It’s always a pleasure to engage with my shachein tov Yonoson Rosenblum but I do believe his comments last week on my take on the tikkun olam industry were wide off the mark. The concept is deserving of critique on many levels.
In a 2008 Commentary piece reviewing a collection of essays about tikkun olam titled Righteous Indignation: A Jewish Call for Justice the writer Hillel Halkin pulled no punches.
As the 40 essays… make clear — Jews have their work cut out for them. There appears to be nothing wrong with this world that Judaism does not command us to fix…. Health care labor unions public-school education feminism abortion rights globalization US foreign policy Darfur: on everything Judaism has a position — and wondrously this position just happens to coincide with that of the American liberal Left.
If it is easy to caricature most of the essays in Righteous Indignation this is because so many of them caricature themselves. They represent the ultimate in that self-indulgent approach so common in non-Orthodox Jewish circles in the United States today that treats Jewish tradition not as a body of teachings to be learned from but as one needing to be taught what it is about by those who know better than it does what it should be about.
Halkin’s skewering of tikkun olam as leftist ideology masquerading as Jewish teaching is right on target. His critique is different from mine however because the Yale speech I discussed thankfully didn’t attempt to treat the New York Times editorial page as Jewish holy writ in the manner of the indignant essayists of Righteous Indignation.
But the speech did something else that I didn’t actually find “galling” (Yonoson’s phrase) just tragic. Disconnected as it was from the authentic sources of Jewish wisdom the speech supplanted the truly important forms of “repair” that make up our life’s purpose with other things that can perhaps play some role in making the world a better place but not nearly the primary one.
If we are to speak of tikkun of repairing that which is broken we must know that the primary mission of a Jew in this world as stated clearly by the Vilna Gaon on the authority of Chazal is to repair his negative character traits and lowly physical drives on the way to becoming an elevated sanctified human being. The sources Yonoson cited are at not at odds with this fundament in any way.
The tragedy of the tikkun olam idea as rendered in the Yale speech is that it contains a kernel of truth so far as it goes but it doesn’t go very far at all down the road to fulfilling our human potential. This is not some self-centered agenda — it’s how the world as a whole can heal and revert to the garden of delights it once was.
Man comes into this world to transcend his physical limitations and rise to angelic heights using every moment to work on himself turning dross into gold and drawing near to G-d — and the best we can counsel him is to start a business that will employ someone or to write a play that might inspire someone? It’s akin to telling a soon-to-be husband that the point of marriage is to bring home a paycheck and take out the garbage; it mistakes trappings for essence.
I’ve read a considerable amount of secular Jewish and heterodox writing on this topic and cannot recall even once that tikkun olam was couched in terms of the human being fixing himself. The arena of action is always seen as outside of oneself in fighting some societal scourge or making some contribution to the world at large.
Just recently the editor of a secular Jewish paper interviewed New York Times opinion columnist David Brooks about his new book on cultivating character and personal virtue and wrote these astonishing words: “His new book… is laced with themes that focus very much on the individual inner life and not on communal responsibility which to me seems to hang more on the Christian side of the Judeo-Christian ethos he so admires.” The myriad teachings of Chazal the lives of exquisite ethical nobility of tzaddikim in every generation from the Avos on down the rich literature of sifrei mussar the very point of all we do as Jews — for her all these are nebach nebach on the “Christian side of the Judeo-Christian ethos.”
But who can fault this “captive child” of an editor? The biggest scandal to my mind of the heterodox movements whose credo she likely internalized isn’t their near-total jettisoning of Judaic beliefs and practices to the point that a to’eivah-practicing agnostic suits them just fine as a clergyman. The far greater scandal is that although they tout themselves as avatars of humanism and heightened moral sensitivity who will teach us all about exalting the ethical over the ritual these movements are institutionally by and large bereft in both word and deed of a focus on personal ethical transformation as a central Jewish goal.
I write “by and large” because in recent years a gifted individual and dear friend of mine named Dr. Alan Morinis has worked assiduously to introduce the study and practice of mussar into the heterodox world. More power to him and his yeoman efforts. But beyond the minority reached by his programs where are the heterodox versions of the books and CDs the school middos curricula the vaadim the video presentations the classes and phone conferences that untold thousands of Orthodox individuals avail themselves of for personal growth?
Is all well in the Torah world in regard to ethical development and mitzvos bein adam l’chaveiro? Far far from it. But one can count on a Torah Jew to acknowledge the absolute centrality of tikkun hamiddos of shemiras halashon of yashrus in business and on an infrastructure of communal institutions and resources to foster progress. These ideals are a part of the ongoing communal conversation in school in shul (hopefully not during davening) and at home.

THE GREAT IRONY of neglecting the repairing of man is that without it repairing the world writ large simply doesn’t work. Top-down societal engineering is a utopian pipedream that ignores basic human realities. Societies are formed of communities communities of families and families of individuals. And it is at that ground level that the work of transformation must begin one individual at a time family by functional family until a society dedicated to human goodness and ethical excellence can be built from the bottom up.
But political and religious liberalism neglect the ethical reformation of the individual and ignore the family’s role as an incubator of goodness. So they must because the notion of a life’s mission to replace the noxious weeds sprouting naturally in the untended garden of the human personality with the life-giving blooms of refined character is anathema to the liberal belief that we’re wonderful from the womb. The fault is always without whether poverty or lack of education or chauvinism or something else.
But neither legal mandates nor “sensitivity education” sessions intended to drum the biases out of people succeed in changing them. At best they compel the adoption of a veneer of civility while under the business suit the caveman remains as untamed as ever. Not for naught is it the sad fact that after decades of feminist-inspired legislation and social conditioning men remain brutes toward women aided and abetted by a secular society that demeans them at every turn.
So can starting a business entering a profession or academia or creating art help make the world a better place? The answer is a very qualified “it depends.”
To begin with much hinges on the nature of the enterprise. If it’s a business whose products for example appeal to man’s animal instinct or distance people from G-d and life’s purpose then that’s not world-repair but world-destruction; how the business itself is run and treats its employees and customers is also highly relevant. The same is true for academia and the arts: Their value in building the world depends entirely on what is being taught or created and we all know just how often those are the very antithesis of what Judaism would regard as constructive.
But the much more important point is that even assuming that career pursuits in these various areas are humane and spiritually positive the single most important thing in all of Creation remains unaddressed — the potential of the individual to transform himself and through him indeed the world. If involvement in business teaching artistry or even a service organization leaves both its practitioner and the people he serves the same savages — albeit with a patina of civility of course! — as entered the world if tikkun ha’adam goes wanting then neither has tikkun olam in a Jewish sense occurred. —