Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/category/archive/2011/26-1-winter-2011/page/9/)
Hope for healing the world must start with children. This is modeled through Peace Pizzazz, a children’s festival in Kalamazoo, Michigan, sponsored by secular groups (such as the 6th Congressional District Campaign for a U.S. Department of Peace) and religious groups (such as the Skyridge Church of The Brethren) in a collaborative effort to build a whole culture of peace locally and globally.
For there is hardly any other people which has something as substantial and striking to offer as Judaism with its Ten Commandments. As the German writer Thomas Mann explained after the terrors of National Socialism, these are the “basic instruction and rock of respectable humanity,” indeed the “ABC of human behavior.”
Today, conditions are as dire as those we faced in the 1960s, but we are not coming together with sufficient urgency to confront them. Climate change threatens the very existence of a habitable planet, but here in the United States, the business of burning fossil fuels continues as usual.
In the kabbalistic theory of tikkun olam, it is our human responsibility to find all those pieces of light that escaped the big creation bang of the original vessel and put the world back together again. When I allow myself to clear my head of my own prejudices and preconceptions, I am always surprised by where I find those pieces of light.
“They stop at treating the symptoms of poverty, such as hunger and poor health, with food programs and clinics, without ever asking the obvious question: Why do a few people enjoy effortless abundance, while billions of others who work far harder experience extreme deprivation?”
War and Peace. Tolstoy got the order right. We must know in deep and dark detail how horrible war is before we will have the courage or wisdom to do much to stop it long enough to resolve and transform a conflict. The Hebrew word for this is “tikkun” — healing and transformation.
This is why I devote my time to working for a health system in the United States that meets the human rights principles of universality, equity, and accountability: a single-payer national health insurance. Anything less will prolong suffering and unnecessary death. Every person in this country must have access to the same high-quality standard of health care.
Specifically, I have suggested two basic guidelines: the egocentrism test, which assesses the extent to which spiritual traditions, teachings, and practices free practitioners from gross and subtle forms of narcissism and self-centeredness; and the dissociation test, which evaluates the extent to which spiritual traditions, teachings, and practices foster the integrated blossoming of all dimensions of the person.
Many happily munch on their hamburgers without a thought to the land destroyed for cattle grazing, or the immense cruelty in the raising and slaughter of the billions of animals we use for food each year. Mothers continue to prod their youngsters to eat their vegetables, unaware of the poisons involved in their production, not to mention the water and air.
SURPRISINGLY HAPPY: AN ATYPICAL RELIGIOUS MEMOIR by Sheila Peltz Weinberg, White River Press, 2010