INTRODUCTION


On the second night of Passover in April 2009, several White House staffers gathered in the Old Family Dining Room for Seder night, the Jewish ceremonial dinner that takes place on the first two evenings of the festival. It was not just the setting that made this night different from all other nights, but the host: President Barack Obama. Never before had a Seder taken place in the White House itself, and never in history had a sitting president attended, but from then on the Seder night was an annual fixture in the presidential calendar over both of Obama’s terms.

Of all the many Jewish occasions that could have been adopted by the new president, why the Seder? Partly, it was sentimental: Obama had joined an impromptu Seder night on the campaign trail the year before and had pledged a repeat of the event: “Next year in the White House.” And partly, it was tactical: upon coming into office his administration had quickly soured relations with Israel, and some positive headlines in the Jewish press might confound critics and reassure the wider Jewish community, which had voted overwhelmingly for Obama in the election.

But the Seder also had a much deeper appeal. Obama was no stranger to this ritual—he had attended a Seder every year for the previous decade and understood its significance in the liberal imagination. The themes he invoked when he opened the first presidential Seder—universalism and the struggle for liberation—are at the core of an ideology with which he was intimately familiar: tikkun olam. In numerous speeches, the president declared how this Hebrew concept—healing the world—had “enriched and guided my life.” Now it would inspire his administration. From his nomination acceptance speech—which he described as “the moment our planet began to heal”—through the eight Passover Seders held during his tenure, this was the apotheosis of tikkun olam in America.

So what exactly is tikkun olam?

Essentially, tikkun olam is the Hebrew moniker for Jewish social justice, and the two terms are often used interchangeably (and will be in this book). As Jane Kanarek, a leader of the Conservative movement, usefully puts it, tikkun olam “is used throughout the Jewish world to summarize the efforts of Jewish social justice movements.”1 Given the superlative popularity of tikkun olam in the American Jewish community, David Saperstein, who has spent his life advocating for tikkun olam in the nation’s capital on behalf of the Reform movement, is entirely justified in describing social justice as “serving as the most common organizing principle of Jewish identity.”2

And what is social justice?

Social justice is a political philosophy that advocates the redistribution of income—and sometimes even wealth and other property—in order to achieve economic egalitarianism. It’s often used synonymously with the terms “economic justice” or “distributive justice.” In more recent decades, social justice has also come to include an agenda of permissive social policies that leave lifestyle questions to the discretion of the individual and promote gender diversity; an approach to foreign and defense policy that emphasizes multilateral diplomacy over military strength; a preference for comprehensive alternatives to the use of fossil fuels and nuclear energy for the sake of the environment; and other attitudes and policies associated predominantly with today’s left-wing political parties.3 (This assessment should not be controversial—your own experience ought to confirm it: just ask yourself what you think of when you hear the phrase “social justice,” and which politicians you think are more likely to refer to it.) Over the past several years, campus radicals have tried to impose even more extreme conceptions of social justice on their universities through protests over safe spaces and microaggressions, and increasingly perceive social justice through the prism of intersectionality, which portrays society as the Manichean struggle for justice by powerless victims against oppressive power-holders.

For our purposes, the most important point to keep in mind is that social justice is a political ideology. It isn’t concerned with just action toward one’s fellow—which is achieved by a virtuous citizenry and upheld by courts of law. Nor is it focused on charity or volunteering at the grassroots level, which are occasionally referred to as “social action” or “direct service.” While these localized efforts are sometimes subsumed within the category of social justice, ultimately social justice and its Jewish variant tikkun olam are about designing an economic and political system that guarantees certain economic and social outcomes. Social justice is about political change—therefore it inevitably takes the form of political activism. As the editors of Righteous Indignation: A Jewish Call for Justice, the bible of Jewish social justice, explain in their introduction to that volume:

Volunteering in soup kitchens is certainly an act benefitting the social good, as is visiting the sick and elderly. But direct service alone is simply not enough. Such action addresses only immediate needs and not root causes. Further, there are justice issues that cannot be addressed at all—foreign policy issues, for example—without political advocacy.4

The distinction between charity and social justice is put into even higher relief in the essay by Jonah Dov Pesner, a leading campaigner in the Reform movement, who regrets that “too often in Jewish communal life, we confuse service-oriented work at soup kitchens … with the work of redemptive social justice.” In fact, these sorts of projects can even distract us and “undermine our commitment to systemic change” (meaning fundamental and transformative change of our economic system and society).5 So be in no doubt: social justice isn’t about charity—it’s about politics. And it’s this political activism and its relationship to Judaism that interest us.

The most populous denominations, myriad independent organizations, and the leadership of American Jewry all espouse the politics of tikkun olam,6 and it has become embedded in all aspects of American Judaism—including education and worship at all ages. For young children, the PJ Library books, including Tikkun Olam Ted, “help to open the family discourse up to difficult topics surrounding tikkun olam.”7 As these children grow up, they will encounter tikkun olam repeatedly in the curricula of their day schools and Sunday schools,8 and also in their youth movement programming and summer camps.9 They will be invited to act on this education by organizations such as the Religious Action Center, which offers high school students L’Taken Seminars “designed to expose students to a variety of public policy issues, explore the Jewish values surrounding these issues, and teach the skills of an effective advocate.”10 The Panim el Panim seminars, offered by Panim, and the Or Tzedek program of the Jewish Council on Urban Affairs, offer similar training.11 For their efforts, particular teenagers’ outstanding contributions to the cause of tikkun olam are recognized by the Helen Diller Family Foundation through their Diller Teen Tikkun Olam Awards, which “celebrate teens who have demonstrated remarkable leadership and are actively engaged in projects which embody the values of tikkun olam.”12

At college, engaged Jewish students will likely participate in programming by Hillel International: The Foundation for Campus Jewish Life, which “helps students find balance in being distinctively Jewish and universally human by encouraging them to pursue … social justice [and] tikkun olam (repairing the world).”13 Jewish students and young adult Jews might intern or work at any of the many organizations devoted to tikkun olam. Before doing so, they might receive training through Bend the Arc’s Jeremiah Fellowship. Or they might go on JOIN for Justice’s Jewish Organizing Fellowship. Or maybe the AMOS Fellowship at Uri L’Tzedek. Or perhaps they could enlist in Avodah Corps.14 As young adults, they might live at, or participate in the activities of, a Moishe House, which houses a handful of Jewish community activists in cities across the United States so that they can host Jewish-themed events for their peers. One of the four priorities of such houses is to “repair the world.”15

Finally, American Jewish adults will find themselves in the synagogue or temple hearing rabbinical sermons on tikkun olam, and may find their liturgy edited to emphasize the concept.16 They might read one of the various periodicals committed to tikkun olam, such as Tikkun magazine and Zeek, or the many other journals to which writers in the field of tikkun olam contribute. Some adults might volunteer with campaigns such as the Jewish United Fund’s Tikkun Olam Volunteers Network,17 or join one of Tivnu’s programs on the West Coast if they want “to do meaningful, physical tikkun olam.”18 And of course they could sit on their synagogue’s own tikkun olam committee. Those who work as Jewish educators might be recognized by the Covenant Foundation as having “distinguished themselves in myriad realms, including … tikkun olam” and be honored with a Covenant Award.19

But no matter their involvement, American Jewish adults will be living in a community shaped by grants made by major Jewish philanthropic funds dedicated to tikkun olam, including the Jewish Federations of North America, which represents 148 Jewish federations, distributes more than $2 billion every year, and cites tikkun olam as the first of its three core values; the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation, which values “a commitment to fulfill the imperative of tikkun olam (repairing the world)”; the Jacob and Hilda Blaustein Foundation, which grants money to several organizations dedicated to tikkun olam; the Rose Youth Foundation, which teaches children how to “practice the Jewish traditions of tikkun olam and tzedakah and … about responsible grant-making”; the Tikkun Olam Women’s Foundation, which seeks to “honor our traditions of … tikkun olam”; Jewish Helping Hands, a grant-making organization that “invites the participation and support of all those interested in joining in tikkun olam”; and the Jewish Funders Network, whose members give $1 billion in grants every year and the first of whose “values” is tikkun olam.20

The political nature of social justice is borne out not only by the activism of the tikkun olam movement but also by its literature, epitomized by Righteous Indignation. The essays in this book—contributed by leaders of the tikkun olam movement and doyens of American Jewry—tackle the entire range of issues in American politics. There are chapters on economic issues such as economic justice and the labor movement; social issues such as abortion, stem-cell research, same-sex marriage, feminism, and transgenderism; constitutional and judicial issues such as gun rights and incarceration policy; immigration, healthcare, and education reform; foreign policy issues such as the War in Iraq, the crisis in Darfur, globalization, and the global AIDS crisis; ecological issues such as environmentalism, toxic waste, and renewable energy; domestic issues such as interfaith families, domestic violence, and disability; and Israel and antisemitism. Clearly, tikkun olam goes well beyond visiting the sick.

The agenda of Jewish social justice is all-encompassing, and naturally the approach is uniformly leftist. We’re talking higher taxes, increased regulation of business, big labor, expanded entitlements, condemnation of any limitations on sexual expression, reduced military spending, greater reliance on international law and multilateral organizations, drastic overhauls to our economy and living standards in the name of ecology, and so on. The tools needed to repair the world are all liberal ones. This isn’t charity—it’s leftist politics. And it’s all in the name of Judaism.

From Abraham to Amos, the Hebrew Bible instructs Jews in particular and mankind in general to repair our damaged planet, mend our broken economy, fix our unjust society, and perfect our world. Tikkun olam is a divine commandment—it is Judaism’s first principle and most fundamental message. The Torah teaches that the greatest service a Jew can do before God and for humanity is to heal the world—to pursue social justice.

Or so everyone thinks. Tikkun olam may have seduced American Jewry and flattered the right gentiles in the White House, but the time has come to challenge its domination. The truth is that tikkun olam has no basis in Judaism. It was conceived by Jews who had rejected the faith of their fathers and midwifed by radicals who saw it as a pretext to appropriate Jewish texts and corrupt religious rituals—such as the Seder—to further political ends. Tikkun olam represents the bastardization of an ancient civilization and, for all the talk of liberation, the enslavement of Judaism to liberal politics. So complete has been the equation of Judaism with liberalism under the guise of tikkun olam that when, a few years back, a prominent politician was asked how he could be Jewish and yet also be conservative, he was flummoxed.

Social justice is a liberal political program, and the purpose of this book is to investigate and decry the association of that program with Judaism. For the avoidance of misunderstanding, it should be reiterated that social justice is a political ideology, and that is what is at issue. This book makes no suggestion that charity, good works, and grassroots welfare efforts targeted at Jews or gentiles—matters that are sometimes conflated with tikkun olam but that are in fact different—are in any way objectionable or undesirable. All Americans have the responsibility to care for their fellow citizens of other ethnic and religious backgrounds and nothing in this book should be interpreted to suggest otherwise.

This book sets out to slaughter the sacred cow of tikkun olam, at whose udder too many unlearned Jews have suckled. But notwithstanding the many defects of tikkun olam—for which the leaders of the Jewish social justice movement that promotes it are to be blamed—the many ordinary American Jews who want to heal the world are ultimately simply doing what feels in their hearts and seems in their eyes to be right. But the Bible demands that Jews not simply pursue what appeals to their hearts and draws their eyes, but that they stay loyal to the covenant between their people and its God and obey His commandments (Deut.15:39). And tikkun olam is no commandment.

Not only has tikkun olam enabled the misappropriation of Scripture, but its stridently universalistic aspirations undermine Jewish Peoplehood and in so doing give sanction to anti-Zionism and assimilation. This state of affairs is not sustainable. Tikkun olam is not the balm to heal the world but the disorder that afflicts American Judaism. If the treatment of tikkun olam in this book goes some way to ameliorating the condition of American Jewry, then it will have been worthwhile. And if there should be pushback, let it be, as the sages of the Talmud put it, a dispute for the sake of Heaven.


Copyright © 2018 by Jonathan Neumann