Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/category/archive/2011/page/9/)
The roots of present-day disorder are about the inability of the nation’s best economic theorists to untie the Gordian knot to solve the intractable problem of feeding the huge appetite of a large, bloated, and ever-growing economy in which expanding overseas markets cannot contain what was started when human bodies were sold as commodities, as simply material objects that wear out and are replaced.
Genital mutilations of girls and women are still condoned by custom and religion in parts of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, as are so-called honor killings. The World Health Organization reports that a huge proportion of women worldwide have been physically abused by an intimate partner and that rape is still endemic.
For those of us who have, for many years, understood and struggled for tikkun olam, this question of meaning is the real and defining focus of the crisis of education. It calls into question the misguided concern for standardized testing, with its emphasis on uniformity, competition, and invidious comparison as the criteria of “effective learning.”
As a result of our current practices of industrialized agriculture, food chains and ecosystems are collapsing and extinction rates are soaring; human food systems — involving food production, processing, transport, and distribution — are strained, fragile, or broken; and hunger is again on the rise.
What are some of the other attributes of a superpower? Once again, they might very well mirror those of a person. These would include a demonstrable commitment to truth, justice, peace, freedom, humility, human rights, generosity, and the upholding of other moral values.
The vast scope of human needs reflects the great challenge of tikkun olam. Simply enacting a law requiring all to pledge “tikkun olam” won’t do it. Notwithstanding the generosity of the American people, there is a scarcity of resources to meet all human needs, there are competing needs to be served, and there are few tools available to assess the relative social impact of different philanthropic and civic investments.
It is an ancient realization, always relearned in resistant, recalcitrant ways, that we cannot receive what is new without relinquishing something of what is old. The anniversary of Tikkun is a time to notice that Tikkun, from the outset, has advocated receiving what is new for Israel and the Palestinians.
I grew up without grandparents. Both of my parents escaped the Holocaust by the skin of their teeth, losing their parents back in the same shtetl in Eastern Galicia; all of my father’s siblings and their children were also murdered.
In 1957, my parents and several other families helped the first African American family move into Levittown, Pennsylvania. That post-war suburb had been previously all white because the developer, William Levitt, a rabbi’s grandson, refused to sell houses to blacks.
I have left it to others to give well-deserved tributes to Tikkun magazine. As for me, I only signed on to be publisher because I knew the editor — my brother, Michael. It turned out to be a very smart choice.
If you’re losing, study the leader.
If you don’t like the rules, work to change them.
But don’t complain.
Utopian as it may sound, I believe that the hope for significant reform in the United States as a whole must also create a strong civil society in which the competing demands of faith and reason have somehow been reconciled.
The death of my father last April caused me to reflect anew on where we agreed and where we disagreed. When I was a college student, we would debate capitalism and socialism. Over the years I came to realize that people would be much better off under the capitalist system he envisioned than under any of the capitalist or socialist realities today.
Unfortunately, the response of the progressive community to Obama’s politics is equally troubling. While appearing more willing to take on the Right, many progressive commentators come off as presumptuous. It’s too easy to tell someone else how to use their power rather than work to develop our own, which I suspect reflects mismanaged emotions.
It was the culminating act of tikkun olam, repairing the world, in my twenty-five years in the rabbinate. Not because our world changed forever; Camden remains the poorest city in the country. But we had moved a mountain. We had shown what was possible. We restored hope.