lies, shams, and “tikkun olam”
this is a slightly repetitive collage of various things i’ve written about “tikkun olam”/”tikn oylem”1 as a framing for jewish liberatory work, arranged according to the ACT-UP rubric for criticizing and rejecting supposedly helpful policies and programs: “it’s a lie, it’s a sham, and it won’t work”.
It’s A Lie
in the 1970s, a cluster of young liberal Zionist men entered jewish political and religious life (i’ll get to some of the key figures in the next section). they soon seized on a theological phrase to depict their politics as an outgrowth of their new role as rabbis: “tikkun olam.” the phrase had never had a social or political resonance before; it was about reincarnation, predestination, and the individual spiritual athletics of kabbalistic and Hasidic religious leaders who sought to bring about the apocalypse by gathering the fragments of divinity scattered in an irredeemably sinful world. that earlier history, however, has very strongly shaped how “tikkun olam” has functioned in the institutionalized jewish left over the past 50 years.
previously, the term’s only political deployment was in a few places in the Mishnah, where it designates small legalistic shifts that ease the conditions of the worst off, in order to ‘repair/maintain [tikkun] the existing social order [olam]’ without structural change.
the newly minted 1970s rabbis who invented the phrase’s new meaning (more or less as a synonym for “social justice”) were looking for a spiritual vocabulary to lend religious authorization to their liberal (or, at best, progressive-except-palestine) politics. like many assimilated u.s. jews from yiddish jewish lineages, their vision of “authentic” jewish spirituality basically meant hasidism, and the 16th-christian-century lurianic kabala that is the source of much of hasidism’s formal theology. and that’s where they found the phrase “tikkun olam”.
but in lurianic kabala, and its offshoots in hasidism, “tikkun olam” means something very specific. it’s the process of repairing the broken vessels of the divine light, not the human world, and its tools are not efforts for social justice.
“tikkun” is accomplished through increased separation from the everyday world in order to perfect both the most extensive forms of ritual practice and a set of specific contemplative forms to accompany them (halokhe and kavones, for those following along in the Zohar at home). the specific lurianic process of reincarnation, in which soul-shards of the prophets and heroes reappear within contemporary spiritual leaders, is also central to the idea of “tikkun” and its advancement (there’s an implication of a certain spiritual eugenic strain in here that i’ve never really seen analyzed, but that may be connected to the rigorous attention to yikhes [bloodline/caste] in hasidic matchmaking).
good works of any kind, and attention to the lives of oppressed people, are peripheral at best to “tikkun” in the lurianic/hasidic tradition. they are only even potentially relevant in relation to fulfilling a ritual duty – giving tsedoke, for instance – but that fulfillment is itself valueless for the purposes of “tikkun” unless it is accompanied with the precise contemplative form prescribed for the ritual aspect of the action.
and what “tikkun olam” aims at is not a human world of justice: it is the re-perfection of the divine, freed from the accidental shattering of the vessels which allowed for the creation of the world in the first place. it is a condition purified not of injustice, but of human life. in the lurianic vision, the ultimate goal of human effort – “tikkun olam” – is to correct the mistake that led to our very existence. in its way, it is a spiritual mirror of the Zionist political project of “shlilat hagalut” [the liquidation of the diaspora], the “correction” of the “mistake” of diasporic, non-state, multi-lingual and many-cultured jewish life by replacing it with a nationalist, state-centered monoculture that varies only in the degree that its religious axioms and origins2 are explicitly stated.
all of this history3 is erased in the widespread adoption over the last few decades of the 20th century of the entirely new use attached to “tikkun olam” in the 1970s. a use that was based, quite clearly, on the english translation (“repairing the world”), and projected back onto the hebrew phrase.
It’s A Sham
this entirely new use for “tikkun olam” was in large part the work of two men who sought to invent a rabbinic pedigree for jewish progressive politics, arthur waskow and michael lerner. they publicized their new meaning of the phrase as members of New Jewish Agenda, the main national progressive jewish organization in the u.s. during the 1980s. their evolution, and the purposes behind their invention of themselves as would-be leaders of a “spiritual left”, matter pretty deeply to the evolution of the phrase as it spread.
arthur waskow, who died last fall, was the person who coined the phrase “Jewish Renewal”, as well as being an influential figure in the Havurah movement. inspired by the role of the Black Church within the civil rights struggles of the 1950s-70s, he spent decades trying to create a neohasidism that could embrace ecological awareness and some aspects of jewish feminist theology without sacrificing his own central role as its annointed rebbe and tsadik, and working to preserve the fantasy of a two-state perpetuation of Zionist colonialism. at his organization, the Shalom Center, he was also notoriously awful to work for (and often with), reserving his best patronizingness and scorn for the women (and folks he thought were women) around him.
michael lerner, who died two summers ago, spent those same decades trying to become the jewish cornel west, with all the liberal wishywashiness (and more), none of the charisma, and an extra side dish of hating queers.4 his trajectory involves a more abrupt shift, with his embrace of jewish spirituality coming soon after his misogyny and rape apologism were publicized enough to make it hard for him to remain in the antiauthoritarian left spaces where he had been based. louise crowley’s 1971 articles in seattle’s Sabot and then london’s Anarchy tell that backstory.5 Reliable gossip from the bay area attests to Lerner’s continued sexual harassment and assault of women in the spiritual/political community he founded there.
both men sought a jewish version of the politicized spirituality and charismatic leadership that they saw in the “beloved community” of the Black Church, with a space of prestige and power reserved at its center for themselves. “tikkun olam” became a key tool that enabled them to pursue those aims. seizing upon a phrase from the Mishna, and obscuring what it actually means there and throughout later rabbinic use, gave them apparent support for loudly claiming that only religion can be a source for an ethics or politics of justice (precisely as their far-right christian counterparts do). it also offered them a theology centered on the individual spiritual athletics of religious leaders like themselves, or, in a more populist mode, of each person according to their spiritual abilities, under the direction of a spiritual virtuoso bearing the soul-shards of past prophets.
conveniently as well, “tikkun olam” establishes the goal as return (or should i say RETVRN?) to a fixed prelapsarian wholeness, rather than collective envisioning and creation of a transformed, evolving world in which many worlds can fit. similarly, it defines its methods as primarily internal and individual – a promise that if only people would hold the proper kavone in mind, not only will their individual feelings become the path to changing the world, but even their own acts of injustice will be automatically wiped away and forgiven. it expresses a kind of apocalyptic quietism, averse to collective decisionmaking and emphasizing symbolic acts over ones with concrete effects in the world.
the problem here is not the innovation, of course! it’s the rewriting of history to eliminate the antiauthoritarian critiques of the rabbinic tradition that have been central to every jewish liberatory movement,6 and to pretend that a religious principle they invented was present instead. the main purpose that serves is to substitute an imaginary religious lineage for an actual political and cultural one, which directly strengthens the christian right by endorsing their claim that only religion can be (or has ever been) a source of ethics, or of a vision of justice.
it would, of course, be perfectly possible to say that “tikkun olam” first became related to social justice in the 1970s/80s because of some sketchily opportunistic dudes – and that we can find positive uses for the concept. the fact that nobody ever does that shows how central the imposition of a false account of jewish radical history is to the contemporary concept of “tikkun olam”.
It Won’t Work
after waskow, lerner, and others publicized it, the term caught on rapidly and by the 1990s had become the preferred way for liberal NGOs to mark a project as jewish, and for jewish NGOs to mark a project as liberal. but with no movement history or political roots below its new meaning, the phrase soon drifted right back to the individualism and passivity of its historical usage.
its apocalyptic quietism has made “tikkun olam”, in many ways, a powerful de-organizing tool, as is clear from the politics that “tikkun olam” has defined for u.s. jews. generally, it refuses any clarity of position; embraces deep confusion between providing services and organizing for change; sees emotional payoff as the criteria for judging success; substitutes individual abstract right-thinking for concrete collective action; and otherwise does all the bullshit that the NGO-industrial complex adores most, and which is death to effective organizing of any kind. so it’s not very surprising that at this point, “tikkun olam” marks synagogue food pantry volunteer programs as opposed to efforts for wealth redistribution, energy efficiency drives rather than antifracking blockades, campaigns for more employer-controlled visas instead of open borders, and vigils for peace in place of struggles for justice.
i don’t know whether an honest use of “tikkun olam”, naming it as a recent innovation and embracing critiques of the inventors of its new meaning, would lead in a different direction – i’ve never seen it done. i suspect, however, that at this point the phrase can’t be pried loose from what it has come to mean over the last 50ish years. so as for me, i embrace tiken through its other Hasidic meaning, which is consistent with my political outlook: a shot of liquor, especially one drunk in memory of a dead comrade on their yortsayt.
1 these transliterations give the Zionist (“israeli hebrew”/ivrit) and yiddish pronunciations of the phrase. sefardi and mizrakhi communities have their own pronunciations of hebrew/aramaic; i don’t know how they deal with תּיקון . the Zionist versions (ivrit/”israeli hebrew”) that are dominant in current u.s. jewish religious life erase all these historically specific ways of speaking our ritual language, rejecting the sibilants of ashkenazi useage as ‘effeminate’, and the sefardi/mizrakhi gutterals as ‘primitive’. it is no accident that “tikkun olam” circulates exclusively in its ivrit pronunciation. aside from “tikkun olam”, in this piece i use transliterations that reflect the yiddish pronunciations of my own diasporic lineage.
2 the two ideological pillars that Zionism (in all its forms, from Revisionist to Reconstructionist to nominally socialist) is built on are (1) the divine landgrant giving jews the right to eternal control of the territory surrounding jerusalem (at scales that vary from all of palestine to the entire levant), and (2) diaspora as divine punishment for “impurity”.
3 for a more detailed look at history of the rabbinic uses of “tikkun olam,” see jill jacobs’ article “The History of ‘Tikkun Olam,’” Zeek, June 2007, http://www.zeek.net/706tohu. be aware, though, that her purpose is explicitly not criticism but instead to defend and justify its current uses. for a more critical analysis and interpretation of its recent history, including its function of defanging previous jewish radicalism, listen to rachel mattson’s presentation “Repairing the Idea of ‘Repairing the World’: Thinking Historically about Jewish Community Service” (Manhattan Jewish Community Center’s 2010 lecture for Ma’ayan, December 6, 2010), here.
4 for instance, in the mid-2000s, the founding conference of lerner’s multifaith (and largely inconsequential) Network of Spiritual Progressives included in its session on sexuality a debate on the question: “Are there forms of sexuality between consenting adults that are not acceptable from the standpoint of a progressive religious or spiritual community? Must sex, for example, be covenantal and not merely recreational – and what exactly should be the dimensions of such a covenant?” a more relevant question might be at what point debating the ‘acceptability’ of sex for pleasure crosses the line between mere conservative homophobia and abjectly reactionary exterminationist queerhating. but let’s not even.
5 http://libcom.org/files/Anarchy%20No1%20(second%20series).compressed.pdf
6 including even religious revolutionary movements like Sabbateanism, and religious reformist ones like Hasidism, both of which drew their initial popular support from their rejection (in the former case) or de-emphasis (in the latter) of rabbinic authority over everyday ritual practice, and selective absorption of vernacular jewish practices the rabbis opposed.