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Javier E

The real meaning of Tikkun Olam - 0 views

jewishjournal.com/...189136

tikkun repair perfection judaism theology history culture

shared by Javier E on 07 Nov 22 - No Cached
  • the idea of tikkun olam was utilized in very specific situations in order to avert particular unintended consequences.
  • Traditional rules were adjusted so as to prevent certain undesirable outcomes.  This has nothing to do with the popular notion of tikkun olam — “social justice” to “repair” the world.
  • Rather, tikkun olam as discussed in the Talmud relates to individual actions in selected circumstances — and adjustments in the rules to avoid potentially perverse results for the community. 
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  • In the 16th century, tikkun olam became part of Lurianic Kabbalah, but this was a very different idea, as well.  As Halkin explains, while the Lurianic tikkun “calls for mending the entire cosmos …  these efforts … are strictly spiritual, involving prayer, religious ritual, and meditation.”
  • Jonathan Krasner, in his 2014 article “The Place of Tikkun Olam in American Jewish Life,” identifies three distinct groups that transformed tikkun olam over the past 75 years.  The first were theologians who, in the aftermath of the Holocaust, looked for ways to re-imagine the covenantal relationship between humans and God.
  • Under tikkun olam, as used by these Jewish leaders, “the Jews were not merely partners with God but ‘senior partners in action,’ entirely responsible for the execution of the covenant.”
  • abbi Artz, in a 1967 address to Jewish educators, proclaimed, “The ultimate goal of man’s partnership with God is Tikkun olam.”
  • Beginning in the 1970’s, a number of progressive rabbis and community leaders began appropriating tikkun olam for their publications and programs
  • “The platform asserted that ‘many of us base our convictions on the Jewish religious concept of tikun olam (the just ordering of human society and the world) and the prophetic traditions of social justice.’”
  • In the early ’90’s, says Krasner, “others took up the effort to shape a progressive Jewish politics around tikkun olam.”  Among these was Michael Lerner, who founded Tikkun, a left-wing alternative to Commentary magazine.  “Lerner hoped to energize alienated Jews with a model of Judaism that rejected the crass materialism and hypocrisy of middle class suburban Jewish life in favor of a Jewishly grounded ethic of social justice.”
  • Today, tikkun olam is part of modern, liberal discourse, even though its popularized connotation has little to do with its traditional meaning. 
  • “It has become a watchword for any value, even if a particular value — worthwhile as it may be — is not rooted in Jewish tradition.”
  • This brings us back to the tradition — the Talmud — in which tikkun olam served a very important, but specific, role when applying rules of morality and justice in certain circumstances.
  • The Talmud, I’ve learned, is more than amazing — parsing in minute detail the many moral and judicial issues that inevitably come up in the normal course of life.  The focus is primarily on what’s right and just for those directly involved.
  • In several limited instances, the rabbis had a wider perspective to keep an eye on the effects on the community as a whole and to adjust specific rules as needed — mi’pnei tikkun ha-olam
  • The idea of “social justice” may, for many, still be worthwhile, but, according to the Talmud, tikkun olam it is not.
Javier E

Opinion | American Jews and Israeli Jews Are Headed for a Messy Breakup - The New York ... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...jews-american-jews-divide.html

israel judaism

shared by Javier E on 04 Jan 19 - No Cached
  • Yossi Klein Halevi, the American-born Israeli author, has framed this moment starkly: Israeli Jews believe deeply that President Trump recognizes their existential threats. In scuttling the Obama-era Iran nuclear deal, which many Israelis saw as imperiling their security, in moving the American Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, in basically doing whatever the government of Benjamin Netanyahu asks, they see a president of the United States acting to save their lives.
  • American Jews, in contrast, see President Trump as their existential threat, a leader who they believe has stoked nationalist bigotry, stirred anti-Semitism and, time and time again, failed to renounce the violent hatred swirling around his political movement. The F.B.I. reports that hate crimes in the United States jumped 17 percent in 2017, with a 37 percent spike in crimes against Jews and Jewish institutions.
  • When neither side sees the other as caring for its basic well-being, “that is a gulf that cannot be bridged,
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  • In a historical stroke with resonance today, American Jewish leaders gathered in Pittsburgh in 1885 to produce what is known as the Pittsburgh Platform, a new theology for an American Judaism, less focused on a Messianic return to the land of Israel and more on fixing a broken world, the concept of Tikkun Olam. Jews, the rabbi behind the platform urged, must achieve God’s purpose by “living and working in and with the world.”
  • For a faith that for thousands of years was insular and self-contained, its people often in mandated ghettos, praying for the Messiah to return them to the Promised Land, this was a radical notion. But for most American Jews, it is now accepted as a tenet of their religion: building a better, more equal, more tolerant world now, where they live.
  • Last summer, when a Conservative rabbi in Haifa was hauled in for questioning by the Israeli police after he officiated at a non-Orthodox wedding, it was too much for Rabbi Steven Wernick, chief executive of the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, the umbrella organization of the Conservative movement in North America.
  • “I do not believe we can talk about a ‘gap’ between Israel and the Diaspora,” Rabbi Wernick wrote in a letter to the Israeli government. “It is now a ‘canyon.’”My rabbi in Washington, Daniel Zemel, said in despair during Kol Nidre, the Yom Kippur evening service, this fall: “For the first time in my life, I feel a genuine threat to my life in Israel. This is not an external threat. It is an internal threat from nationalists and racists.”
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