Tikkun Olam

The worst mistake my teachers made growing up was believing that “tikkun olam” was a materialist concept.

It’s the most important thing in life, and I don’t even think it WORKS in a materialist frame. But most moderns who have encountered the concept, Jewish or otherwise, understand it to mean something like “community service” in the basic, civic, worldly sense.

That’s what happened to it as Jews began to blend into modernity. It’s this rationalist take on what is really a blindingly mystical concept, leaving the moral action part as this watered-down civic thing with the entire WHY removed.

The old standby translation of “repairing the world” isn’t the WORST Hebrew translation out there; the problem is a benighted understanding of what “the world” is.

עולם means space AND time. Notably it does NOT mean the civic world.

Tikkun olam is the Eternal Repair of Creation.