What Some People Get Dead Wrong About Tikkun Olam
Early after October 8, I had an argument with an already radicalized neighbor about how Israel should respond to the largest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.
She pulled the Tikkun Olam “repairing the world” card and proceeded to distort it.
I’ve seen that distortion widely since — employed with particular relish by the ‘As a Jew’ crowd. They love playing that card. It is virtue signaling on steroids. So I’m calling it out.
Somewhere along the way, Tikkun Olam has been twisted into something it was never meant to be: endless openness, unquestioned inclusion, and withdrawal at any cost. It asks Jews to absorb harm in the name of virtue.
That’s not repair. It’s the erosion of the boundaries and guardrails Jews need — now more than ever.
Tikkun Olam doesn’t ask Jews to ignore harm directed at them in order to prove moral virtue. It doesn’t require walking into spaces where antisemitism is tolerated and call that courage.
Repairing the world also means naming what’s broken. It means refusing to normalize hate, even when it’s dressed up in the language of justice. It means calling out the silence and the selective allyship that too often extends to those who traffic in antisemitism — most frequently now under the banner of antizionism (with ample pockets of hate from other corners that we shouldn’t dismiss either).
Tikkun Olam means understanding that solidarity cannot come at the expense of your own people’s safety. The most honest form of Tikkun Olam is stepping back and making it clear that certain conditions are not acceptable.
Bottom line: You can’t truly repair a space that refuses to acknowledge it’s broken either. And while I am on the topic, Democrats: a “big tent” that tolerates hate isn’t repair. It’s surrender.
Fighting antizionism is Tikkun Olam. Antizionism harms many groups, not just Israelis.
Consider, for example, Palestinian descendants living in countries such as Lebanon, Jordan, and Syria. Many are third- or fourth-generation residents, yet they are denied citizenship due to the antizionist agenda of these regimes and through Western funding of this injustice via UNRWA.
Dictatorial regimes like those in Qatar, Turkey and Gaza use antizionism to consolidate power and deflect accountability for their own failures and oppression.
Academia, media, and international organizations, including the UN and Doctors without Borders, are distorted by antizionist bias, which monopolizes attention, suppresses honest inquiry and and undermines their credibility.
In the West, weak political leadership allows the very real suffering in Gaza to be used as a Trojan horse by hostile states like Iran, China, Qatar, and Russia, who exploit free speech to spread division, normalize hate and violence, and erode the West from within.
Sometime last year, I wrote to the leaders of Indivisible (Ezra Levin and Leah Greenberg) about how much I admired the work they were doing to get citizens to take action against the horrors of the Trump regime, but that they were wrong to call on Congress to defund support for Israel because of the Israel-Gaza war, and that they, as Jews, would not be protected from antisemitism because of their anti-Israel stance. This is part of the response I received from a staff member: "We do not expect those involved with Indivisible to agree with us on every issue -- that would make us a very narrow tent, when a large coalition is needed to win." Again, the big tent. I responded with links to articles about the anti-Israel bias from "leading human rights organizations" and called out their selective outrage against Israel. Never got a response. Sigh.