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

Oh please God, just what the blog world needs: Martin Peretz. David Carr, in his too solicitous profile of The New Republic lets us in on the secret. The pro-Israel hack who “never met an Israeli military offensive he didn’t like” (Carr’s words, my beliefs precisely) will join the blog world next week. I don’t know about you but I can’t wait (cue gag reflex):

Martin Peretz, the editor in chief of the magazine and one of its owners, is less sanguine about the possibilities of online journalism than Mr. Foer. “The political dialogue has been digitally enhanced, but it has also been digitally diminished,” he said. He plans to address these issues, among other topics, on — what else? — a new blog called The Spine.

“I would hope the name is accurate, that I have the kind of conviction that will lend itself to the medium,” he said.

Oh, I have no doubt he’ll have conviction. But that’s all he’ll have: full of sound and conviction signifying nothing. All the rest will be ideological propaganda for his right-wing pro-Israel demagoguery.

His blog will have its debut next week. Mr. Peretz, who recently signed on to a committee to raise funds for I. Lewis Libby Jr., Vice President Cheney’s former chief of staff, indicted on a perjury charge in the C.I.A. leak case, and who never met an Israeli military offensive he didn’t like, cares little for the conventions of objectivity that constrain most working journalists. Perhaps he was always a blogger waiting to happen. But is he ready for the blood sport that goes with it?

“I do not remember a time, even during the 60’s, when there was such uncivil discourse,” he said. “Even at Harvard.”

I do so look forward to reading his defense of Libby. I imagine that the latter has done some big favors for Aipac and the pro-Israel crowd over the years and they never leave their own behind wounded on the battlefield.

UPDATE: Here is part of what Peretz has to say about his good friend and “American patriot:”

Let me concede: I am a friend of Scooter Libby. But I do not like his boss. And I do not like his boss’s wife. I know this gets me no credit with the all-or-nothing crowd. Still, I like Scooter, who is quite brilliant, very honest, and brave. Also funny. I’ve contributed to The Libby Legal Defense Fund and have joined the fund’s advisory committee, which is not large because in Washington old pals dessert when even their college roommate gets into trouble. In a time when self-styled civil libertarians are giving money to defend Muslim terrorists, I am happy to help defend an American patriot, some of whose politics I do not share and some of whose politics I do, from a cynical onslaught of the special prosecutor who put journalists into jail for not telling him what he already knew.

C’mon Marty, you’re a neocon. Stop temporizing and beating around the bush (so to speak).

I bet there are a few of us lying in wait for Marty. But I also bet he won’t allow comments or if he does they’ll be heavily moderated. I don’t see him as someone who embraces a debate he can’t control.

UPDATE I: Marc Cooper has just written about The Spine’s inaugural post. It’s a turgid, stiff (get it, The Spine?), self-serving and self-promoting effort completely lacking in verve. I found this passage to be unintentionally funny for its self-delusion:

Then there is the spine of my past: a man in his mid-sixties, a family man with children, a teacher at Harvard for almost four decades, formerly of the New Left (very important to understanding my spine) now of the center, at the helm of The New Republic (which I have deliberately maintained as undogmatic center-left) for 32 years.

A “man of the center.” Indeed. But center of what? The Likud party? The Joe Lieberman party? How ’bout the New Republican representing the “undogmatic center-left?” That’s a real whopper.

tags david-carr-new-york-times, marc-cooper, martin-peretz-blog-the-spine, the-nation, the-new-republic