Tikkun Olam — Repair of the World
The teaching that human actions, performed with the right intention, can gather up what was scattered in a primordial cosmic breakage and restore the world's original order.
The phrase tikkun olam predates Luria by well over a thousand years — it appears in the Mishnah as a legal term for social ordinances enacted 'for the sake of the repair of the world,' and again in the ancient Aleinu prayer's aspiration to perfect the world under divine sovereignty. Lurianic Kabbalah gave the phrase an entirely new, cosmic register: because Shevirat HaKelim scattered divine sparks throughout creation, every mitzvah, every prayer performed with correct kavanah, becomes an opportunity to liberate one of those sparks and return it to its source. In this framework, tikkun is not symbolic self-improvement but literal cosmic mechanics — human choices are understood to have consequences at the level of the sefirot themselves. Only in the twentieth century did tikkun olam broaden further into a general banner for social-justice activism in progressive Jewish thought, a meaning quite far from Luria's technical, sefirotic sense of the term.
To perfect the world under the sovereignty of the Almighty
The popular modern usage of 'tikkun olam' as a synonym for social justice is a 20th-century broadening; its technical Lurianic meaning is considerably more specific and cosmological.
Written about in
- What Kabbalah says about failure
The phrase is far older than Luria — a legal term in the Mishnah, a line in the Aleinu prayer — and its twentieth-century career as a banner for social justice is later still. Luria's sense is narrower and stranger: repair assembled spark by spark, by people who will not live to see it finished.