Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/category/articles/page/48/)
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!
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.
I remember my arrest. It was May of 1972 and Nixon had just mined Haiphong Harbor.
In other words, tikkun olam is working toward a future in which the same arc that enveloped American Jews envelops all of our neighbors. And for me, that means building interfaith cooperation: bringing together diverse people to both understand one another better and serve the common good.
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.
“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?”
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.