Actualizing Tikkun Olam

Sometimes I don’t get it!  If you mention the word “healing”, someone invariably thinks you’re talking about new-age innovation. When in actuality, healing is the backbone of Judaism. In the very second paragraph of the Amidah, the central Jewish prayer, the siddur (the prayer book) declares, “He sustains the living with kindness, supports the fallen and heals the sick”. Many of us think of healing as a curative intention when we get sick, especially when medical science fails to help. Most of us believe that healing may benefit us personally, never realizing its other dimensions—mending relations between people, calming disputes within a nation, pacifying conflicts among countries and repairing the damage we do to the environment. Healing is what Jews pray for.

The healing of anything, according to Jewish mystical beliefs, depends on a certain course of events. It postulates an original unity, a state of perfection and wholeness. Then some traumatic event causes the unity to shatter, which demands the subsequent repair back towards wholeness. Rabbi Isaac Luria, the 16th Century mystic whose teachings clarified the obtuse prose of the Zohar, the classic opus of Jewish mysticism, formulated this theory. He labeled it Shevirat HaKelim, the shattering of the vessels which concludes with Tikkun Olam, the attempt towards the ultimate repair. In order to understand the process better, we have to think in terms of the shattering, the split of the original unity and its subsequent repair. All illness, physical, emotional or mental is a function of the split.

The question is—how do we repair the split and actualize Tikkun Olam, the three hundred-year-old expression for healing?  The story of Eden clues us into the answer. Before tasting the fruit, Adam and Eve represented the original unity, but afterwards they knew good and evil, a metaphor for all the diversity in the universe. At that moment, their world, as they had known it, shattered. The expulsion from the Garden initiates the start of their journey towards repairing the duality.  Every life situation we encounter contains both good and evil or positive and negative.  Our tendency is to cling to the good and reject the evil; that’s human nature. In order to heal, we have to learn to accept both sides of the equation and develop a new stance—reconciliation between what we want and what we renounce. Any time we could locate that conciliatory position, we take a step up the spiritual ladder. The Jewish technology for reaching higher spiritual levels is through heartfelt prayer—the intense focusing on God’s holy name centers us between the extremes.

Prayer is the environment in which we heal both body and mind, but lets take it to the next level, healing the split between two or more people. Sometimes relationships can become strained. We become resentful when someone says something that hurts our feelings. People regularly create situations that’s irritating or upsetting. Other people can become demanding and overbearing. There are endless reasons why people don’t get along with one another. When relationships becomes labored, it’s because we play into someone else’s behavior. We allow it to happen. Patching matters up is merely not participating in their game any longer, but learning to rise to another notch on our spiritual scorecards. By operating from the center between the extremes, our adversary realizes that we are no longer playing the game, they quit; they have no one to play with any longer.

There are other ways of finding center. The practice of meditation on a single object of concentration teaches us to tune out the chatter of the many voices clamoring in our minds all day. We can also summon the “still small voice” by learning to accept the unpleasant side of troublesome situations. That happens by experiencing the consequent discomfort, without “sweeping it under the rug” which, in itself, ultimately leads to Tikkun Olam.

In the national arena, I don’t think Americans ever found real peace or healing from political or social activism. It only divides the nation between the issues. The social battles, from Roe vs. Wade to social equality, still rage on to this day. No amount of protesting, picketing or marching has ever solved our social ills. Whenever long lasting changes take effect, it’s the result of a communal shift in consciousness, a transformation of group awareness to a new spiritual plateau. Even though, there are still fierce pockets of resistance to many social changes—gay rights, women’s equality and integrated neighborhoods—of recent years. It may take more years of prayer and meditation to bring about lasting Tikkun Olam.

On the international scene, we’re all much too aware of the conflict between the state of Israel and the Palestinian authority. All the bargaining, the negotiations, politically or economically, doesn’t seem to do either side any good, as current events demonstrates.  It just leads to more killing and more destruction. It never fails to surprise me how all these intelligent, educated statesmen, who seem to be concerned with social justice, cannot see eye to eye on peace. They appear to be more like school kids needing to settle a score.  Could it be that peace is not a matter of intellectual acumen, but more a matter of spiritual sensitivity? As an alternative to the futility and the devastation, we could transform ourselves. Peace doesn’t come from the barrel of a gun; it comes from the heart.

Healing the environment—conserving our natural resources, cleansing our air and purifying our water supply—has become a program of self-imposed social action built upon fear; the fear that we will tragically destroy ourselves. It doesn’t come from the heart. Tikkun Olam is heart centered healing. The Kabbalah teaches that everyone is a world unto himself and in that light we create our own reality. At anytime we can change our reality by positioning ourselves in the center, between the extremes. If we change ourselves, we ultimately repair the world.