tikkun olam

tikkun olam, concept in Judaism that has been reinterpreted with multiple shades of meaning over the past 2,000 years. It is often translated as “healing the world,” however, the implications for what is healed and what is envisioned as the world have varied. Although absent from the Hebrew Bible, it appears as a legalistic concept in rabbinic texts of the first few centuries ce, and Kabbala texts from the 13th through 18th centuries imbued it with mystical significance. Since the 20th century it has come to denote modern ideals of alleviating human and global suffering, such as social justice, human rights, world peace, and environmentalism.

Rabbinic textual origins

The Hebrew verb tikkun appears four times in the Hebrew Bible: thrice in Ecclesiastes (Qohelet) in the sense of “to straighten” or “to repair” and once in Daniel 4:36 in the sense of “to restore.” The writers of rabbinic texts such as the Talmud and Midrash used the verb tikkun in the contexts of repairing physical objects, fixing a social wrong, or making adjustments to adapt Judaism for new historical conditions. The phrase mipne tikkun ha-ʿolam, or “for the sake of the betterment of the world”—ʿolam means “world”—appears commonly in the Mishna (c. 200 ce), the codification of Jewish oral law (Halakhah). The phrase is used in legalistic situations pertaining to resolving possible conflicts and maintaining social order, especially in reference to matters of divorce but also other contractual concerns such as debtors’ repayment of creditors.

Tikkun olam took a more theological turn in the ʿAleinu prayer, which includes the phrase le-taqen ʿolam be-malkhut Shaddai, meaning “when the world is mended and the kingdom of God is established.” Attributed to the 3rd-century scholar (amora) Abba Arika (commonly called Rav), the ʿAleinu prayer was originally part of the Rosh Hashanah liturgy but since the 14th century has been the closing prayer of the thrice-daily liturgy.

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Mystical manifestations

The idea of tikkun olam received considerably more religious significance in the 13th-century Zohar, the founding text of Kabbala, a form of Jewish mysticism. In the Zohar there are said to be 10 sefirot, or divine emanations, of which the lowest is Shekhina (or Malkhut), God’s presence in the material world. Human activities—e.g., prayer, mitzvot (good deeds), and the festivals—cause the divine effulgence to descend through the sefirot, uniting the mundane world with the heavenly and bringing about a restoration (tikkun) of self, Earth, and heaven as divinity suffuses all. It is not merely the social world that is healed in this process but the universe that is repaired and filled with divine light.

In the 16th century Isaac ben Solomon Luria (1534–72), the eponymous founder of the Lurianic school of Kabbala, added a further mystical dimension to the concept of tikkun olam. Luria taught that at God’s creation the divine light caused certain vessels (identified as the sefirot) to shatter, scattering the light into the material world where it became trapped in shells (qelipot) and mixed with evil. Through mitzvot, prayer, and contemplation humans could lift those sparks back toward the divine. With enough good deeds elevating the divine sparks, Luria urged, the world would be healed, and the messiah could arrive.

Later thinkers in the 18th century, such as the Italian Kabbalist Moshe Ḥayyim Luzzatto and leaders of the Hasidic movement, stressed personal moral and spiritual growth as means for tikkun olam. Luzzatto contended that the Jewish people had an important role fill as God’s assistants in healing the world. The pietistic Hasidic movement gave prominence to the role of the tzaddik, a righteous man, as a special conduit for repairing the world.

Modern applications

The modern conception of tikkun olam, as developed particularly in the United States in the 20th century, sweeps aside legalism, mysticism, and individual morality and returns the concept to the rabbinic social meaning, albeit far more broadly construed. Modern usage of tikkun olam has a general sense of universal betterment in the face of modern global catastrophes and inequities, encompassing the ideals of social justice, human rights, civil rights, pacifism, gender equality, gay rights, environmentalism, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and combating antisemitism. The Jewish commandment (mitzvah) of tzedakah (“righteousness”), which is most often associated with monetary charity, is often subsumed within this expanded tikkun olam ethic.

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The first writer to use tikkun olam in this modern sense was possibly Shlomo Bardin, the founder of the Zionist Brandeis Camp Institute in 1941, who extrapolated it from the ʿAleinu prayer. During World War II and the Holocaust, Jewish thinkers, writers, and rabbis adopted tikkun olam as a response to those horrors. For them, healing the world after its fundamental breakage in the Holocaust required a robust social and this-worldly project of fixing and preventing human suffering. Examples of such thinkers include Emil Fackenheim, a Reform rabbi, and Alexander Dushkin, a professor and educator who was a student of Reconstructionist Judaism founder Mordecai M. Kaplan. Rabbi Gerald Serotta, who founded the progressive organization New Jewish Agenda (1980–92) was instrumental in the term’s popularization. This new conceptualization of tikkun olam spread throughout most branches of Judaism, and even Orthodox Jewish leaders such as British chief rabbi Jonathan Sacks espoused it. In some Jewish movements and congregations, tikkun olam has become the predominant ideology—many observers call it a shibboleth—of modern Jewish ethical thought and action, and it has become especially prevalent in the anglophone Jewish Diaspora.

For politicians and non-Jewish religious leaders, this modern rendering of tikkun olam has served as a potential common ground with Jewish people. The phrase has been mentioned by multiple Christian denominations in official publications promoting interreligious outreach. Pope Francis cited it in a speech to the World Jewish Congress in 2022. Political figures such as Joe Lieberman, Eric Greitens, Mario Cuomo, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama have invoked it as well.

The modern popularity and ubiquity of tikkun olam, however, has sparked some backlash within Jewish circles. Critics express regret about the term’s overuse, concern that it has supplanted other key religious beliefs and obligations in Judaism, and fear that it has reduced Judaism to mere social activism and liberalism, thus threatening to shatter the uniqueness of the Jewish identity. Those who remain committed to tikkun olam as an ethical ideal respond that healing the world and maintaining Judaism are not mutually exclusive but rather complimentary endeavors.