The Way Into Tikkun Olam (Repairing the World)

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In honor of Jewish Family Service of Los Angeles, which has provided social services for Jews and non-Jews in the greater Los Angeles area since 1854.

I am currently honored to serve as its president, and I am thrilled to complete during my tenure a volume devoted to the Jewish roots of the many forms of tikkun olam that JFS does. That includes more than sixty programs of loving-kindness (gemilut chasadim), through which JFS–LA fixes the world each day.

These are the deeds that yield immediate fruit and continue to yield fruit in time to come: honoring parents; doing deeds of loving-kindness; and making peace between one person and another. Study of Torah is basic to them all.

—Mishnah, Peah 1:1

Contents

About The Way Into …

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Part One: Tikkun Olam in Theory

1.  The Meaning and Significance of Tikkun Olam

2.  Why Should I Care?

3.  Religion and Ethics

Part Two: Tikkun Olam for Individuals and Society

4.  How We Talk to Each Other

5.  Helping the Poor

6.  Ransoming and Surrendering Captives

7.  Accompanying and Supporting People in Times of Need and Joy

Part Three: Tikkun Olam within Families

8.  Duties of Spouses to Each Other

9.  Filial Duties

10. Parental Duties

Forward: Envisioning an Ideal World, Shaped by Tikkun Olam

Notes

Glossary

Suggestions for Further Reading

Index

About the Author

About The Way Into ... Series

Copyright

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Preface

Tikkun olam—to fix the world. Quite a task! Yet that is precisely the goal that the Jewish tradition sets for our lives. It gives us a mission, and thereby lends meaning to our lives. It also imposes a heavy burden on each and every one of us every day of our lives. We may certainly take time to enjoy ourselves now and then, and we not only may, but should, spend time with our families and at our place of employment. But beyond all these activities, and throughout our lives, we must dedicate at least part of our time, energy, and resources to improving the lot of others.

Jews understand this almost instinctively. Surveys show that even Jews who doubt the existence or significance of God, who are not involved much in Judaism’s prayers, rituals, or holiday celebrations, who do not observe Judaism’s restrictions on diet and work on holy days, and/or who do not know much about their heritage or devote any time as adults to studying it nevertheless feel in their bones that they have a duty as Jews to make this a better world, that this is the essence of what it means to be a Jew. As a religious Jew, I would say that it is sad that so many people, by their own description, are not very religious, for such people are missing out on a virtual treasure trove of meaning, joy, intellectual ferment, and communal connections that the Jewish tradition offers us. Still, such Jews are not wrong in identifying social action as a key component of what it means to be Jewish, for much of the tradition is devoted to it.

This book describes the roots in Jewish beliefs and laws of the Jewish commitment to improve the world. It explores the many reasons why Judaism would have us engage in such activities, reasons that include, but go far beyond, a general humanitarian feeling that we might have or the hope that if you help others, others will be there to help you when you need assistance. It also describes how the Jewish tradition would have us seek to fix the world, rooted ultimately in its vision of the ideal world, the goal for which we should strive.

The book is divided into three parts. Part 1 addresses the underlying theory of tikkun olam. Chapter 1 describes how the term has developed over time into the meaning it has today. This chapter also indicates other related terms and concepts that Judaism has used for thousands of years to describe the duties we now identify and name as acts of tikkun olam, and it cites sources to demonstrate the great significance that classical Judaism ascribes to such activities. Chapter 2 explores why any person, and why any Jew in particular, should care about the lot of someone else. Finally, chapter 3 delves into the complicated but critical issue of the relationship between religion and ethics, exploring what Judaism has to add to our general feeling that it is a nice thing to help someone in need.

Part 2 explores both the theory and the practice of Jewish tikkun olam in our social interactions. Thus, chapter 4 deals with language—how we should speak to others and what we should avoid saying. Chapter 5 deals with poverty, including reasons we should be wary of helping the poor, reasons we should nevertheless offer aid, the proper limits of such support, the duties of the poor, and the modes of assistance we should offer. Chapter 6 describes Jewish thought and law on redeeming captives, a problem the Jewish community has unfortunately had to confront from earliest times to our own. Chapter 7 addresses our duties to provide health care to the sick, including the emotional support we must provide the ill by visiting them. Just as the sick need communal support, so too do couples celebrating their weddings and families mourning the loss of a loved one, and so attending to the emotional needs of people in those situations also constitutes a form of tikkun olam.

Part 3 addresses tikkun olam within families. Thus, chapter 8 considers the duties of spouses to each other, chapter 9 describes Judaism’s specification of filial duties, and chapter 10 delineates Judaism’s understanding of parental duties. In each case, the chapter cites traditional sources, but it also takes into account the places where modern conditions are really very different from ancient or medieval ones and explores how that might affect our use of traditional materials in approaching a given issue in our day.

Finally, the last section, which would normally be called the conclusion, is instead called the forward, because it pushes us to envision the goals of our specific efforts of tikkun olam and hopefully also motivates us all the more to engage in such efforts. The forward describes Judaism’s understanding of the components of an ideal world. Here Jewish sources articulate our highest hopes so that we can have a clear sense of what we should be striving for on a daily basis. I hope that this book helps people understand the elements of such a world and the specific directives that Judaism gives us to achieve it through what we do each and every day in many parts of our lives, so that we are all motivated and informed to do what we can to make the Jewish vision real.

A Note on the Translation

The Bible translation I have used in this book is almost entirely from the Jewish Publication Society translation of the Tanakh (1985). This translation uses what we today recognize as masculine God language. This is in contrast to the language that I have used in my text throughout the book, but I leave the masculine God language intact to preserve the authenticity of the citations.

Acknowledgments

There are many people I would like to thank for helping me make this book possible. It was Stuart M. Matlins, the publisher of Jewish Lights, who first suggested that I write such a book and convinced me to do it. It has been a true work of love and hopefully useful besides, and so I want to thank him for developing The Way Into… series, an idea created by Rabbi Sheldon Zimmerman, for this book within it, and for asking me to contribute in this way. Alys R. Yablon applied her considerable editorial talents to my manuscript, making it better than the one I created, and I want to thank her sincerely for that. I teach at the University of Judaism, and Steven Edelman-Blank, a rabbinical student in the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies there, kindly offered to read the manuscript, suggest editorial changes, and make it conform to the formatting requirements for publication. I want to thank him for taking on this task so willingly and so skillfully. I would also like to thank all the good people at Jewish Lights for their help in publishing and marketing this book. Finally, I want to thank the love of my life, my wife, Marlynn, for her support in joining me in our many acts of tikkun olam and for her patience in allowing me to spend the time necessary to write about it. I also want to thank her and, indeed, God, for the incredible blessings of our children and grandchildren—Tammy and her son Zachary Ethan; Michael and Tanya, and their daughter Zoe Elliana; Havi and Adam, and their daughters Noa Yarden and Ayden Chaya; and Jonathan and Mara, and their son Amiel Shalom. As I mention in this book, and as my children have heard me say ad nauseam, children are one of the greatest blessings of life, an integral part of God’s promise to Abraham long ago, and so I hope that many more grandchildren are on the way!

I have dedicated this book to Jewish Family Service of Los Angeles. JFS was founded in 1854, seven years before Los Angeles was incorporated as a city. Ever since then, it has engaged in a wide variety of acts of tikkun olam. With more than sixty programs, it now serves people through activities including, but not limited to, counseling, drug and alcohol abuse aversion programs, teenage Jewish enrichment and counseling, senior services of all sorts, support groups for the bereaved and for cancer patients and their families, free burial for those who cannot afford to bury their deceased kin in the Jewish way, shelters for battered women and children, food pantries for the hungry, meals on wheels from our kosher kitchen for thousands of people who are not ambulatory, and housing for the homeless. This is truly an agency that does acts of tikkun olam and gemilut hasadim in the purest sense of those terms. I have been proud to be on its board of directors since 1985, and I currently serve as its president, a post my father also held with Jewish Family and Children’s Services in Milwaukee, where I grew up. I had the good fortune to have absolutely wonderful parents, who not only exuded warmth and support but also modeled in their own lives what it means to carry out the Jewish duties inherent in our mission to fix the world. It thrills me no end that I have written this book during my tenure as president, thus exquisitely combining my familial, intellectual, religious, emotional, and practical commitments to tikkun olam. Jewish Family Service is a true model of what it means to fix this world, a model from which I hope people who read this book will learn how to make acts of tikkun olam part of their own lives.

Introduction

Modern Jews often think of tikkun olam, fixing the world, as a core commitment of Judaism. In fact, in a national poll of American Jews conducted in 1988 by the Los Angeles Times,¹ 50 percent listed a commitment to social equality as the most important factor in their Jewish identity, while only 17 percent cited religious observance and another 17 percent cited support for Israel. A 2000 study conducted by Steven M. Cohen and Leonard Fein similarly found that social equality topped the list by far: 47 percent said that a commitment to social equality was the most important factor in their Jewish identity, 24 percent said religious observance, 13 percent said support for Israel, and 16 percent said other.² Finally, a poll conducted by the American Jewish Committee in 2003 asked 1,008 Jews to choose the quality most important to their Jewish identity; 41 percent said being part of the Jewish people, 21 percent said commitment to social justice, and only 13 percent chose religious observance.³

Those deeply committed to Judaism may find these results disturbing, for they indicate that Jews are mistaking the fruit for the tree. After all, in classical Jewish sources, Judaism’s commitment to social equality stems from its more fundamental convictions regarding God, covenant, and mitzvot (commandments). Thus, Jews should not only include those elements in their Jewish identity, but also see them as central.

This pattern, though, is apparently not as new as some might suppose. Hundreds of years ago, the Rabbis of the Midrash described their own Jewish community in very similar terms:

I sleep, but my heart wakes (Song of Songs 5:2). The congregation of Israel said to the Holy One: I sleep in neglect of ritual precepts, but my heart wakes for the practice of loving-kindness (Shir Hashirim Rabbah 5:2, par. 1).

That should provide at least some comfort to contemporary Jewish religious leaders!

Moreover, the large percentages who singled out social equality as the most critical factor in their Jewish commitment were not wrong in identifying concern for helping others as an important Jewish conviction. The Torah includes a number of laws and theological tenets that articulate this duty, and later Jewish law and thought expand upon that base. Classical Jewish sources depict our duties as a series of concentric circles, with primary duties to ourselves, our family, our local community, the wider Jewish community, and then the world at large. While this principle continues to define Jewish duties to others, as Jews were accepted more fully into general society in post-Enlightenment times, they became all the more interested in making society as a whole not only fair and equitable, but also supportive and, as much as possible, ideal.

This book will present some of the most important aspects of the social component of the Jewish tradition. After examining the grounds for Judaism’s fundamental conviction that we should indeed care for others and the relationships between Judaism and ethics, it will turn to areas of life in which this concern takes concrete expression. Specifically, it will first explore the ways in which fixing the world applies to the social arena, and then will turn to the family. The former section includes chapters on how we should speak with and about others, ameliorate poverty, ransom captives, heal the sick, bury the dead, and comfort mourners. The latter section addresses duties of spouses to each other, as well as obligations of parents to children and of children to parents.

Several important topics that might also reasonably fit within a book on tikkun olam will not be treated here. We might fix the world literally by taking care of the environment and by repairing what we have polluted. That is the topic of another book in this series, however, so this book will be limited to discussing how we might fix the world in terms of our relationships with other human beings. Two important components of this arena are our relationships with people of other faiths and our business dealings, but those are also the topics of other books in this series. Although each of those books may be understood on its own, this book’s theoretical section will lay the groundwork for the latter two in articulating why we should care about other human beings at all. This book’s discussion of social and family life will also prepare readers for the application of Judaism’s teachings to the areas treated by those other books. Since Judaism’s social message is a significant part of Judaism, and since, as the surveys cited above indicate, this aspect of Judaism is a (if not the) fundamental mainstay of the Jewish identity of a large percentage of North America’s Jews, this book will hopefully help many Jews understand their Jewish identities and the foundations and directions of their Jewish social commitments.

Part One

Tikkun Olam in Theory

1

The Meaning and Significance of Tikkun Olam

The Meaning of Tikkun Olam

Jews today speak of tikkun olam as a central Jewish precept, and concern for literally fixing the world by making it a better place through activities often called social action is certainly at the heart of a Jewish perspective on life. That meaning of the term tikkun olam, however, is itself very new in Jewish history.

The first occurrences of the phrase tikkun olam in the Jewish tradition appear in the literature of the classical Rabbis. They are the people whose work first appears in the Mishnah, Midrash Halakhah, and Tosefta (the earliest compilations of the oral tradition, all edited around 200 C.E.) and then in the Talmud (edited around 500 C.E.) and the various books of Midrash Aggadah, which were edited from the fifth to the twelfth centuries C.E.

The Mishnah records that the Rabbis instituted a number of changes in Jewish law "for the sake of tikkun olam."¹ In these first usages, the term probably means, as the Reuben Alcalay and Even-Shoshan dictionaries suggest as their first definitions, guarding the established order in the physical or social world (with derivatives t’kinah meaning standardization and t’kinut meaning normalcy, regularity, orderliness, propriety).² In the twelfth century, Maimonides expanded on this idea considerably, claiming that the Rabbis created all of their rulings, customs, and decrees—that is, the entire rabbinic legal tradition—in order to strengthen the religion and order (fix) the world.³ In this first meaning of the term, then, rabbis order the world by making Jewish law apply fairly and effectively to their contemporary circumstances. They thus structure the world with proper proportion and balance.

The next time the phrase is used with a different meaning occurs in the second paragraph of the Alenu prayer, which was first used in Jewish liturgy in the fourteenth century. That paragraph is much less often sung than the first and therefore is much less well known, even though it is the core of the prayer’s meaning. The first paragraph says that we have a duty to praise God for making us Jews a distinct nation and for creating and ruling the world. The second paragraph then states:

Therefore we hope in You, Adonai, our God, soon to see the glory of Your might, sweeping idolatry away so that false gods will be utterly destroyed, to fix [perfect] the world by [to be] the Kingdom of the Almighty (letakken olam b’malkhut shaddai) so that all human beings will pray [call out] in Your Name, bringing all the earth’s wicked back to You, repentant. Then all who dwell on Earth will acknowledge and know that to You every knee must bend and every tongue pledge loyalty. Before You, Adonai, our God, they will bow and prostrate themselves, and they will give honor to Your Name. All of them will accept the yoke of Your Sovereignty, and You will rule over them soon and forever; for sovereignty is Yours, and You will rule with honor always and forever, as it is written in Your Torah [Exodus 15:18], Adonai will rule for ever and ever. Furthermore, it is said [in the Prophets, specifically, Zechariah 14:9], And Adonai will be acknowledged Sovereign over the whole Earth, on that day Adonai will be one and His Name one.

Notice several things about the concept as it appears in this paragraph. First, because God chose us, created the whole world, and rules it alone (that is, without the aid of any other god), we hope and pray that God will fix the world. This is definitely not the modern notion that we human beings are called to do that.

Second, the fixing about which the prayer speaks is not what moderns call social action. It is rather theological—that Adonai will be recognized by all human beings (literally, all creatures of flesh) as the one and sole God. God’s rule and therefore God’s moral standards will become absolute and universal, forcing all the evil [people] of the earth to turn to God and, presumably, change their ways. A fixed world will thus involve universal recognition and acceptance of a clear and exclusive standard of behavior, with everyone fixing his or her attitudes and behavior to conform to that standard. But while this prayer envisions a moral renaissance as a corollary to universal recognition of one and only one God, it does not speak of a world rid of war, poverty, dissension, and disrespect—except, perhaps, implicitly. That is, everyone following God’s rules and aspiring to God’s ideals for human beings may well produce a world in which those limitations no longer exist. However, that kind of moral ideal is not the explicit message of the prayer. It is, rather, an expression of hope for a theological ideal, that of monotheism.

The third time the phrase appears in Jewish history, in Lurianic Kabbalah, it has yet another meaning. Isaac Luria (1534–1572) created his own, distinctive form of Kabbalah. From the thirteenth century, when the Zohar was written, until the time of Luria, Kabbalists had depicted a God consisting of ten spheres (sefirot) with multiple interactions among the spheres. Human beings were to try to become one with God through study of the esoteric meanings of the Torah and through obeying God’s commandments, which were also given new, mystical meanings. Luria, however, claimed that in creating the world, God used too much energy and benevolence, thus shattering the finite vessels that God had created. (Those vessels included all finite beings, inanimate and animate, vegetable, animal, and, especially, human.) When Jews study the Torah, especially its esoteric meanings, and when Jews fulfill their obligations under God’s commandments, Luria maintained, they literally help fix the shattered world. Jews thus have immense power—a comforting message to Jews battered by pogroms and massacres—for even if they are often helpless victims in their lives on earth, in the celestial realm, they can do nothing less than fix God and the world God created.

For Luria and his followers, obeying the commandments certainly included what we would call the social and moral imperatives of our tradition, but those social ideals were not their primary emphasis. They focused instead, as did all Kabbalists, on fixing one’s own life by making one’s will and being one with God. For Luria, Jews observing the commandments would also, quite audaciously, fix God. In a world physically, economically, culturally, politically, socially, and religiously hostile to Jews, one can readily understand how Jews needed to find meaning and hope by turning away from that world and focusing instead on one’s own inner life—and, for Luria, on God’s as well.

The Maharal of Prague (Judah Loew ben Bezalel, 1525–1609) uses the phrase tikkun olam in yet two other senses. First, he maintains that the whole purpose of the Torah is to teach us how to fix the world, ridding it especially of our penchant to do evil. Thus, we—that is, all Jews—fix the world when we obey the dictates of the Torah because we thereby purge the world of evil.⁴ This is not our modern concept of social action because the Maharal means both more and less than what moderns have in mind. More, because he clearly thinks that a Jew must obey not only the moral dictates of Judaism but also the ritual commandments to free the world from evil, while moderns usually do not have rituals in mind as part of what they mean by tikkun olam. Less, because freeing the world from the desire to do evil is not the equivalent of the much broader agenda that most moderns intend by the phrase, including the need to feed the hungry, house the homeless, and so on.

In another place, the Maharal uses the phrase in yet a different sense—namely, to assert that sometimes common manners, based on our desire to fix the world (make the world work efficiently), contradict the Torah’s laws and do so unjustly, whether the desire to fix the world in this sense would lead to stringency or leniency:

In chapter 2 of Bava Metzia (21b) the Rabbis said that a person does not have to return a lost object to its owner once the latter has given up looking for it. But this seems far-fetched to people that a person should take something that is not his and for which he did not work or toil and covet the property of another. This is not according to common manners (dat ha-nimusit), for common manners requires that one return an object even after the owner gave up on finding it. The reason why that is so is because common manners requires us to do that which is suited to fix the world, even if reason does not require such an act [as a matter of justice] but rather that is simply the way of fixing the world. Thus sometimes common manners are stringent with regard to a given issue, even if reason and the plain law do not require something.

But sometimes common manners are the more lenient in a given matter even though reason does not approve—namely, when the act is not necessary to fix the world. Thus according to common manners, one must return a lost object after the owners have given up on finding it, and that is a stringency. On the other hand, if he found a silver or gold vessel and announced once or twice that he had found it, and nobody sought after it for a year or two, he may take possession of it and use it, for there is no fixing of the world [in not doing so] after he announced it several times and waited for a year or two or more, for the owner will no longer come for it [after that]. But that is not according to the Torah, for if he found a silver or gold vessel and announced it many times [and still nobody claimed it], he may never use it. It must just sit there forever until [the Prophet] Elijah comes [to announce the Messianic era], which is a great stringency.

—Maharal of Prague (Be’er Ha-Golah #2, pp. 30–32)

The Maharal then claims that in both instances the Torah, which is fully rational and wise, is actually right, and common manners are wrong. Property merely belongs to a person; it is not his or her flesh and blood. Therefore, if a person gives up finding something, the despair of never retrieving it (ya’ush) is enough to sever it from him or her. As a result, it becomes ownerless (hefker), and any finder may keep it. On the other hand, if it is clear (from the value of the property, for example) that the owner would not give up the search to find it, then the owner has never done anything to release ownership, and so the finder must just keep it without using it until Elijah comes. Thus, the Maharal is using the term tikkun olam to indicate common sense or accepted, utilitarian norms, which are intended to make the world work efficiently, and he is claiming that sometimes Jews must not fix the world in that way but rather obey Jewish law.

It is only in the mid-twentieth century that the term tikkun olam comes to mean that we human beings (not just rabbis) fix the world of concrete objects, animals, and persons by engaging in both environmental and social care and repair. Possibly a creation of the civil rights era of