Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/category/jewish_wisdom/page/28/)
One of the major turning points in my political education was hearing Michael Harrington, the socialist organizer and author of The Other America (1962), the influential book about poverty in America, who spoke at my temple when I was in high school. I agreed with everything he said and thought to myself, “If he’s a radical, so am I.”
When I know that this is what is happening right now and the next moment will be different, as long as I do not resist it, a space opens. This is the space of freedom which activates my intelligence, my free will.
It would appear, however, that Rabbi Papa was perhaps not really completely empathetic with the plight of his community. He was the head rabbi, so of course it was expected of him that he would take some kind of action, like decreeing a day of fasting and prayer. But social activism requires more than a functionary response to society’s maladies.
When Tikkun was founded, its name made clear its intent to repair and establish a means by which the values of tikkun olam would have their moral and ethical effect on not only the Jewish community but also the larger American and global ones.
We offer interfaith courses to our rabbinical and ministerial students because we believe that contemporary clergy working in an increasingly interconnected world should possess knowledge of other religious traditions and the skills to interact constructively across religious lines.
“The affirmation of the divine unity aspires to reveal the unity in the world, in humankind, among nations, and in the entire content of existence, without any dichotomy between action and theory, between reason and the imagination. Even the dichotomies experienced will be unified through a higher enlightenment, which recognizes their aspect of unity and compatibility” (2:411).
Clergy need to be developed to be shapers of the new forms. Rabbis, as at least the nominal leaders of Judaism, and hopefully among the leaders of the Jewish people, need to be trained to be effective leaders in a time of great flux. Given this, I decided to create a new program at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College on Social Justice Organizing to help in the formation of rabbis.
Should we make the error of focusing exclusively on literal interpretations, and should we encourage a narrow-minded approach to the Torah and other holy books, we only end up limiting the vitality and import of such works. And we end up leading more superficial lives.
This noisy study hall for a diverse crowd of intense, wisecracking, basically brilliant Torah students is a threefold tikkun: it’s a traditional form that transforms students, allowing the secular to access the Tradition; the Reform to become literate; the Conservative, passionate; and the Neo-Hasidic to gain textual traction; and it drives the Orthodox sane.
The most important principle in Judaism is the awareness that there is no such thing as “the most important principle” in Judaism. All of its teachings are equally as vital, and if you fulfill any one of them, taught the second-century Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, you have fulfilled all of them (Midrash Mishlei 1:17).
According to R. Yannai, the prophets’ utterances must be refined, just as silver from a mine needs to be refined: “The words of Torah were not given as clear cut decisions (chatuchot). For with every word which the Holy One, blessed be He, spoke to Moses, He offered him forty-nine [seven times seven] arguments by which a thing may be proved pure and forty nine-arguments by which a thing may be proved impure.”
America is not an “honest broker” nor is it working on a just solution to the conflict. Our government, largely as a result of pressure from our community, provides blanket support for Israel.
I remember my arrest. It was May of 1972 and Nixon had just mined Haiphong Harbor.
In the kabbalistic theory of tikkun olam, it is our human responsibility to find all those pieces of light that escaped the big creation bang of the original vessel and put the world back together again. When I allow myself to clear my head of my own prejudices and preconceptions, I am always surprised by where I find those pieces of light.