Tikkun Olam: Restoring the wholeness
Rev. Edmund Robinson
Unitarian Universalist Church of Wakefield
September 16, 2001

	Let me begin with this story from Martin Buber's "Tales of the Hasidim": Rabbi Barukh's grandson Yehiel was once playing hide and seek with his friend.  He hid himself well and waited for his playmate to find him. After waiting a long time, he emerged from his hiding place to discover that his friend had gone home. Now Yehiel understood that his friend had never bothered to look for him and he cried to his grandfather over his friend's faithlessness. Rabbi Barukh cried as well. "Even God cries," said the maggid. "God says, 'I hide and no one wants to find me.'"
	I think that this might express our situation up until this past Tuesday.  Many of us find God hidden, a complete mystery, and we don’t really care about finding her.  We go along day to day and figure we can do without God, can do without asking the big questions.  Indeed why should we care?  We have money in the bank, the ATM machine delivers for us like a cow gives milk, we have enough to eat and a roof over our heads and we have lots of gadgets that keep us occupied and good friends and CDs and movies and books, as much entertainment as we could ever want, keeping boredom at bay.  Why would we need God?
	And then something happens.  It may happen to us on a personal scale, a diagnosis of cancer, a divorce, loss of a job.  Or it may happen on a very public scale and be spread out over all the TV networks, newspapers and Internet.  Something happens to the basic structure of meaning which we carry with us through our lives.  It goes awry, it seems to come apart.  The explanations we have for things don’t work anymore.
	We are hungry for words that will help us make sense of these things.  Humans are the meaning-making animal, and the principal way we have of dealing with threats to our sense of well-being is to try to understand them, to fit them into our conceptions of the world.  The news media recognize this and the airwaves and print columns have been filled not just with information but with the words of commentators and pundits trying to make sense of it.  Many of you have come here this morning hoping for the same thing.
	What I want to do to try to help us all is to come a bit out of left field and discuss the topic I had planned to discuss today, but in a way that I hope might relate it to our present situation.  I also invite any of you who care to stay after coffee hour to a talkback downstairs.
	This week on the calendar marks the beginning of the High Holy Days in Judaism, and in recognition of that fact I have usually wanted, as a non-Jew honoring Jewish tradition, to lift up some aspect of that tradition.  As I have said before, I have been profoundly moved in this past year by James Carroll’s book, Constantine’s Sword, a detailed and comprehensive account of Christianity’s systemic 2000-year hostility toward Judaism and the Jewish people, culminating in the unfathomable catastrophe in Europe between 1935 and 1945.  One of the ideas that that book introduced to me was the concept of Tikkun Olam, and I resolved to return to it to explore it in greater detail.
	Tikkun Olam is translated as “restoring the world,”  and it is a phrase widely used in contemporary Jewish life as a synonym for what we would call social action.  Tikkun is also the name of a respected magazine of liberal thought.  Most people connected with communal Jewish life will know the phrase, though I don’t know how many would know the doctrine which is behind it.
	That doctrine is part of kabbalah, or the mystical branch of Jewish thought, which essentially dominated in the Fifteenth through the Eighteenth Centuries of the Common Era, though its origins were much earlier than that.  Tikkun Olam was one of the three parts of the radical theory of creation formulated by a man named Isaac Luria, who lived from 1534 to 1572, and taught in the town of Safed, in Palestine.  To attempt to understand the doctrine, it helps to put his life in context.
	In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Jewish though had been dominated by the falusofs, the philosophers who resurrected Aristotle and de-emphasized much the was distinctively Jewish about Jewish thought.  This coincided with a relative liberalization and acceptance of Jews within European Christian society.  But in the fifteenth century Christianity hardened its attitude, and one European city after another expelled its Jewish citizens.  This wave of expulsions culminated in the decree by Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492 giving the Jews of Spain the choice of converting to Christianity or leaving.  
	This wave of expulsions resulted in a massive movement of Jews from Europe into North Africa and the Middle East.  When Isaac Luria was born a generation after the Spanish expulsion, there had been a retrenching of conservative Jewish practice and there was a hunger for some explanation of how the people whose most sacred texts told them they were God’s chosen could find themselves homeless in the world.
	Taking off from an earlier Spanish book called the Zofar, Luria devised a highly detailed and very complex metaphysical creation myth.  I don’t pretend to understand more than the basic outlines, and I can hit only the highest of high points here, drastically oversimplifying to get out those ideas we may be able to relate to. I am grateful to Gershem Sholem’s book on Kabbalah and to Karen Armstrong’s fine book, A History of God, which I’d also commend to any of you interested in the relations between the three great monotheistic religions Judaism, Christianity and Islam.
	There are three pillars of Luria’s creation doctrine: tsimtsum, the breaking of the vessels, and Tikkun Olam.  Tsimtsum means “withdrawal.”  Luria’s concept begins with God as God is in God’s self, not as revealed to humans through history or the Bible, and not as any humans can know it, using the neuter pronoun to avoid attributing gender.  The kabbalists use the Hebrew words en sof to refer to this first godhead.  En sof occupies the entire world, leaving no space for creation, since it is impossible to imagine an area which is not God, since this would constitute a limitation on God’s infinity.  Thus creation is only possible if God contracts out of a space, leaving a hole in God’s person within which creation of the world can take place.  Thus God sort of withdraws to a perimeter.
	Into the space left by this withdrawal come a variety of things whose complexity verges on the extreme.  There are ten emanations from the Godhead called sefirot.  The most important of these is the force called din, or judgment.  Each emanation has two aspects, a circle and a line.  The circle is purer than the line, but the line is associated with humans, and into this space there is a primordial man, called Adam Kadmon, and emanations of light also issue from his head.  
	The emanations were contained within vessels which consisted of weaker lights.  Somehow as to the upper three sefirot, the vessels managed to contain the light within them, but as to the lower seven, the light struck them all at once and the vessels were not strong enough to contain it.  Six of them shattered and the seventh one cracked.  Some of the light retraced its path to its sources, but the rest was hurled down with the vessels themselves, and from their shards the kelippot, the dark forces, took substance.  These shards are the source of dark matter.
	This brings us to the third aspect of the doctrine, Tikkun, the restoration of the world.  This is the most complex and important part of the doctrine.  Part of the restoration is accomplished by the forces of light originating from Adam Kadmon’s forehead, which create new structures called parzufim, which literally mean faces.  There are faces representing a male principle and a female principle, and they couple together both erotically and intellectually under the influence of the rising sparks from the broken vessels.  From their union comes about a new face, which comprises the six lower sefirot or emanations.  The self manifestation of God, en sof, takes place mainly through this newly created being through processes called birth, suckling, immaturity and maturity.  
	Now these stages and the way they work out have some interest, but the most important thing for us is that although the Tikkun of the broken vessels has almost been completed by these supernal lights, and the processes stemming from their activity, certain concluding actions have been reserved for humans.  To quote Sholem, “These are the ultimate aim of creation, and the completion of Tikkun, which is synonymous with the redemption, depends on man’s performing them.  Herein lies the close connection between the doctrine of Tikkun and the religious and contemplative activity of man, which must struggle with and overcome not only the historic exile of the Jewish people but also the mystic exile of the Shekhinah, which was caused by the breaking of the vessels.”
	Now you may be saying, this is all very well for the New Agers or those with interest in arcane philosophy, but what does it have to do with me?  And more sharply, how does it speak to any of us in the flood of grief and fear and rage and other feelings unleashed by the atrocities of last Tuesday, to say nothing of the more quiet but equally poignant tragedies such as the death of a child this week in Wakefield. 	Some of us will have an additional reaction: how can this possibly speak to me since I don’t believe in God – or Santa Claus or the tooth fairy for that matter.  But I don’t think the humanists are off the hook, as I’ve said before.  Being humanist doesn’t exempt one from the hard theological questions, it just puts them in new language.  All of us have faith in something; some call it God, some cal it goodness, some cal it beauty, some call it love. The Universalist affirmation of 1935 equated God with love.  Our faith in something is tested by events such as last Tuesday’s.
	And I should add that the concept of Tikkun Olam works for contemporary Jews without Isaac Luria’s creation myth that I just described.  When I told her what I was preaching on, a committed but secular Jewish friend yesterday told me that Tikkun Olam was the central organizing principle of her life.  When I asked if she knew the origin of the idea, she guessed, “the Bible?”  	The fundamental notion of Tikkun Olam is that we are all responsible for restoring the harmony of the world, and in this it is little different from UU ideas of social action. But I think the creation myth adds to this notion the important additional ideas that there was an initial withdrawal, the tsimtsum, of God or spirit or universal love from the world in order to bring it into being, and that there was an accidental event, the breaking of the vessels, which introduced disharmony.  
	I think this is surprisingly consistent with the 20th Century process theology notion of a God who is not all-powerful, who does not pull all the strings.  So God is not at the control of the airplane that crashes into the building.  God loves us and has created us with free will, and one consequence of this is that people motivated by great hatred can do acts of great harm to innocent others.  God does not and cannot intervene to prevent these acts, but God weeps with us at their consequences.  
	This free will, less-than-all powerful God position has become mainstream; it was articulated by several Protestant and Catholic clergy in the Globe Spiritual Matters column yesterday.  It is opposed to the main currents of Universalist theology as it existed before merger, which rejected free will and affirmed an omnipotent God.  We need not resolved these old debates here for they are conducted at an intellectual level that doesn’t respond to what we need emotionally.
	I would rather see Luria’s myth as a kind of metaphor.  Our world has been shattered.  Our sense of American exceptionalism, the feeling that international terrorism happens to other countries, has been smashed.  There is a well-known psychological effect that happens when we are victims of a violent crime or even an auto accident; our sense of a zone of safety around our bodies leaves us for months or years afterwards, and we feel vulnerable, and are inclined to overreact to anything that our instincts tell us might be a threat.
	So it is here.  We feel exposed.  Many of us are afraid to travel.  There is every prospect that the  security measures now being instituted at airports will be far more burdensome on the traveling public without actually making anyone any safer.
	That we should feel great anger and rage along with our sorrow and grief is inevitable and even healthy.  Anger is one face of grief.  The command to love our enemy does not mean that we deny to ourselves what our feelings are; in fact, it enjoins on us the responsibility to be mindful of those feelings and their role in stimulating action.
	But if we are to rebuild our world, if the shattering entails a Tikkun, a restoring, then anger cannot be either our motivating force or our guide.  A love of the world, a wish to see God or love rebuilt, means that we must understand the motives of the people who perpetrated this attack.  To understand those motives  does not mean to condone the act, but to act without understanding is to ensure that our actions will only shatter things worse.
	We are brought up by these events forcefully against the reality that there are people in this world who reject western capitalist democracy, the secular world built by science and technology and symbolized by the World Trade Center.  Indeed, there are many people critical of this world.  We liberals who benefit from it also criticize it.  Religious groups such as the Amish in America try to shun the modern world as much as possible, though they would never take arms against it.
	This general antipathy towards the modern west is characteristic of Islamic fundamentalism, which is not all of Islam by any means, and only small groups within Islamic fundamentalism would consider terrorism to be legitimate.   But the presence of fundamentalism as a political force in the Muslim world means that there is a risk that reactions by our country could polarize opinion against us.
	This is why I agree so fervently with James Carroll in yesterday’s Globe when he says that the better response would be to use law, not war.  If this atrocity was the work of Bin Laden, use the resources of diplomacy to get him and his cohorts extradited to stand trial in the US.  By all means, he should be stopped from further acts of terrorism, but a war on him risks making him a martyr.
	The world we rebuild, the God we rebuild from the shattered remnants of this atrocity can be one in which religious differences are respected and tolerated and all brought together to condemn violence, or it can be one in which further violence is used to inflame passions and prejudices and create an endless cycle of retribution.  The doctrine of Tikkun Olam expresses an absolute preference for restoration over retribution, and on that basis alone, I think it speaks to us in our present situation.  Let us rebuild a better God and a better humanity out of the ruins of this day.  Shalom, salaam, and  amen.