A protection for the poor that had stopped anyone lending to them.
Tikkun olam
The obligation to repair what is broken in the world - a phrase whose meaning has shifted three times.
- Theme
- Society, politics and power
- Tradition
- Jewish
- Term
- תיקון עולם · tiqqun ʿolam
- Term fixed
- c. 200
In plain terms
Tikkun olam is now usually translated as repairing the world and used to mean social justice. That is its most recent meaning and its least original.
In the Mishnah the phrase is technical and modest: rabbis adjust a legal rule mipnei tikkun ha-olam, for the ordering of the world, when the rule as written is producing a bad practical result. It is a reason for legal reform, not a call to action.
In Lurianic kabbalah it becomes cosmic. The vessels holding the divine light shattered at creation, the sparks are scattered through the world, and human action - specifically, observance - gathers them. Repair is a metaphysical operation.
The modern usage takes the phrase from the second and the content from neither. That is not an objection; concepts move. It is worth knowing that they have.
As a philosopher would put it
The Mishnaic uses are pragmatic. Hillel's prozbul is the standard case: the sabbatical-year cancellation of debts, commanded in Deuteronomy, had made lenders unwilling to lend to the poor as the year approached, producing the opposite of the law's purpose. The prozbul assigns the debt to the court so that it survives the remission, and the stated reason is mipnei tikkun ha-olam.
Isaac Luria's sixteenth-century cosmology transforms it. Tzimtzum, divine contraction, makes space for creation; the vessels shatter under the light they were to hold; sparks fall into the material world; and human observance raises them. Repair here is the restoration of a broken cosmos, and the agent is ritual practice.
The twentieth-century social-justice usage is largely American and postwar, and scholars including Jill Jacobs and Levi Cooper have traced its rapid spread. Its critics within Judaism argue that it detaches the phrase from both earlier senses and turns a specific obligation into a general benevolence.
Where you meet it
Around the first century BCE, Hillel faced a rule that was defeating itself.
Deuteronomy cancels debts every seventh year, a protection for the poor. Its effect near the end of a cycle was that nobody would lend to them, since the loan would shortly be extinguished - and Deuteronomy itself anticipates this and forbids withholding the loan, without providing a remedy.
The prozbul is the remedy. A lender declares before the court that the debt is transferred to it, and since the remission applies to private debts, the loan survives the seventh year. Credit continues to be available; the sabbatical remission remains on the books.
The Mishnah records that Hillel instituted it mipnei tikkun ha-olam. Whether this repairs the world or circumvents a commandment has been argued ever since, and the argument is the point: the phrase's original use is a legal justification for adjusting a rule whose literal operation was producing harm, offered by someone who knew he would have to defend it.
What is actually disputed
Whether the modern usage is legitimate.
Critics argue that the phrase now does work neither earlier sense supports: the Mishnaic use is about legal adjustment within the halakhic system, the Lurianic use is about ritual observance restoring a cosmos, and neither is a mandate for general social action. On this view a specific term has been emptied and used to lend traditional weight to a modern commitment.
Defenders reply that traditions live by reinterpretation, that the underlying obligation to act on the world's brokenness is amply grounded elsewhere in Jewish sources, and that objecting to a phrase's development is a strange complaint from within a tradition built on commentary.
The substantive question underneath is whether repair is primarily a matter of law, of observance, or of action in the world - and the three answers are what the three meanings of the phrase actually record.
Commonly confused with
- social justice generally The modern usage overlaps with it. The Mishnaic and Lurianic senses do not, and the phrase is used as though all three were one.
- fixing the world The Mishnaic sense is narrow and legal - adjusting a rule producing a perverse result - not a general programme.
- repairing damage The Lurianic sense concerns a breakage at creation itself, not harm done by anyone.
Defined against
- Dharma Both name an obligation flowing from an order larger than the individual, and they differ on whether that obligation is to sustain the order or to repair it
Philosophers
- Maimonides The rationalist treatment of law and its purposes
- Philo of Alexandria The earlier Hellenistic reading of Jewish law
- Baruch Spinoza The critical account of law's social function
Works
- The Guide for the Perplexed Law understood by its purposes
- The Kuzari The alternative account of Jewish particularity
- I and Thou The relational register the modern usage draws on
- Ethics The critical alternative
Schools
- Maimonideanism Where law is interpreted by its ends
- Lurianic Kabbalah Where repair becomes cosmic
- Hasidic Philosophy Where the kabbalistic account is popularised
- Musar Movement Where the ethical obligation is cultivated
- Jewish Aristotelianism Where the rationalist reading develops
Related concepts
Covenant c. 1140 · Justice c. 380 BC · Solidarity 1848 · Care 1982 · Emancipation 1843
The phrase appears in the Mishnah as a reason for legal adjustments, is transformed by Lurianic kabbalah into a cosmic task, and acquires its modern social-justice sense in twentieth-century America - three distinct meanings under one phrase.