Tikkun Olam in the New Year

Here's hoping everyone has a great new year, filled not only with happiness but with the necessary steps towards being better people--more generous, compassionate, and sweet-spirited.

As we celebrate the new year and prepare for Yom Kippur, our thoughts are on atonement. But atonement is empty without a renewed effort to do better. One of the ways we can do better is to focus on reparing this damaged world. There are many ways to perform tikkun olam, but I know I am going to spend the upcoming year being more proactive in helping my friends and family members.

The worst thing about American culture is the blind pursuit of individual wealth and material goods, especially when we are equally blind to the struggles of the friends we spend time with. We ALL are just a few set-backs from being in some sort of trouble--whether it be financial or health-related or spiritual. Capitalism forces people to focus on the self and pass judgement on others.

Living a Jewish life should help us overcome that tendancy.

Rabbi Milton Steinberg writes, "Are men brothers, owing one another fraternal solicitude? Then let a tithe be taken up for the indigent; the needy may lawfully claim for their own the corners of fields, the gleanings, and anything overlooked in the harvesting. Therefore, too, anyone who requires it may enter a field and eat, save that he may carry nothing away. Hence also the accepting of interest is prohibited, nor may a millstone or cloak be taken as security for a loan.

Are the world's goods a trust imparted by God to mankind? Then, loans shall be cancelled every seventh year so that no one may forever be sunk in debt; and bondsman may not, except at his explicit request, be indentured for more than six years; nor may the land be sold in perpetuity but shall be returned every fifty years to the descendants of its original owners so that the impoverished may have fresh access to the soil from which they have been dispossessed."

Rabbi Steinberg continues, "On the evidence of the past and of the modern rabbinate, Judaism stands these days:

• For the fullest freedom, political, economic, and social, for every individual and group, which includes among other things, maximal civil liberties, trade unionism, the equality of all.
• For the social use of wealth, though whether this involves social ownership and if so to what extent is disputed among contemporary interpreters of Judaism.
• For a society based on cooperation as its root rule rather than competition.
• For international peace guaranteed by a world government, the notion of the absolute sovereignty of the national state having always been an obscenity in they eyes of the [Jewish] Tradition."

Rabbi Steinberg was one of Judaism's greatest rabbis. Like I said, there are many ways to perform tikkun olam in the coming new year; let's allow the good rabbi's interpretation of the Jewish way of life to seep into our consciousness and help repair the world.

Shana Tova!!

(Basic Judaism, Rabbi Milton Steinberg. Harvest; San Diego, New York, London 1947.)