The World, Repaired

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It is always worth reading or listening to anything that Jonathan Tobin, editor-in-chief of JNS, writes or says. Last week, he and a guest discussed a phenomenon that is hard for many of us to comprehend–why seemingly educated Americans side with Palestinian Arab terrorists against Israel and, even more puzzling, make excuses for the barbaric excesses of those terrorists.  Their discussion is fascinating, illuminating, and depressing.

I urge you to find it and listen to it (“Think Twice” Podcast with Jonathan Tobin and Uri Kaufman).  I will just provide a few highlights, because, as you will see, the discussion led me in an entirely different direction.

They maintain that the progressives who have taken over culture and education in America have conditioned and indoctrinated an entire generation to see the conflict in the Middle East through the prism of race relations, with Israelis viewed as white oppressors and Palestinians as down-trodden blacks, with various similar, and similarly erroneous, constructs emerging (e.g., European settlers and Native Americans or, in a particularly disturbing inversion, Nazis and Jews, with the Israelis being the Nazis). Blinded to every fact about Palestinians and the events of October 7, all they can see is a distorted vision of the  privileged abusing the disadvantaged.  Kaufman blames all the usual suspects for the vilification of Israel:  Jimmy Carter, Barack Obama, Tom Friedman and “so-called human rights groups” like Amnesty International.  In this scenario, the Palestinians, as victims, will always be blameless, no matter how intransigent, brutal, violent, rejectionist, and deviant.

The podcast was persuasive and explained the troubling, almost inexplicable, images of enlightened students supporting rapists and kidnappers, sensitive idealists tearing down posters of kidnapped babies, gays closing their eyes to the oppressive nature of the Islamist credo, and educated observers denying facts and history in favor of a distorted narrative.

And I kept thinking, “That explains the Democrat Party and the teachers unions and the brainwashed students, but what about the Jews?  Why are there so many Jews in the ranks of the opponents of Israel and Zionism? Why don’t we Jews, with our long history of persecution, know better? Would any other ethnic or religious group be persuaded by this sort of cultural current to betray their nature and their people, to side with savages who want to exterminate their brethren?  Can Barack Obama and intersectionality so easily overcome the filial and fraternal loyalties of the People of Israel?

And when the campus unrest and urban demonstrations incorporate open and blatant anti-semitism, what explains the fact that some Jewish organizations are ready to man the barricades and lead the struggle against efforts to oppose the anti-Jewish behavior?  Would the NAACP support the KKK?

Nothing that Tobin and Kaufman say explains the fact that Jews seem to be playing such a prominent role in the “resistance,” acting as spokesmen for the campus insurrectionists, chaining themselves to gates of universities, brazenly wearing Jewish symbols and signs proclaiming their Jewishness and their alienation from the Jewish State. 

I understand the rationalization for the behavior and beliefs of a Gentile generation that has been indoctrinated in woke, intersectional anti-Semitism.  But what failures in Jewish upbringing, education, and experience account for the mindless perfidy of the cohorts of the  “As a Jew,” “Not in My Name,” and “Jewish Voice For Peace”?  And what could possibly explain the vociferous opposition of the Reform, Conservative, and Reconstructionist movements to a crackdown on anti-semitic activities and their non-citizen participants?  Why do efforts to protect Jews on campus make these organizations feel “less safe”?  Is it even conceivable that if women, blacks, or gays were being assaulted and abused on campus that the Union for Reform Judaism, the Central Conference of American Rabbis, the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, the National Council of Jewish Women, the American Conference of Cantors, HIAS, the Rabbinical Assembly (Conservative), the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, and the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association (not to meention affinity groups for women, blacks, or gays) could so quickly band together to oppose efforts to protect them?

We can’t blame that on Barack Obama, or the teachers’ unions, or Jimmy Carter, or Tom Friedman.

What is wrong with us?  What is to blame?

Tikkun Olam. Repairing the world.

This manufactured substitute for authentic Judaism has eaten away at the fabric of Jewish community and Jewish solidarity.  Where Judaism asserts the special mission of the Jewish people in its homeland, Tikkun Olam defines Judaism down to the most anodyne, tedious, pareve ethical culture, so inclusive in its concern for everyone and everything that any individual identity or loyalty is impossible.  When the liberal Jewish establishment gave up on God and Jewish practices and Jewish law, the substitute it chose–Tikkun Olam–authorized a wholesale rejection of everything that Judaism has represented.  The bastardization of this liturgical and Talmudic concept in progressive Jewish movements is the force that has mainstreamed Jewish rejection of Israel and Judaism itself.

Don’t get me wrong.  Tikkun Olam is a beautiful thing, even in its watered-down version.  We should all be trying to make the world a better place.  But Tikkun Olam is not Judaism nor an adequate substitute for Judaism.  And the fact that it has been mislabeled to two generations of liberal Jews as the sine qua non of the Jewish faith has been catastrophically destructive.

Classically, there are three authentic definitions of “Tikkun Olam,” none of which fits the definition ascribed by those who have co-opted it to represent whatever social justice movement  catches their fancy.

In the liturgy, it is used once in the Aleinu prayer–לתקן עולם במלכות שדי–to perfect the world under the sovereignty of the Almighty.  In this prayer, the perfection of the world is to be accomplished by God, not environmentalists or social justice warriors.  The prayer speaks of our duty to praise God who is the author of all creation, who has not made us like the nations of the lands . . . for they worship vanity and emptiness and pray to one who can not save.  But we bow in worship and thank the supreme King of kings . . .who, we anticipate, will perfect the world.

No one who invokes Tikkun Olam as a reason to espouse a political or social ideology ever invokes the sovereignty of the Almighty. It is a movement based on misinterpretation of a fragment of a thought, an incomplete half of a phrase.

In the Talmud, Tikkun Olam does not mean fixing the world, but applying Rabbinic flexibility as a corrective to situations in which a mindless adherence to the law might yield a result that is harmful to society. For example, one who sends a messenger to act on his behalf in delivering a divorce document was empowered to annul it in a way that might not have come to the attention of the messenger, who then might deliver it, creating a situation in which a married woman might think she was free to marry someone else.  This possibility was foreclosed, because of Tikkun Olam–the improvement of the world–because a world in which a woman could mistakenly have illegitimate children needed a remedy. So the Rabbis improved the world by rendering that scenario impossible.

Similarly, when the Rabbis saw that lenders were refraining from lending money to those in need as the shemitah year–in which loans were automatically forgiven–approached, they created a process known as prozbol, in which the loan was assigned to the court; debt repayment to the court was not excused in the shemitah year.  Thus loans would continue to be made to needy people, enabled by an amendment to the law motivated by Tikkun Olam.

In Kabbalah, Tikkun Olam is seen as repairing the rift between God and the exiled Shekhinah through the performance of mitzvot.  I will not elaborate here, but trust me that it has nothing to do with gay rights, BLM, fossil fuels, free range chicken, or free Palestine.

Note that all the examples deal with highly particularized situations of the Jewish community, not attempts to recreate the world.

Sadly, when the burden of the rules and laws and culture that sustained Judaism became too onerous for a Jewish community that just wanted to be like their friends in the Democrat Party, the forward-thinking leaders of their movements came up with the feel good concept of adapting a totally inapposite Jewish principle–Tikkun Olam–as a stand-in for pretty much everything that gave shape and meaning to Jewish life.  You don’t want to observe the Sabbath?  Fine, as long as you oppose fracking.  Inter-marriage appealing? No problem, but help us repair the world by getting religion out of the public square, ending racial discrimination, and, perhaps, freeing Palestine.  The best way to be a good Jew is to simply be a good person.  Just like everyone else.

When the Romans initially rejected Christian theology, as represented by the portion of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount to the effect that he did not intend to change jot nor tittle of Moses’ law, Paul “saved” Christianity by redefining it, explaining that circumcision of the heart could replace circumcision of the flesh.  He “democratized” Judaism and defined it right out of existence.  Those cumbersome rules could be shunted aside; all you needed to do to achieve salvation was believe in Jesus. The marketing was extraordinarily effective. 

So it was with Tikkun Olam.  The concept was no less pervasive and, initially, equally as successful.  It became the cornerstone of liberal, progressive Judaism.  It was so successful that it nearly obliterated any trace of authentic Judaism from the groups that adopted it as their lodestar.  It is only half a joke that Judaism was transformed into the Democrat Party with holidays.

All that is required is to be a citizen of the world and try to make it better.  As citizens of the world charged with fixing it, we have no special allegiance to our people or any people.  HIAS, once for displaced Jews, took the world for its constituency. Jews must support unlimited access at the border, because we are for Tikkun Olam.  We must bleed for the downtrodden Palestinians, irrespective of their sordid behavior.  The woke Rabbis must prefer freedom of speech for insurrectionists over protection for Jewish students.  It would be beneath us to take sides by favoring the people of our faith.  On the contrary, we will bend over backwards to accommodate those who hate us.  We are repairing the world.

Right into oblivion.

Of course being Jewish should mean being good. But being good does not necessarily mean being Jewish. Being Jewish should mean living an ethical, moral, charitable life, but none of those activities make you Jewish. They are necessary but not sufficient.

Judaism is more than that. And for those for whom Judaism is not more, it will, as is easily apparent, be diminished to the point of invisibility.