase first appears in the rabbinic writings of the first few centuries of the common era. There, it seems to have the meaning of "establishing social order" or "clarifying social/hierarchical relationships. But "tikkun olam" derived its true power and importance from the sixteenth-century, kabbalistic teachings of Rabbi Isaac Luria. Luria taught that in the process of creating the universe, God sent forth a pure divine light that could not be contained by the 'vessels' into which it flowed. An explosion ensued, scattering broken shards/sparks of holiness about the new universe. Broken-ness became for Luria and his many followers an existential cosmic reality. And in a broken universe, the human task is repair -- tikkun. We are to find the holy sparks and reunite them with their divine source by doing the mitsvot, by saying blessings, or through mystical meditations. I'm not sure when the uniting of the prophetic and Lurianic streams occurred. (I think that the contemporary use of the term "tikkun olam" is only decades old. If any of my readers know otherwise, I would be interested to hear from you.) But it is a natural union. Those who speak of tikkun olam in the contemporary sense find broken-ness not (only) mystically, but quite literally, in human relationships and in the natural world. We also have faith that sparks of holiness can be found in those same realms and can be revealed/retrieved/made whole by our acts of tikkun olam." written by Rabbi Jeremy Schwartz
		last update: August 1999 Got a question for Reb on the Web? Visit our Archived Questions SHOOT*! ("SHOOT" is the Hebrew acronym for SHe'elot OOTeshuvot (Questions and Answers), the centuries-old dialogue between Jews and their rabbis.)

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