The End of Tikkun Olam
Daniel Cotzin Burg
Credit: Shutterstock
Daniel Cotzin Burg is Senior Rabbi of Beth Am Synagogue in Baltimore, Maryland.
In April 2015, just before hosting a seder at the White House, and one week before 25-year-old Freddie Gray would be arrested just a mile from my home in Baltimore, then President Barack Obama sent a Passover message to the American Jewish community. “Like the Israelites who Moses led out of slavery long ago, it is up to us to never lose faith in the better day that lies ahead…. Together,” he went on, “we can continue the hard but awesome work of tikkun olam and do our part to repair the world.” Gray, who had been lead-poisoned in his public housing project as a child, would ultimately succumb to the injuries he suffered in police custody. Afterward, two weeks of peaceful protests gave way to widespread unrest. Rioters set fire to more than a dozen structures and well over 100 vehicles. Hundreds of businesses were looted or destroyed. The mayor imposed a curfew, and the Maryland National Guard was deployed to Baltimore for the first time in nearly half a century. National media outlets ate it up.
As spiritual leader of Beth Am Synagogue in West Baltimore, working in an historically Jewish and for many decades majority Black neighborhood, my perspective was informed by my proximity. I took part in protests calling for police accountability. To signal solidarity with our African American neighbors even as they felt unseen and undervalued by media consumers around the world, I led my congregation in Musaf outside, on the steps of our historic Grand Moorish building the following Shabbat.
My experience during the riots was not just professional; it was personal. My family and I live across the street from our shul in a neighborhood called Reservoir Hill, an area of the city abandoned by most white folks and Jewish institutions during the mid-20th century. The opportunity to do a tikkun, a repair of sorts, on that legacy of white-flight and divestment, helped motivate me to move my family to Baltimore nearly fifteen years ago. Living and working where I do has not been without its challenges—particularly since October 7, 2023, when Jewish involvement in racial justice work became more complicated. My goal in this essay is not to address these challenges, which are complex, with competing notions of how bad things are, let alone how to solve them. Instead, I offer a model of community engagement growing from Beth Am’s ability to do social justice on our front doorstep. In Reservoir Hill, we build relationships across difference because, put simply, we view the racial, religious, and socioeconomic diversity of our neighborhood as a sacred opportunity.
In 2015, Reservoir Hill, being almost entirely residential, was untouched by looting, but nearby commercial districts were devastated. Our Black neighbors were as dismayed by the unrest as we were, but even as they decried theft and vandalism, many of them also had an appreciation of the circumstances that prompted so many to take to the streets in anger. Solidarity and service felt obligatory. The day after the riots, my wife and I kept our kids home from school. We walked toward neighborhoods to our west as hundreds of Baltimore residents stumbled out their own doors, clutching garbage bags and push brooms, resigned but determined to restore what we could of the shattered pieces of our city, repairing our corner of the world. The considerable host cleaning up Tuesday morning, April 28 eclipsed those rioting and looting the night of April 27. But the national media that had swarmed a burning CVS the night before was now nowhere to be found. If, as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., said in 1967, riots are “the language of the unheard,” next-day community cleanups are the burden of the unseen.
Tikkun olam, as President Obama rightly observed, means “repairing the world.” The phrase has become synonymous with social justice and volunteerism. More than this, tikkun olam is, for large swaths of American Jewry, a powerful (perhaps the most powerful) manifestation of ethical behavior. To “do Jewish,” many feel, is to do justice, and we often define this as mending cities, communities, and the planet in all their broken places. The Pew Research Center’s “Study of Jewish Americans in 2020” found more than half of respondents saw “working for justice and equality” as an essential part of being Jewish, third in line after “remembering the Holocaust” and “leading an ethical and moral life.” By contrast, only 15 percent said “observing Jewish law” is essential to being Jewish.
Tikkun olam, I want to suggest, though, is not the most authentic model for pursuing justice in a Jewish idiom. My own experience working for a better world reveals the term’s limits, as does its history. I also believe we should be precise with language: how we describe our pursuit of justice shapes our doing of it. More specifically, I want to introduce a different framework, takhlit olam, completing the world, to talk about our social justice work. While this phrasing is new, the notion that humanity’s fulfillment of God’s creative enterprise is also the work of justice originates in the earliest chapters of Genesis and weaves its way through our liturgical and midrashic traditions. Below, I’ll explore the roots of tikkun olam before presenting takhlit olam in more detail.
The Problematic Roots of Tikkun Olam
The phrase tikkun ha’olam, repair of the world in ancient sources, first appears in the second century in the Aleinu prayer. To what should we aspire? This text tells us: letaken olam bemalchut Shaddai, “to repair [or perhaps, establish] the world under God’s sovereignty.” Later, during the early rabbinic period, the term was mainly used for what Jill Jacobs calls “the preservation of the halakhic system and the social order” (There Shall Be No Needy: Pursuing Social Justice through Jewish Law & Tradition, 2009).
The sage Hillel’s innovation of the prozbul is a prime example. Deuteronomy prescribes debt relief every seventh year, during the period known as shemitah, or sabbatical (15:9). But this utopian solution to the problem of generational poverty was impractical. Instead of supporting or empowering the underclass, it had a cooling effect on lending, with creditors unwilling to make loans just before the shemitah, believing (accurately) that their loans would become de facto gifts. To prevent this, Hillel ruled that during the seventh year, Torah law cancels only personal debts, not debts due in court. He then introduced the prozbul, according to which a creditor could in effect transfer promissory notes to the court to avoid their automatic cancelation. Why, asks the Mishnah, did Hillel implement this rule? Mipnei tikkun ha’olam, “for the sake of repairing the world” (mGittin 4:3).
Our contemporary association between social justice more broadly and the idea of tikkun olam finds its antecedent, however, not in Jewish law but in Jewish mysticism, namely the thinking of sixteenth century Galilean rabbi, Isaac Luria. Luria imagined the world coming into being through an explosion called shevirat hakeilim, “the shattering of the vessels.” Here’s a version of this creation story as presented by folklorist Howard Schwartz in Tree of Souls: The Mythology of Judaism (2004):
At the beginning of time, God’s presence filled the universe. Then God decided to bring this world into being. To make room for creation, God first drew in His breath, contracting Himself. From that contraction a dark mass was produced. And when God said, “Let there be light” (Gen. 1:3), the light that came into being entered the dark mass, and ten vessels came forth, each filled with primordial light.
In this way, God sent forth those ten vessels, like a fleet of ships, each carrying its cargo of light. Had they arrived intact, the world would have been perfect. But somehow the frail vessels broke open, and all the holy sparks were scattered, like sand, like seeds, like stars…. That is why we were created—to gather the sparks, no matter where they are hidden…. And when enough holy sparks have been gathered, the vessels will be restored, and repair of the world, awaited for so long, will finally take place.
But Schwartz’s version of the story omits important but less palatable and less inspiring aspects of Luria’s tikkun olam. In a 1989 article, “Tikkun: A Lurianic Motif in Contemporary Jewish Thought,” Lawrence Fine, scholar of medieval Jewish mysticism, describes the Lurianic concept of tikkun olam as suggesting, “like the gnostic myths of an earlier time, a complete rejection of the world as we know it, and of the historical process. In other words, the tikkun, the repair of which Lurianic Kabbalah speaks, is not that of this world, this olam, but of ‘worlds’ beyond it.” In essence, Lurianic Kabbalah, like the late antique gnostic myths it is drawing on, suggests that the material world in which we live is inherently tainted by human sin going all the way back to Adam in the Garden of Eden. The call for humanity to repair our fractured world paradoxically casts doubt on the essential value of that world. (This may also explain why tikkun olam is so attractive and readily understandable to Christians whose theology depends on the concept of original sin.)
With a few exceptions, the phrase tikkun olam largely disappeared from use from the 1500s until the 1950s, but by the 1970s and 80s in the United States, tikkun olam had become the mainstream way to describe everything from volunteerism to advocacy to community organizing that broadly reflected a progressive agenda. As historian Jonathan Krasner argues, idealistic 1960s educators uncomfortable with Jewish insularity found common cause with civil rights activists concerned about increasing Jewish conservatism. Together, they helped shape tikkun olam into “a central Jewish tenet and even a rationale for Jewish survival” (“The Place of Tikkun Olam in American Jewish Life,” 2013).
Additionally, tikkun olam owes much of its early appeal to the existential and theological crisis posed by the Shoah. Post-Holocaust thinkers including Harold Schulweis, Emil Fackenheim, and Irving “Yitz” Greenberg argued that the catastrophic nature and scope of the Holocaust demanded a new sort of theology, one that acknowledged a degree of rupture not previously known to the Jewish people, nor perhaps, as some argued, to humanity. Krasner suggests that in this context, tikkun olam was preferable to other terms because it “implied the brokenness of the world. It gave expression to the bafflement that Jews felt as they sought to grapple with what was seemingly inexplicable.”
My own critique of tikkun olam, though, goes beyond its ubiquity and plasticity or even its seeming alignment with progressive politics. My West Baltimore rabbinate has caused me to question the utility of a paradigm that envisions a fundamentally broken world and bestows upon humanity the gargantuan task of repairing it—this notion of “fixing the world,” as if this is a soluble problem. But fixing the world is not a discrete, eminently achievable task like fixing a leaky gutter or repairing a fence. “The world” is orders of magnitude larger and more complicated than these issues. Complete, let alone lasting, solutions are elusive. Furthermore, the world, the people within it, and the societies we create are not static; we evolve and grow in myriad unpredictable ways. Practitioners of tikkun olam experience continual disappointment when, inevitably, their solutions fall short, like a replacement bulb that burns out soon after you finish screwing it in. Compassion fatigue is often the enemy of sustainable justice solutions and burnout is made more likely when seeking not progress but panacea.
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The tikkun olam paradigm also lends itself to a unidirectional posture of noblesse oblige. Nearly a decade-and-a-half ago, not long after I came to Beth Am, a concerned congregant-neighbor, a white Jewish man married to a Black Jewish woman, asked me: “Rabbi, when are we going to stop treating our neighborhood like a project?” Much of my work since that conversation has been to reframe our thinking vis-à-vis our community, striving not only to be in and for but also of. Even as more Jewish families have relocated to the area, I encourage every congregant, no matter their home address, to treat Beth Am’s surrounding community as our neighborhood.
Broken Windows and Broken People?
Sweeping up broken glass in April 2015, I found myself (ironically) thinking that the broken hearts of Freddie Gray’s family were related to Baltimore’s “broken windows” approach to policing, an approach that tries to address violent crime by policing disorder, e.g., litter, graffiti, and broken windows. Social scientists have come to question this underlying theory and its lack of attention to root causes. In a 2006 University of Chicago Law Review paper, Bernard E. Harcourt and Jens Ludwig tracked low income families living in high crime public housing communities who were assigned vouchers to move to less “disadvantaged and disorderly” neighborhoods in five cities, including Baltimore. They conclude that this experiment provided “no support for a simple first-order disorder-crime relationship.” Furthermore, closer study shows that predominantly white neighborhoods with similar amounts of “disorder” (e.g., litter or graffiti) as predominantly Black neighborhoods are generally viewed as less disorderly. As a result, broken windows policing has been disproportionately applied in neighborhoods like my own, which outsiders are likely to refer to as broken, run-down, shabby, or just “bad.” In 2015, finger-wagging cable news viewers (and unfortunately, more than a few suburban Jewish Baltimore residents) echoed these subjective judgments when they accused Black Baltimoreans of “destroying their own neighborhoods.” The message was clear: The city, its communities, maybe even a substantial number of its residents, are broken. Someone has to clean up this mess. Someone needs to fix it.
The tikkun olam paradigm and broken windows theory share the view that improvement and repair are synonymous. There are at least two significant problems with this approach. First, the repair of something broken brings it back to a previously functional state but does nothing to advance it. Repair is about reinstatement, not progress. Second, and more insidious, is that tikkun thinking runs the risk of viewing people like objects. Things can be broken and then fixed, but they are not self-aware. They don’t detect that they’re broken, and they don’t notice when they’re mended. People who experience suffering, though, can too easily internalize a sense of brokenness. Salvation comes when they remember their essential humanity. Viktor Frankl, recounting his time in Nazi concentration camps with “men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread,” writes in Man’s Search For Meaning that, “everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.” To transcend one’s circumstances requires a capacity for horizon thinking, a realization that, as Genesis reminds us, we are each a manifestation of God’s image in the world. In more recent years, Baltimore is replacing broken window policing with better strategies, honoring and investing in community assets, viewing residents, community organizations, and police as allies in the work of building vital and sustainable communities.
At Beth Am, we continue to view our neighbors as critical partners in the equitable and sustainable improvement of our shared community. We created In, For, Of Inc. (IFO), a sister nonprofit, to support Reservoir Hill relationships and soften racial, religious, and class boundaries. Through that work we’ve hosted speakers, concerts, and cultural events. We’ve shared oral histories and co-sponsored a recurring Greens and Kugel Cook-Off. We created a joint African American and Jewish American coming-of-age program inspired, in part, by a visit from author (now Maryland Governor) Wes Moore. We’ve done anti-racism book clubs and a community justice Seder on the topic of gentrification. We dance to hip-hop outside our doors as we welcome voters each election day with our Party at the Polls—an initiative designed to convert polling places into block parties, fostering community while increasing voter turnout. Since the pandemic began, we’ve distributed hundreds of thousands of pounds of fresh produce to our neighbors, including newer Afghan refugee families.
Takhlit Olam: Completing the World
“You sanctified the seventh day in Your name, a completion (takhlit) of heaven and earth’s formation.”
- Shabbat Blessing, Friday night Amidah
Our earliest Jewish sacred writings view the world not as shattered but evolving. The book of Genesis portrays creation as a process. Consider the very first verse of the Torah, usually rendered, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” A better translation is, “In the beginning of God’s creating the heavens and the earth,” implying that the story of creation has not yet ended. Humans enter the story to serve as partners with God. The universe is incomplete, unrealized. The world isn’t broken, it’s developing, growing. The Genesis model is all about the horizon. God “begins” to create the world in six days and then rests: “The heaven and the earth were finished (vayekhulu) and all their array. On the seventh day God finished (vayekhal) the work that [God] had been doing” (Gen. 2:1-2). But before that first Shabbat, God creates (in the divine image) a species called humanity and places us into the world “to till it and tend it” (Gen. 2:15). At the other end of existence is the messianic era, a glimpse of which the Talmud tells us we are meant to experience on Shabbat (bBerachot 57b). The paradox of creation as described in Genesis is that completion is not completion at all. Each Shabbat is a pause before renewing, with God’s help, our work of creation and cultivation. We’re not mechanics or janitors; we’re not here to fix broken windows. We’re existential horticulturalists.
In the account of creation and elsewhere, the Torah provides a better model for pursuing justice. In Numbers, just after the Priestly Benediction and at the head of the long list of initiatory gifts for the tabernacle, it says: “On the day that Moses finished (kalot) setting up the Tabernacle, he anointed and consecrated it and all its furnishings, as well as the altar and its utensils” (7:1). The verb kalot, to “finish” or “complete,” is the same verb used to describe the world’s creation. As our Sages understand it, the tabernacle is a miniature world; its components and construction mirror the universe itself. The thirty-nine versions of labor delineated by the rabbis in the Mishnah (Shabbat 7:2) and ascribed to the tabernacle’s construction in the Talmud (bShabbat 49b) are meant to be employed six days a week throughout history in furtherance of this project. Genesis says God completed the work of creation, but this is only the first part of the story. Jewish tradition appreciates creation as a process, with God concluding phase one. Humans enter the story to serve as inheritors of and collaborators on the divine project, furthering the creative enterprise. In Siach Sarfei Kodesh, Rabbi Simcha Bunam of Peshischa explains, “The universe God made is always in an unfinished state. It is not like a vessel… It requires continuous work, for the world is re-created every day, and humanity is reborn every morning.” We, in partnership with the divine, are responsible for that re-creation.
A world of potential, societies and communities worthy of cultivation: these are worth fighting for. This is why I suggest the term takhlit in place of tikkun. Takhlit means “completion” or “perfection” and derives from the word used to describe both the creation narrative in Genesis and the construction of the tabernacle in Exodus. The medieval hymn Adon Olam describes God as b’li reishit, “without beginning,” and b’li takhlit, “without end.” The Creator, the Infinite One, began creation. We, finite beings, are projections of the divine. We (hopefully) work to better the world during our short time here. Humanity’s entrée to the unfolding of history (to invoke Churchill), is not the beginning of the end but the end of the beginning. Takhlit olam instead of tikkun olam honors creation’s iterative nature, suggesting an ongoing process of development and growth. Tikkun is a judgement on our world. Takhlit is a call to build on the world’s past successes and overcome previous failures. Takhlit invites us to be an active part of the world's becoming—refining, expanding, and improving upon God’s initial project, seeking a more perfect world.
Takhlit olam is a better framework for the realization of God’s creative enterprise: a more just outcome for humanity. But it is also more apt for the fulfillment of God’s promise to our Jewish people. In freeing the Hebrews from the injustice of slavery, in giving them Torah and guiding them through the wilderness toward the promised land, Torah’s core narrative—what Neil Gillman calls the primary myth of the Jewish people—is a story not of brokenness and repair but of journey and eventual destination. While President Obama’s use of the Hebrew phrase tikkun olam on Passover 2015 made many Jews swell with pride, his application of tikkun olam to the words, “like the Israelites who Moses led out of slavery long ago, it is up to us to never lose faith in the better day that lies ahead” is incongruous. The exodus narrative is a story not of repair but arrival.
Takhlit has another advantage in that it can also mean “purpose.” What is it to work for the completion of the world? It is to fulfill God’s intended purpose for humanity: to participate in the ongoing betterment of our planet and its inhabitants. A midrash attempts to explain why it is that in Genesis 1 we’re told “the earth brought forth grass” (12) but in Genesis 2, just before the Torah describes the creation of human beings, it says, “No shrub of the field was yet on earth” (5). How to resolve this seeming contradiction? Rav Asi explains, “This teaches that the grasses emerged [on the third day] and stood just below the surface, [but they did not grow] until human beings came and prayed for mercy upon them, and rain came, and they sprouted” (bChullin 60b).
The world isn’t broken. It is replete with potential energy waiting to be actualized, grass waiting just below the surface for the right conditions to burst forth. Systems can be broken; too often they are. Sometimes they can be repaired. Sometimes they must be reimagined or even dismantled and reconstructed. Broken windows, after all, are not repaired; they are replaced. But people within those systems—our families, our communities—they are not broken but unrealized, in need of attention, love, investment, and nourishment. They are grasses reaching for water and sunlight. Torah’s essential call for justice is captured in Deuteronomy 16:20: “Justice, justice you shall pursue.” Justice isn’t to be found amidst so many broken pieces of shattered lives. It’s ahead of us, stretching out before us. “God unfurls the heavens like a curtain,” says Isaiah (40:22). Justice is the work of our minds and our hands and the achievement of our greatest purpose. Its full realization is waiting just beyond the horizon.
