EXOD224 The meaning of Tikkun Olam. Jews today speak of tikkun olam as a central Jewish precept, and concerned for literally “fixing the world” by making it a better place through activities often called “social action” is certainly at the heart of a Jewish perspective on life. That meaning of the term tikkun olam, however, is itself very new in Jewish history. The first occurrences of the phrase tikkun olam in the Jewish tradition appear in the literature of the classical Rabbis. They are the people whose work first appears in the Mishnah, Midrash Halakhah, and Tosefta, (the earliest compilations of the oral tradition, all edited around 200 C.E.) and then in the Talmud (edited around 500 C.E.) and the various books of the Midrash Aggadah, which were edited from the fifth to the twelfth centuries C.E. The Mishnah records that the Rabbis instituted a number of changes in Jewish law “for the sake of tikkun olum.” In these first usages, the term probably means, as the Reuben Alcalay and Evan-Shoshan dictionaries suggest as their first definitions, guarding the established order in the physical or social world (with derivatives t’kinah meaning “standardization” and t’kinut meaning “normalcy, regularity, orderliness, propriety”). In the twelfth century, Maimonides expanded on this idea considerably, claiming that the Rabbis created all of the rulings, customs and decrees--that is, the entire rabbinic legal tradition--in order “to strengthen the religion and order (fix) the world.” In this first meaning of the term, then, rabbis order the world by making Jewish law apply fairly and effectively to their contemporary circumstances. They thus structure the world with proper proportion and balance. The next time the phrase is used with a different meeting occurs in the second paragraph of the Alenu prayer, which was first used in Jewish liturgy in the fourteenth century. That paragraph is much less often sung than the first and therefore is much less well known, even though it is the core of the prayer’s meaning. The first paragraph says that we have a duty to praise God for making us Jews a distinctive nation and for creating and ruling the world. The second paragraph then states “Therefore we hope in You, Adonai, our God, soon to see the glory of Your might, sweeping idolatry away so that false gods will be utterly destroyed, to fix [perfect] the world by [to be] the Kingdom of the Almighty (letakken olam b’malkhut shaddai) so that all human beings will pray [call out] in Your Name, bringing all the earth’s wicked back to You, repentant. Then all who dwell on earth will acknowledge and know that to You every knee must bend in every tongue pledge loyalty. Before You, Adonai, our God, they will bow and prostrate themselves, and they will give honor to Your Name. All of them will accept the yoke of Your Sovereignty, and You will rule over them soon and forever; for sovereignty is Yours, and You will rule with honor always, and forever, as it is written in Your Torah [Exodus 15:18], “Adonai will rule forever and ever.” Furthermore, it is said [in the Prophets, specifically, Zachariah 14:9], “And Adonai will be acknowledged Sovereign over the whole Earth, on that day Adonai will be one and His Name one.” Notice several things about the concept as it appears in this paragraph. First, because God chose us, created the whole world, and rules it alone (that is, without the aid of any other god), we hope and pray that God will fix the world. This is definitely not the modern notion that we human beings are called to do that. Second, the fixing about which the prayer speaks is not what moderns call “social action.” It is rather theological--that Adonai will be recognized by all human beings (literally, “all creatures of flesh”) as the one and sole God. God's rule and therefore God's moral standards will become absolute and universal, forcing “all the evil [people] of the earth” to turn to God and, presumably, change their ways. A fixed world will thus involve universal recognition and acceptance of a clear and exclusive standard of behavior, with everyone fixing his or her attitudes and behavior to conform to that standard. But while this prayer envisions a moral renaissance as a corollary to universal recognition of one and only one God, it does not speak of a world rid of war, poverty, dissention, and disrespect--except, perhaps, implicitly. That is, everyone following God's rules and aspiring to God's ideals for human beings may well produce a world in which those limitations no longer exist. However, that kind of moral ideal is not the explicit message of the prayer. It is, rather, an expression of hope for a theological ideal, that of monotheism.