[Avodah] Tiqun Olam

[Micha Berger]

On Wed, Apr 02, 2008 at 02:29:45PM +0300, Michael Makovi wrote:
: B'vadia "b'malchut ShDY"!! I said that Rav Hirsch was writing a perush
: to Aleynu, and therefore, whatever he said perforce applied to tikkun
: olam whether or not he himself quoted the explict words "tikkun olam"
: (or l'taken olam; oto davar).

Except that RSRH defines lesaqein olam bemalkhus Shakkai in very bein
adam laMaqom terms -- that we teach the world to be willing subjects.
(Perhaps from: ein melekh belo am?)

The problem with the Wikipedia entry is this: Tikun Olam as the sunnum
bonum of Judaism as platitudes about social justice (and concern for
the ecosystem) is a new age invention. By equating RSRH's notion of
actually acting like we are kohanim to the rest of the world, being its
moral voice, to this travesty of Judaism is lumping him in with the very
movement he spent so much effort fighting. It's unfair to the founder
of austritt.

He believed in Social Justice, but not qua tiqun olam in the new age sense
(nor write about anything in the real sense of the original idiom).

: So all's that left, question wise, is whether "l'taken olam" = "tikkun
: olam". I'd say, l'taken olam, hu la'asot tikkun olam. Oto davar.

That's like an Arab saying that he isn't be an antisemite because he
loves all but a fraction of a percent of the world's half-billion or
so semites.

Regardless of what people with odd notions of religion also did to the
idiom, the original idiomization of "tiqun olam" still goes beyond what
we know of Yehoshua's kavanos. He even might have understood the Torah
using a paradigm much like the Ari's, but he doesn't say so in Aleinu.

The idiom took on additional meaning in the Ari's theory (in the
scientific sense -- a unifying notion that explains many phenomena)
of Qabbalah. To Lurianic Qabbalah, tiqun olam refers to "veyei'asu
kulam agudah achas la'asos Retzonekha beleivav shaleim" in terms of the
nitzotzos trapped within qelipos of the shevurei keilim. The people who
aren't yet in that agudah achas and the elements of the world that are
their tools are trapped in the remains of the keilim...

Tir'u baTov!
-Micha

-- 
Micha Berger             A sick person never rejects a healing procedure
micha at aishdas.org        as "unbefitting." Why, then, do we care what
http://www.aishdas.org   other people think when dealing with spiritual
Fax: (270) 514-1507      matters?              - Rav Yisrael Salanter