Tikkun olam

join the parade

When cheering Christian social justice movements on. And encouraging them to liaison with others, religious and secular, I have learned to applaud the contemporary Jewish movement Tikkun olam.

Should religious movements prepare the groundwork and form a religiously-founded movement, but then hopefully invite in others in society and culture? With a mind-blowing radical agenda, go out on the streets looking for (secular) companions. This is the approach within Judaism adopted by Tikkun olam (repair the world) by its charismatic founder and now by its successors. This movement originated with its imperative to mend, heal, transform creation. But from its beginning it formed a Network of Spiritual Progressives, including Christians and other spiritually-defined people as well as agnostics and atheists. Together they sought to move America. According to Google this became Tikun’s “Spiritual Covenant with America,” to which they invited all comers, including agnostics and atheists: “a modern idea blending the Jewish principle of tikun olam (repairing the world) with the American experience, seeing the U.S. as a unique place for Jewish values to flourish and contribute to a more just society, a partnership where American democracy provides safety and Jews, through social action and upholding moral ideals, help perfect the world and the American experiment itself. It’s about Jewish communities using American freedoms to model moral citizenship, fulfilling their tradition’s call to social justice and finding meaning in their American lives” Here is their statement of goals on their pamphlets freely handed out:

We will create a society that promotes rather than undermines loving and caring

relationships and families.

We will take personal responsibility for ethical behavior.

We will build Social Responsibility into the normal operations

of our economic and political Life.

We will reshape our education system to teach the values of

love, caring, generosity, intellectual curiosity,

tolerance, gratitude, awe and wonder at the universe.

We will seek a single-payer national health care plan

and also broaden the public’s understanding of health care.

We will be stewards of the environment.

We will build a safer world and promote a rational approach

to immigration through a strategy of nonviolence and

generosity that eliminates poverty

both in the U.S. and in every other country.

I could not possibly have exceeded this wonderfully comprehensive statement of goals. And Christians would have little to add to this Jewish document, though they might root it in their own tradition. Just imagine if this bill of goods took off and became entrenched in American politics, economy, and religion! Just imagine if this became AIPAC’s agenda! What if small Christian groups, too, rose up to create such a movement. And political parties! Tikkun imagined a New Bottom Line that measures all public policies not by how well they maximize money and power (the old bottom line), but how they produce, sustain or enhance our abilities to be loving and kind, generous and caring for others, ethically and ecologically sensitive in our behavior, able to see others as embodiments of the sacred, and living lives not of utilitarian calculus but filled with awe, wonder, and radical amazement. (They actually talked and acted as if they believed the Hebrew Bible, including the God of the Exodus and the prophets of social justice, could come true!)