Judaism: discuss

pulpits, journals, magazines, books, articles — all of these platforms, texts and so on, are committed to Tikkun Olam. Even liturgy has been adapted to emphasise it or to include it.

“It has saturated American Judaism to the point that people think that Tikkun Olam is a mitzvah or the Mitzvah, the great teaching of Judaism. It’s US Judaism’s greatest and most wellknown export to Non-Jewish America.”

In fact, Mr Neumann believes, the concept was actually an import to Judaism from American Christians.

“I think it’s heavily influenced by the Social Gospel, a major Liberal Christian movement a hundred years ago in America,” he says.

“The Christians had this idea of establishing the kingdom of God on Earth, and the Jews, I think, the Reform movement and Mordechai Kaplan, the co-founder of the Reconstructionist movement, were quite enamoured of this idea. He [Kaplan] I think saw in Aleinu [a prayer said at the end of synagogue services] this idea of ‘perfecting the world under the Kingdom of God’ –‘l’takein olam b’malchut shakkai.’

“My thinking is that it was originally the ‘kingdom of God’ phrase — the ‘malchut shakkai’ — that drew them to it, but then they kind of dropped that and it was the Tikkun Olam part that got people very excited.”

Mr Neumann believes that, contrary to the claims by some that Tikkun Olam is a way to bring Jews closer to Judaism, “the grand theology of Tikkun Olam has no answer to the question of ‘why be Jewish?’. Essentially it is a route into assimilation.” One of the main casualties of this way of thinking, Mr Neumann believes, is a decline in support for Israel.

“The issue for Jews is how they square the Tikkun Olam theology, which essentially has no place for a distinction between Jews and nonJews, while also holding to a proud Jewish identity,” he says.

“You really see this borne out in the philosophical writings of the advocates of Tikkun Olam in America. They see the Jewish people and the idea of Jewish chosen-ness as a relic and chauvinistic. They don’t like what Israel has become — at best for them Israel is a special case, they don’t really see a theoretical argument for it except that the Jews suffered in the Holocaust and they need a haven — but essentially their toleration for this sort of exception is, I think, starting to wear out.”

Jonathan Neumann will present a session called ‘Stop Doing Tikkun Olam!’ at Limmud