Tikun Olam-תקון עולם: Make the World a Better Place

No, I haven’t had the honor of Marty Peretz attacking this blog yet. But he has gone after J Street, Ezra Klein and the misuse (to his feeble Jewish mind) of the term tikun olam. I knew the attacks on J Street would come fast and furious, so I’m not surprised that Peretz has jumped into the fray. I am a bit taken aback that he has widened the attack with a vicious and ignorant assault on both Ezra Klein–for invoking Heschel in his support for J Street–and that long-standing Jewish phrase. Thanks to Gershom Gorenberg, who has weighed in on the debate himself, for bringing the interesting story to my attention:

If you suspect you see a charlatan in a Jew wait for him to utter the words, “tikun olam.” “Repair of the world.” Big idea, revolutionary, utopian, progressive. In the mishna torah where the phrase first appears it really means tweaking, at best, adjustment. Imagine how many silly sermons and speeches have been given with this deliberately falsified phrase as their text.

First, you’ll notice that Reb Marty has somehow secured smicha and is opining on Jewish mysteries about whose meaning he has no special interpretive aptitude. Tikun does not mean “tweaking” or “adjustment.” It means mending or repairing. And as Gershom Gorenberg, a Jew well-versed in traditional texts, points out the term doesn’t appear first in the “mishnah torah,” but rather in the Mishnah. That little mistake makes Marty off by only 1,000 years give or take a decade or two since the Mishnah Torah was written by Rambam a thousand years after the Mishnah was compiled. Marty–before you try commenting on Jewish tradition you might want to take a few adult education Talmud courses with your local rav. I’d also urge him to read Rabbi Elliot Dorff’s seminal work on this issue of tikun olam.

I’ve always thought Marty was an intellectually coarse individual. But in the following passage he shows that he is just plain coarse. In fact, this is language I’d expect to find at Masada2000 and not in the pages of The New Republic:

Heschel marched with Dr. King…But, believe me, he had his standards, and he wouldn’t have marched with the two-bit Jewish leaders [those uttering the phrase tikun olam] who are still excited to utter Arafat’s name. (In 1993, they were so were so excited to see him at the White House that they almost pissed in their pants…and in their panties.)

I don’t know many Jewish leaders, two-bit or otherwise who “are still excited to utter Arafat’s name.” I suspect this is a bit of Marty’s typically overblown and nonsensical politically incendiary rhetoric. I do know many people, Jews, non-Jews, a president, cabinet secretaries and members of Congress who were quite excited to see Yitzhak Rabin and Yaser Arafat shake hands at the White House. Maybe those are the people he’s referring to who were pissing in their pants and panties??

All of us who write blogs sometimes write infelicitous, awkward phrases which we edit when we notice them. Marty has done this in spades but hasn’t noticed what a mess he’s made of the English language here:

It isn’t as if Heschel hadn’t written of the Israel that is a Jewish sovereign state and which sovereignty, it is my guess, that truly troubles Klein…

If you try you can sort of follow Marty’s meandering mind, but he sure makes it hard.

With the remainder of the above quoted passage, Peretz in his typically pugilistic way accuses J Street board members Ezra Klein, Matt Ygleisias and others of being anti-Zionists. Can anyone take this idiot seriously:

…and Matthew Yglesias and many of the other cold Jews or almost Jews or non-Jews who cannot stomach Zionism because it is of this world.

J Street is actually a group that is pro-Israel. Says so all over its website. But Marty doesn’t let that stop him. He uses the anti-Zionism trope as a sword to slay a dragon that isn’t even there. Typical.

I also take strong exception to Peretz’s distortion of Heschel’s notion of the impermissibility of neutrality in the face of moral evil. The former, in this quotation, seems to believe that Heschel would be as coarsely pro-Israel in the current iteration of the conflict as Peretz himself:

Having wrestled Heschel’s idea of neutrality out of context, Klein wants his Jews and others not to be neutral towards Israel. Klein wants them to feel anger towards Israel, while Heschel wanted them to love the land as the people, the miracle as the commonplace…

Of course Heschel would take sides in the conflict. He would take Israel’s side…and the Palestinian’s side. He would be critical not of Israel, but of Israeli policy. He would advocate for peace, for tolerance; against bloodshed, against hatred. Any Jewish simpleton with the faintest idea of Heschel would know this. But not the morally blind and obtuse like Peretz. For him, Heschel would be roaring like Jabotinsky for Jewish victory in its war against the Palestinian people.

If we need any further proof of where A.J. Heschel would stand on this issue we have only to look to his daughter, Susannah Heschel, his familial and spiritual heir. Her commitment to Jewish social justice and Israeli-Palestinian peace speaks volumes about where her father would come down on the issue.

Marty–go hang your head in shame. You’re the one who’s the “charlatan.” You don’t know Jewish tradition. You don’t know your Heschel. What do you know?

Returning to the phrase tikun olam, Gershom correctly notes that the phrase in the Zohar and Kabbalah connotes the Jew’s yearning to perfect the world and bring messianic redemption by performing mitzvot. There has always been an element of social justice involved in the performance of certain mitzvot. Indeed, the social justice imperative is at the heart of Judaism going all the way back to our Prophets and farther.

Contemporary Jews have adapted this ancient phrase for today and used it as shorthand to denote the Jewish commitment to perfecting the world through acts of justice and lovingkindness. For right-wing Jews like Marty who are deeply offended by such perversion (in their eyes) of an ancient tradition–all I can say is that even God is not on their side. In the Talmud, there is a debate between a rabbi and his colleagues about a particular point of halacha. The rabbi says God is on my side and summons a bat kol (”heavenly voice”) to confirm this. His fellow rabbis are not impressed. The law sides with them. Even God, who should know what his original intention was regarding halacha, is bested when the rabbis innovate.

Innovation is allowed in Jewish tradition. Consider Rabbenu Tam, prozbul and scores of other innovative halachic concepts which rabbis devised to deal with new social and economic conditions. At the time doubtless there were rabbinic figures who objected to what they saw perhaps as creating legal fictions. But in time, the new interpretations were accepted, even embraced. Jewish law is not immutable as Antonin Scalia would have you believe the U.S. constitution is. It is an ever-changing set of concepts always firmly rooted in the text but never frozen in time.

Tikun Olam is a phrase we can be proud of and our use of it is fully within our tradition’s legacy of both change and continuity.

tags ezra-klein, gershom-gorenberg, halacha, j street, martin-peretz, the-new-republic, theological innovation, tikun-olam

Let me start this post by saying that I support Barack Obama. But when Marty Peretz starts saying nice things about your candidate you know something’s up. Marty Peretz is the worst type of pro-Israel propagandist. He’s so far out in right field when it comes to Israel that there’s only a shade of difference between his views and those of Avigdor Lieberman or Bibi Netanyahu. In fact, if I was a bit more conspiratorial I’d say that an embrace from Marty is sort of like the Don’s giving you that fatal final hug before his henchmen mow you down in a hail of bullets. Maybe Marty knows how people like me would react and has deliberately made nice with Barack to make us hold our noses when we think of voting for him.

But seriously, a Marty Peretz endorsement is very troubling. With friends like him you don’t need enemies.

In the Jerusalem Post column Peretz actually argues with a straight face no support whatsoever that Obama would be more “pro-Israel” (read, pliant) than Clinton. His bile against the latter is astounding. This type of statement makes you wonder what Peretz is smoking:

…Even the most moderate Palestinians now assume that future discussions will start where Clinton left off. It is good to know that Obama understands why that won’t work.

I’m not one to give praise to the New Republic(an) in this blog. But I have to give them credit for publishing Gregory Levey’s story about Obama’s testy relationship with the pro-Israel Jewish community. He begins with the e mail smear campaign recently sweeping the inboxes of Jews throughout the country. Interestingly, an Obama staffer conjectures on the source of both the e mail and the mailing list used to circulate it. This passage begins with an especially telling quotation from Mort Klein which I couldn’t pass up:

A little while ago, I told Mort Klein, president of the influential Zionist Organization of America, that I was writing an article about Barack Obama.

“You mean Barack Mohammed Hussein Obama?” he asked, laughing.

Klein quickly stressed that he was joking, and that he didn’t put any stock in the anonymous e-mail circulating that claims Obama is not only a closet Muslim–and that his middle name is Mohammed–but also that the senator from Illinois is part of an Islamic conspiracy to destroy the U.S. by winning its highest office. He had, however, certainly received the defamatory e-mail, as well as another that alleges that Obama’s church is a racist and anti-Semitic institution that is more committed to Africa than to the United States.

Klein is far from alone. The Internet libel seems to have been directed in part at the Jewish community, and in recent weeks, these two emails have landed in the inboxes of thousands of Jews across the country. In fact, an adviser to the Obama campaign told me that he suspects the emails were originally sent using the mailing list of a Jewish nonprofit in Washington. He added that they may have originated with Middle East hawks skeptical about Obama’s approach to the region, but because the e-mail campaign has ramped up in both intensity and scope following Obama’s victory at the Iowa caucus, he believes that the candidate’s political foes may be pushing it.

“One can draw inferences on who might have interest in this spread,” he said.

Indeed one can. Can we surmise which “Jewish nonprofit in Washington” might’ve been the source of the e mail list? Would its acronym consist of five letters beginning with “A?” I think so. Then the question becomes: how did the spreaders of the smear get AIPAC’s list? Were they given it by staffers or key volunteers? We may never know the answer. But this sure smells of the type of chicanery for which AIPAC is famed/notorious.

Unlike Peretz’s tripe in the Jerusalem Post, Levey’s piece is well-worth reading and thoughtfully articulated. He deftly characterizes AIPAC’s schizoid attitude toward Obama:

Several other people connected to Middle East lobbying in Washington have told me…that they believe there is a rift between the official positions of AIPAC on Obama and the feelings of a good deal of its membership, possibly including some of its major donors. Because AIPAC doesn’t endorse candidates directly, but often encourages its very active membership to get involved in campaigns and fund-raising on their own, how the AIPAC rank-and-file acts is not a matter of diktat; it’s an accurate barometer of how it feels. And according to The Jerusalem Post, “When it comes to the Jewish establishment of campaign donors, fundraisers, and political players, support for Clinton is estimated to be twice that for Obama (except in his home state of Illinois, where he has deep connections with the Jewish community).” With regards to the AIPAC bigwigs, one former AIPAC official recently said to me that he believes that Obama’s stated willingness to diplomatically engage with some of Israel’s most avowed enemies makes much of the organization’s leadership “uncomfortable”–though they would never say so publicly because of a reluctance to sour their relationship with a potential future president.

There you have it: Obama’s willingness to entertain dialogue and negotiation is what scares the pants off the AIPAC crowd. They’d much rather a George Bush who does nothing for six years and then scurries around in his final two like a chicken with his head cut off trying to appear to be doing something. That type of lassitude regarding the U.S. relationship with Israel is far preferable in AIPAC’s eyes to a president who actually wants to engage in the issues and resolve the conflict. For AIPAC knows that to resolve the conflict Israel’s interests will have to be compromised (as will the Palestinian’s). Any compromise of Israel’s interests whatsover is treif.

Michael Lerner has also dealt with this “war for Obama’s soul” over I-P policy in a recent e mail which he sent to his Tikkun supporters:

Obams’s problem is that his spiritual progressive worldview is in conflict with the demands of the older generation of Jews who control the Jewish institutions and define what it is to be pro-Jewish, while his base consists of many young Jews who support him precisely because he is willing to publicly stand for the values that they hold. We can expect that this tension will be central should Obama win the nomination. But once in office, whether Obama actually pursues policies that are in accord with his highest beliefs as a spiritual progressive, or whether he finds it “too unrealistic” to try to buck the spineless Democrats who will bow to the Israel Lobby automatically, depends on whether we can build a powerful enough movement of ordinary citizens to push for a peace that provides security for Israel and justice for the Palestinian people. Obama has made it clear he would want to do that.

Justin Elliot at Mother Jones writes a column that treads similar ground to Levey’s but with a decidedly more downbeat take on the prospects for Obama actually standing up to the Lobby should he ever become president.

tags aipac, gregory-levey, martin-peretz, Matter-of-Trust, muslim-smear, new-republic, Obamas-Israel-Shuffle, Trust-Obama-on-Israel