Tikkun Olam: Ancient Jewish Wisdom for Modern Times
Plus, Rainn Gets Deep with Rabbi Susan Goldberg
Greetings, Fellow Soul Travelers!
This week on the Soul Boom podcast, Rainn gets deep with Rabbi Susan Goldberg. Together they explore the relevance of ancient Jewish wisdom to our modern dilemmas—we found it rich and timely and think you will too.
Relevant to that conversation is the Jewish concept of Tikkun Olam—and so we thought as a nice companion piece to the interview with Rabbi Goldberg, we’d have our good friend Ta’alumot share his reflections on this most profound and essential of Jewish concepts. In Tikkun Olam—often translated as “repairing the world”—we uncover a shared mystical lineage across cultures and languages. The Hebrew word olam evokes a realm of being that transcends our physical world. Similarly, in Arabic, the phrase al-‘alam al-akbar speaks to the “greater world” within us, as expressed in the wisdom of an iconic early figure of Islam, ‘Ali ibn Abi Talib:
Your remedy is within you, yet you do not sense it.
Your sickness is from you, yet you do not perceive it.
You reckon yourself a puny form, but within you is enfolded the greater world.
These two words, olam and ‘alim, share a common Semitic root that signifies knowledge, worlds, and what is hidden. This shared etymology reminds us that the universe, or the greater world, is not only “out there” but also within us, hidden in plain sight. Just as the shattered vessel of Creation calls us to gather and uplift its scattered sparks in the Jewish mystical tradition, the greater ‘alim calls us to see the infinite cosmos mirrored within our finite selves.
In this Dispatch, Ta’alumot reflects on his own journey into this tradition, illuminating how Tikkun Olam is more than mending a broken world—it’s participating in the sacred and eternal act of spiritual repair. His words remind us that by tending to the divine sparks within and around us, we engage in a shared, infinite work that unites humanity across time, space, and faith.
Eternally yours,
The Soul Boom Team
Eternal Repair
By Ta’alumot
If you told my childhood self I would marry a rabbi someday, he would have laughed in your face. I wanted nothing to do with rabbis as a kid. I only knew any because my parents forced me to be in their presence, and after they realized how uninterested I was in what they had to say, they never seemed any more pleased to be in my presence than I was to be in theirs. I spent many years after my bar mitzvah looking for any way I could connect to Source other than Judaism (or any of its Abrahamic descendants).
And yet here I am, a rabbi’s husband, raising two children to be proud, learned Jews, writing voluminously about Jewishness, and doing many other conscious and unconscious things to anchor a living, breathing, growing Jewish community of people in my generation and hopefully far beyond. What happened here? What is continuing to happen? It is what the mystics of my people would call a tikkun — a repair.
Surely, meeting the woman who would become my wife — and my rabbi — was a critical moment in my Jewish life. But I was prepared for that moment all my life. I was prepared by my running away from Jewishness because its insistent presence in my life caused me to become part of its story no matter how hard I resisted. And I was prepared in my running back towards it, zigzagging though I was, through unfamiliar cultural forms, seeking exactly what Jewishness offered me without knowing it, and then eventually realizing what had happened and turning — first gradually, then suddenly — back.
For the many years of her rabbinic education, my future-wife and I wandered together. She never really turned away from Jewishness very far, but in our early 20s we certainly explored far beyond the frontiers of how we had been raised, in music scenes, in festival culture, in alternative modes of working and living on the opposite coast from where we both grew up. Then we got married, and then she became a rabbi — and then we moved home to where our families live — and we made our return together, too. In doing so, we entered fully into what Jewishness is — not a “religion” of beliefs and ideas, but an inseparably interconnected web of relations, a network of souls called into being as a community of communities. And when we got there, we realized what a precious — and difficult — thing that is to preserve, not just for our own sake, but for the world’s sake.
Hard as we have always tried to preserve the wisdom of our most ancient forebears, Jewish people have been swept along by the course of history. Paradoxically, it’s how the Jewish People — through its many geographical and cultural expressions — has remained alive in the world for so long.
This may not be apparent to outsiders, but “Orthodox” Judaism is a (relatively) modern construction. The religious laws and practices observed in Orthodox communities are not modern — not hardly — but the decision to circle up around those practices, to enshrine the living teachers of that particular time to be emulated exactly down to their forms of dress, that was an intentional response to modernity. Specifically, it was a response to the Haskalah, the 18th-century outbreak of rationalism and materialism that paralleled the one in the surrounding European world known as the “Enlightenment,” and that wouldn’t be a bad translation of Haskalah, either.
This was far from the first eruption of humanist philosophical reforms amongst the Jewish people, or the first conflict between those humanist philosophers and hardline religious traditionalists. Arguably the most consequential one was that which took place in the Hellenistic period, due to assimilation within the world’s first truly globe-spanning empires and immersion in the many global languages and wisdoms they encompassed. This philosophical turn outward from the closed circuit of Jewish life gave rise to such disruptive innovations as Christianity.
But these disruptions never extinguish the eternal flame of closed-circuit Jewish life. If anything, they only refine and strengthen what it is the eternally Jewish soul stands for in the world. And when the dust settles after such a period of disruptive change — and I would say we’re in another one right now — that eternal Jewish soul and what it stands for can be seen and felt on both sides of whatever rift may have been created, reuniting that soul at the Source.
The Haskalah gave us the Jewish projects that are probably most recognizable to contemporary non-Jews, such as the Reform and later Conservative movements, an unprecedented Jewish emphasis on secularism and diversity — and worldly success in the diverse, secular world — as well as political projects such as modern Zionism. It also popularized what may now be the most universally recognizable Hebrew term representing the Jewish take on the job of a global humanity: תקון עולם (tikkun ’olam).
Contemporary people typically translate this phrase as “repair of the world.” That translation renders it as a humanistic calling, and it’s easy to understand why Haskalah thinkers would choose to elevate this term in this way. It was a way to enact the timeless transmitted wisdom of Jewishness in the modern world, transforming it into a vector for economic, political, and environmental change.
And we need those things. The human world is globalized and diverse and interconnected in ways the ancients could never have dreamed of, and these changes have consequences — dire ones — creating new world problems in urgent need of repair. But these problems are not the world’s — or the Jewish people’s — first problems, and tikkun ’olam is a concept that long precedes them.
Yes, tikkun ’olam calls us to repair the world. But what is the world? Why is it broken? How can we repair it? These are not humanist questions but mystical ones. And the tools of Jewish mysticism are just as important as those of Jewish rationalism for understanding — and repairing — our predicament as incarnated beings.
Is “repair of the world” even an accurate translation?
In the Bible, עולם doesn’t mean “world” — at least, not in the sense of “planet” or “physical place.” It almost always makes more sense when understood in entirely temporal terms, meaning “forever” or “eternity.” An illustrative example is from right at the beginning, Bereishit/Genesis 3:22, in which God reflects privately — or to some Divine Council? — upon the first earthlings’ decision to eat the forbidden fruit of Knowledge:
וַיֹּ֣אמֶר ׀ יְהֹוָ֣ה אֱלֹהִ֗ים הֵ֤ן הָֽאָדָם֙ הָיָה֙ כְּאַחַ֣ד מִמֶּ֔נּוּ לָדַ֖עַת ט֣וֹב וָרָ֑ע וְעַתָּ֣ה ׀ פֶּן־יִשְׁלַ֣ח יָד֗וֹ וְלָקַח֙ גַּ֚ם מֵעֵ֣ץ הַֽחַיִּ֔ים וְאָכַ֖ל וָחַ֥י לְעֹלָֽם׃
And God יהוה said, “Now that humankind has become like any of us, knowing good and bad, what if one should stretch out a hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever!”
In that last phrase, “live forever,” עולם is the “forever” part. In the entire Hebrew Bible, this is essentially always how it is used. Now, it sure would be interesting to translate “וחי לעלם” as “and live in the world,” as that is exactly what happens: After the earthlings eat this fruit, God casts them out of Paradise and into the broken, painful, mortal world. If, after learning the Truth from the tree of Knowledge, they realized they should eat from the tree of Life, too, so they could continue to be immortal, that would probably disrupt the divinely ordained order of things. But clearly it would also mean they would “live forever,” and that is the plain sense of the meaning of the word in basically every example in Tanakh.
I chose a potentially ambiguous one on purpose, though, as clearly the sense of the word evolved over time to mean “world” the way contemporary people use it. By the time of the Mishnah, the first redacted code of Jewish oral law and teachings from the Hellenistic period, the term tikkun ’olam had already come to mean something like “preserving order in society,” and various laws intended to keep things civil were explained as being for the sake of tikkun ’olam. It always remains a little ambiguous, though. The famous Jewish song “Kol ha’Olam Kulo,” the words of which are attributed to the late-18th-century Hasidic master, Rebbe Nahman of Breslov, is typically translated to mean, “The whole entire world is a very narrow bridge, and the key is to not be afraid.” But isn’t it even more powerful if that line also means, “All of time is a very narrow bridge?”
I find it best to understand the sense of the word עולם as encompassing time and space. And isn’t that funny? Because a 20th-century Jewish scientist named Albert Einstein would eventually discover — using the tools of rational materialism — that spacetime is precisely how the universe is apparently structured.
But there’s another meaning of the root ע–ל–מ that should not be overlooked. It also means “hidden” or “concealed.” The vowels and word constructions around it are slightly different when meant that way, but this is how roots in Hebrew work: they connect meanings to each other. However the word עולם is used, it carries senses of space, time, and secrets. Again the word takes us to a limit where science and mysticism meet, slack-jawed, equally unable to speak. What is the nature of the universe itself? It is impossible for finite beings to know. But we know that at the limit of what we can know, time and space implode on themselves into an unfathomably deep mystery.
In both the Biblical and scientific creation stories, it is from such a Singularity that the spacetime in which we find ourselves erupts into being. This is the part where tikkun comes in. It was in the 16th-century mystical illuminations of Lurianic Kabalah that tikkun, “repair,” was understood to be the spiritual job assigned to human beings. When the Vessel of Creation was filled with God’s Essence, it was overloaded. It shattered into myriad holy sparks, including ones within each of us. And for that reason, we are called to find and reunite these sparks, to patch up the Vessel and return it to the unquenchable soul-fire from which we came. In doing so, we bring about redemption, which is incomparably more beautiful than perfection because it reflects the love by which the work is done. Indeed, this is the very reason God put the earthlings in the garden: so that they would break the Vessel in order to repair it.
This is the tikkun ’olam of the mystics. And yes, it is the tikkun ’olam of striving for social justice. But it is also the tikkun ’olam by which I went from a hipster existentialist teenager to a rabbi’s husband. It is also the tikkun ’olam by which my wife and I do 1,001 little things each day to make Jewish life more aligned with our hearts and the hearts of those around us. And that means it is the tikkun ’olam in which the world we received from the generations before us cannot be the world we leave to our descendants, because if nothing changes, nothing has been repaired.
Why was this term so resonant with the upwelling of humanism in European Jewish culture that sought to reject the otherworldly mysticism of the old ways? The use of tikkun ’olam to describe secular movements for social and environmental justice looks nothing like, for example, the post-Lurianic Hasidic idea of lifting up sparks with each punctilious observance of daily religious mitzvot — perhaps not the mitzvot of giving charity, protecting the orphan and widow and stranger, and so on, but surely the mitzvah of, say, wrapping tefillin. What use does a social justice warrior have for that? And what use does a Hasid have for political aims that wildly conflict with Rabbinic law?
Narrowly adhering to either understanding of tikkun ’olam does not account for the range of meaning packed into the term. The religious world is not “the whole entire world.” The goals of the contemporary secular environment — nor, indeed, the goals of contemporary nation states and political movements and economic forces — will not “live forever.” Neither worldview can explain reality; there is an unfathomable secret truth underlying all of it. Yes, it is our job to “repair the world.” But can the repair ever be grasped and understood, let alone completed?
I have come to prefer an understanding of tikkun ’olam that does not mean “repairing the world” in some messianic ultimate sense that can be completed, but rather as “eternal repair” — work we are born to do to heal the fractured world, which will never be complete, and which we must hand down from generation to generation.
There is one teaching from the Mishnah, in Pirkei Avot (“Sayings of the Ancestors”), that’s a bit of a cliché, but that’s because it’s one of the wisest things any Jewish person ever said, and it helps me understand the importance of tikkun ’olam in a way I believe will help anyone. It’s attributed to Rabbi Tarfon, and I will let him make the point from across the narrow bridge of time:
לֹא עָלֶיךָ הַמְּלָאכָה לִגְמֹר, וְלֹא אַתָּה בֶן חוֹרִין לִבָּטֵל מִמֶּנָּה
It is not your duty to finish the work, but neither are you at liberty to neglect it.
This is something my wife and I have to remind ourselves — and each other — every day. There is so much work to do. It can seem like peace may never come. The word שלום — shalom, peace — has the root ש–ל–מ, which means fullness or completion. But peace does not mean the completion of all work. When we wish each other Shabbat shalom on Friday evenings, our job is not done. We are resting from the work, and we know full well it will pick up again when the stars come out tomorrow night. But because we are all together and aligned in our work — because we are working towards the same world — we can trust each other to rest together and get back to work together. That trust and togetherness creates safety, and that is peace. That is fullness. I bless us all to remember this, not just for ourselves and those we know, but for all with whom we must work together to live in peace — that is, the whole entire world.
Ta’alumot (a.k.a. Jon Mitchell) is a writer, musician, rabbi’s husband, and father of two from Atlanta, Georgia. He is a lay initiate of Michael Elliston Roshi at the Atlanta Soto Zen Center. His wife, Rabbi Ariel Root Wolpe, is the founder of Ma’alot, a spiritual community transforming Jewish life in Atlanta through music, nature, and Jewish wisdom. Jon plays the drums there and helps run Netzah, or Commitment, the container for men’s work in the Ma’alot community. He has a website, taalumot.com, where he writes about householder spirituality and hosts a private message board for people balancing committed spiritual practices with busy worldly lives. He is the author of In Real Life: Searching for Connection in High-Tech Times from Parallax Press.
