“You are a bad Jew! You are a bad Jew! Have you ever heard of Tikkun Olam? …This, what you are doing, is NOT healing the world.”
This finger-pointed accusation made by one left-wing Jew to a right-wing Jew outside the D.C. offices of FreedomWorks went viral last week. Along with illustrating the over-the-top anger leftists have regarding right wing politics, this brief exchange highlighted the schism that increasingly pervades political dialogue. Today, it seems that when it comes to politics, two people may disagree and still get along, unless they are radical leftists. To radical leftists, those who hold an opposing viewpoint are simply accused of destroying the world.
But can the accusation of “not healing the world” really hold water?
The politic of “Tikkun Olam” can be traced back to the Mishnah, which was codified around 200 C.E. Mipnei tikkun ha-olam (for the sake of the repair of the world) is commentary relating to what was, essentially, discombobulated bureaucratic procedure; courts would convene, and then cancel; people would randomly change their names; divorces would not be finalized. The idea behind the Mishnah’s version of “repairing the world” was simply to establish order on the part of governing bodies with the goal of avoiding chaos among the population at large.
Move ahead to the 16th century and Tikkun Olam is taken to a newer, more spiritual level by Kabbalistic Rabbi Isaac Luria. His interpretation (in a nutshell) involved human beings repairing the world by divorcing the holy from the physical world through deep, contemplative spiritual acts. In fact, Luria’s Tikkun Olam didn’t require the repair of the world so much as the ending of it through the transcendence into a completely holy, spiritual realm.
Fast-forward to the 1950s when Tikkun Olam was re-fashioned again, this time by Jewish progressive causes looking to spur on social change. Applying the idea of repairing the world to the Marxist ideology of oppressor versus oppressed (boss v. worker; majority v. minority, etc.), progressive Jews took an idea meant to de-bureaucratize government and used it as an excuse to establish a huge bureaucracy in the form of a social welfare state: Repairing the world, one government program at a time.
Even more interestingly, Tikkun Olam took on the concept of collectivity at the sacrifice of individuality. Like the Protestant Social Gospelists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, today’s progressive Jews take Biblical teachings on communal responsibility (i.e. Cain and Abel) and, through their socialist lens, re-interpret these teachings to mean that the individual has no right over the collective. (This, despite the fact that the bureaucracy of social justice calls for varying groups—defined in terms of ethnicity, gender, sexual preference, race, and even religion—to receive entitlements over other groups.) Using a twisted form of Jewish teaching to justify their political beliefs, this progressive version of collectivist Tikkun Olam became the justification for telling any non-progressive that their politics were destroying the world.
One look at Biblical history, however, proves the exact opposite to be true: Time and time again, Israel’s narrative is one of the individual attempting to lead the nation out of collective misery. The most notable example, Moses, was a total loner. Born a Hebrew but raised in an Egyptian household, he spent most of his life living among desert tribesman before returning to lead his people Israel out of bondage. Five minutes into their journey, the Hebrews begged for a return to slavery and spent most of their 40 years in the desert whining about how much better it was to stomp straw into bricks than be free and on their way to their own Mediterranean beach front real estate.
A few generations later, the young nation of Israel begged their prophet Samuel, “Give us a king to judge us like all the other nations.” This collective desire to be lorded over by another human being translated into a series of largely corrupt lunatics (with one glowing exception) who weakened the kingdom and left it vulnerable to eventual attack and destruction by surrounding tribes and nations who drove the people of Israel into exile.
Of course, a series of prophets repeatedly arose to warn Israel of impending disaster. These individuals, like the Judges before them, ranged from members of guilds and Temple service to average farmers, but they shared a few common traits. They each stood out as a lone voice of warning in the crowd, they were pretty much all thought of as lunatics, and the majority of them suffered horrible fates at the hands of the collective population of Israel who just wanted them to shut up.
In fact, Biblically speaking, Jewish collectivism has clamored for a return to slavery, sought to empower kings, was cool with being governed by corruption, and slandered, ostracized, evicted, and even stoned the only individuals who tried to get them out of their own collective mess. (So much for trying to be your brother’s keeper.)
The situation didn’t get much better after the Tanakh ended, either. More corruption in the priesthood led to Israel’s own Vichy of sorts—a Roman rule mediated by a crooked Jewish priesthood that led to a series of Zionist revolts, ending in the destruction of yet another Temple and a 2,000-year long Diaspora.
Interestingly, the Rabbinic reason for why the Jewish nation came upon such a horrible fate is sinat chinam, “baseless hatred”. In the period leading up to the destruction of the second Temple in 70 CE, Jews in Judea were split into varying factions, many of which turned on each other in the midst of the revolt. Instead of being one unified force in the face of Roman occupation, these groups drew sides and formed alliances for varying religious and political reasons. This factional attitude put Israel on a path of self-destruction.
One Rabbinic teaching likens the nation of Israel to a unified body having distinct parts with their own unique purposes that work in harmony for the greater good of the nation. “Therefore, when we as individuals actualize our potential, every other individual is uplifted, as well as Jewish people as a whole.” Compare this to the attitude behind baseless hatred: “But a person who acts according to his inner conviction that he is correct will never admit his mistake. He believes that the other person or the government is wrong. What mistake is there to admit? He thinks that you are wrong, not him!” As a result, both “God and our fellow man” are stripped “of their singular importance in the world.”
In the midst of the Temple’s destruction, Israel’s factions put more faith in themselves than in God, and as a result, put their own religious and political priorities above the needs of the very people they claimed to be fighting for. (Sound familiar?) Consequentially, many individual lives were sacrificed in the name of collective callings.
Whether it meant fleeing from Egypt, foregoing pagan behaviors, or seeking to overthrow occupying forces, for the collective of ancient Israel, enslavement to an oppressor or oppressing ideology continually trumped the freedom of individual choice. Contrary to today’s progressive spin on Tikkun Olam, the result of favoring the collective was not repair, but repeated self-destruction.
Thomas Jefferson once said, “A democracy is nothing more than mob rule, where fifty-one percent of the people may take away the rights of the other forty-nine.” When the collective is distributing justice, who is there to ensure that the collective is being just?
