Monday, October 7, 2013

Anyone Else Out There Suffering From Extreme "Tikkun Olam" Fatigue?

The concept of tikkun olam--"repairing the world"--has become little more than a Hebrew way of saying/justifying "the social justice agenda," with all the lefty nuttiness and self-righteousness that that entails. (Part of that nuttiness: using tikkun olam against the State of Israel, i.e. accusing it of "failing" to live up to an absurdly high "social justice" standard demanded of no other country in the world; call it the hard bigotry of impossibly high expectations.) Given that, I say it's time to either retire the thing completely, or to return it to its original meaning, which has nada to do with the war on poverty, We Day, recycling and/or Obamacare:
As the meaning of the term tikkun olam has expanded to apply to virtually any action or belief that the user thinks is beneficial to the world, some Jewish social justice activists and thinkers have moved away from using the term at all. Complaining about the equation of Judaism with liberal politics in an essay titled “Repairing Tikkun Olam” [Judaism 50:4], Arnold Jacob Wolf comments, “All this begins, I believe, with distorting tikkun olam. A teaching about compromise, sharpening, trimming and humanizing rabbinic law, a mystical doctrine about putting God's world back together again, this strange and half-understood notion becomes a huge umbrella under which our petty moral concerns and political panaceas can come in out of the rain.” 
Unless tikkun olam can return to its original meaning, I suggest we hang it out to dry for now--and maybe even forever.

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