The Jewish faith, like a number of religious traditions, teaches that our beliefs about the nature of God matter far less than how we treat our fellow creatures. For this reason, such traditions oblige their followers to do whatever they can to fight for greater justice, compassion, and tolerance in the world. That said, the spiritual admonition to pursue greater equity and empathy for all people has never been more crucial than it is at this present moment in our history.
One of the most powerful Judaic concepts I’ve encountered concerning this ethical obligation is the idea of Tikkun Olam, a Hebrew phrase which is commonly translated as “repairing the world.” Dating back to the 2nd Century, Tikkun Olam was originally concerned with adapting Jewish religious law to provide extra protection to those potentially disadvantaged in their dealings with others.
This idea took on a new and much deeper significance during the 16th Century thanks to the writings of a rabbi and mystic named Isaac Luria. It was Luria who created the story known as the “Shattering of the Vessels of Light,” retold here by the renowned Jewish folklorist Howard Schwartz:
At the beginning of time, God’s presence filled the universe. When God decided to bring this world into being, to make room for creation, He first drew in His breath, contracting Himself. From that contraction darkness was created. And when God said, “Let there be light” (Gen. 1:3), the light that came into being filled the darkness, and ten holy vessels came forth, each filled with primordial light. In this way God sent forth those ten vessels, like a fleet of ships, each carrying its cargo of light. Had they all arrived intact, the world would have been perfect. But the vessels were too fragile to contain such a powerful, divine light. They broke open, split asunder, and all the holy sparks were scattered like sand, like seeds, like stars.
To rectify this situation, Luria tells us, God created the Jewish People to gather these hidden sparks. In a more contemporary retelling, we might say that all of us, Jew and non-Jew alike, are charged with the fulfilment of this holy work of seeking out and gathering the sparks of light wherever we can find them. Each time any of us perform an act of kindness, compassion, or generosity, each time we seek to bring greater justice, equity, and peace to the world, we gather up one of these sparks. According to Luria, once the task of finding and gathering all the scattered sparks of light is completed, the broken vessels will be restored and the world will be repaired.
In our own time, the idea of Tikkun Olam received renewed impetus from the teaching of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, one of the foremost Jewish theologians of the 20th Century. Heschel was also a prominent figure in the Civil Rights Movement and a close colleague of Martin Luther King, marching with King on a number of occasions, including the 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery. An early leader in both the anti-war and interfaith movements, Rabbi Heschel was also deeply committed to the concept of “spiritual activism” and believed that modern liberal religion has a moral obligation to seek out opportunities to pursue social justice.
One of Heschel’s most prominent followers is Rabbi Michael Lerner, an important leader in today’s spiritual activism movement and the founder of one of the movement’s leading journals, itself named Tikkun. For Lerner, the fundamental teaching of Tikkun Olam is that the world truly can be fundamentally transformed and healed through our efforts. Lerner believes this vision to be so foundational to the Judaic perspective he says of Judaism, “Our whole religion is based on that insight.”
Perhaps the greatest challenge to embracing the work of Tikkun Olam is the sheer enormity of the task. Our world is broken in so many deeply rooted, complex, and intersectional ways that even beginning the work of addressing these problems seems daunting. As a way of overcoming our sense of hopelessness when faced with the enormity of the brokenness of our world, Jewish spiritual teacher Rachel Naomi Remen advises that we let go of the idea that Tikkun Olam requires that any one of us affect change on a massive scale. Rather, she suggests that we begin by looking for all the countless small possibilities for bringing healing to the world right around us. Or as Dorothy Day so poignantly reminds us:
People say, what is the sense of our small effort. They cannot see that we must lay one brick at a time, take one step at a time. A pebble cast into a pond causes ripples that spread in all directions. Each one of our thoughts, words, and deeds is like that. No one has a right to sit down and feel hopeless. There’s too much work to do.
In addition, it is also important to remember that Tikkun Olam encompasses both the outer and the inner, both service to others and to society as well as to seeking out and liberating the divine spark within ourselves. It asks each of us to seek out and relinquish whatever within us might be holding us back from wholeheartedly engaging in the work of repairing our broken world.
Finally, and most importantly, we need to remember that it is impossible to complete the work of Tikkun Olam alone. Building the world we dream of, a world in which love, justice, and peace prevail, will take the persistent and concerted efforts of all us. Bearing that truth in mind, may we always support and encourage each other in the work of Tikkun Olam, the sacred obligation we share to seek out and gather together all those sparks of divine light, sparks of love and hope and justice which have been scattered and hidden for far too long.