Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/category/archive/page/58/)
Clergy need to be developed to be shapers of the new forms. Rabbis, as at least the nominal leaders of Judaism, and hopefully among the leaders of the Jewish people, need to be trained to be effective leaders in a time of great flux. Given this, I decided to create a new program at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College on Social Justice Organizing to help in the formation of rabbis.
Secularism is growing in the United States, especially among the young. Perhaps 15 percent of the population already have no religious affiliation. While many among the nonchurched profess traditional views of God, it is not clear that such beliefs will remain vibrant without institutional support.
Should we make the error of focusing exclusively on literal interpretations, and should we encourage a narrow-minded approach to the Torah and other holy books, we only end up limiting the vitality and import of such works. And we end up leading more superficial lives.
The old social movements were based on deep connections between activists who knew each other for a long time and thought long and hard about the issues before jumping into the fray. It took guts to confront authority and one’s opponents. We need to recapture some element of that discipline.
This noisy study hall for a diverse crowd of intense, wisecracking, basically brilliant Torah students is a threefold tikkun: it’s a traditional form that transforms students, allowing the secular to access the Tradition; the Reform to become literate; the Conservative, passionate; and the Neo-Hasidic to gain textual traction; and it drives the Orthodox sane.
Let’s get the apology over with first. Like everyone in my generation (those who lived through the upheavals of the sixties), I feel dreadful about the world we’re leaving you. I myself don’t plan on leaving it soon, but we had the chance to leave you a much better springboard, and we failed.
The most important principle in Judaism is the awareness that there is no such thing as “the most important principle” in Judaism. All of its teachings are equally as vital, and if you fulfill any one of them, taught the second-century Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, you have fulfilled all of them (Midrash Mishlei 1:17).
I’m struggling with this right now, and I’ve struggled with it for thirty years … self-care and soul care and close-circle-of-friends care are not distractions from our work for tikkun olam or the kingdom of God, but rather are integral to it.
This is what tikkun means to me: asking who else is out there in the dark and what they are finding in their own pool of light, and how their torches are working for them.
Those of us who founded and shaped Tikkun for the past twenty-five years have been solidly committed to supporting the manifestation of the Spirit of God in this world. In our view that means advancing the possibilities of a world based on love; kindness; generosity; individual and collective freedom; mutual recognition; thanksgiving; pleasure; joy; the evolution of scientific knowledge, spiritual wisdom, understanding of self and others, and deep levels of individual and global consciousness; the triumph of social justice; peace; equality; material well-being; environmental sanity; mutual forgiveness and caring for each other; and awe, wonder, and radical amazement at the grandeur and mystery of the universe. Our goal of tikkun-ing the world (healing, evolving and transforming it), has a long tradition in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and in other spiritual and religious communities as well. We are merely one contemporary embodiment of that tradition. The Promise, Successes, and Problems of the NSP
Knowing that people often find that their highest progressive ideals cannot be expressed freely in their various religious communities, or at least not acted upon in those institutions, we decided seven years ago to create the Network of Spiritual Progressives (NSP) to be the educational and activist arm of Tikkun.
And we will inflict damage as long as we burn fossil fuel, and we will burn fossil fuel as long as we keep allowing the oil and coal companies to pour their waste into the atmosphere for free. And we’ll keep doing that as long as we don’t stand up politically to the power of that industry.
Don’t be afraid of solitude and silence, and question those who are!
Tikkun olam is itself the realization that every human life is unique and distinct from every other human life; that the odds against human life ever having occurred in the universe are so overwhelming that we can conceive of it only as a miracle; and that this miracle requires us, because we are human, to tend to the world that receives us at birth and from which we eventually depart.
According to R. Yannai, the prophets’ utterances must be refined, just as silver from a mine needs to be refined: “The words of Torah were not given as clear cut decisions (chatuchot). For with every word which the Holy One, blessed be He, spoke to Moses, He offered him forty-nine [seven times seven] arguments by which a thing may be proved pure and forty nine-arguments by which a thing may be proved impure.”
America is not an “honest broker” nor is it working on a just solution to the conflict. Our government, largely as a result of pressure from our community, provides blanket support for Israel.