by Matthew Vogel Over the past few years, the organized Jewish community has participated in a tremendous amount of research, discussion and implementation surrounding the idea of Jewish Peoplehood as a conceptual framework for engaging with Jewish life and uniting the disparate Jewish communities around the world. Erica Brown and Misha Galperin formulated Jewish Peoplehood as having a "shared history and common destiny" while Yonatan Ariel offered another formulation of questioning more about "who am I, who are you and who are we?" to learn about the commonality of Jews across the world. Recently, 24 students and six professional staff members from Baruch College, the Inter-Disciplinary Center in Israel, and the Kiev Hillel met in Ukraine to explore Jewish Peoplehood in a program called Kol … Continue Reading
Andrew Silow-Carroll on Tikun Olam and Peoplehood
by Andrew Silow-Carroll There are few things more satisfying than finding out that something you’ve been saying for years is actually true. In a number of columns, I’ve written about the rise of tikun olam as a Jewish way of saying “social justice.” Although the concept of “repairing the world” has been in the Jewish vocabulary for centuries - especially among kabalists - I’ve confidently asserted that hardly anyone talked about it before the early 1980s. Google’s nifty “Ngrams” tool confirms this. Plug in any word and Google will chart how often it appears among the millions of books in Google’s on-line database. I entered “tikkun” (the most common spelling). Google generated a hockey-stick shaped graph that shows few if any examples of the term before 1980, then … Continue Reading
Keep Dreaming: Jewish Identity 101
by David Breakstone Jewish Identity Day in the Knesset. A happening that included “a special plenary session, committee meetings, an art exhibition... with pertinent musical interludes” (The Jerusalem Post, February 9). Sounds reasonable enough, even commendable. But not unproblematic. Nothing’s so simple in this complex state of ours that aspires to be both Jewish and democratic. Example. The meeting of the Committee for the Advancement of Women dealt with the need to combat the phenomenon of Jewish women marrying Muslim men. “I’d like to see what would happen if in France they held a hearing about what happens when Christians marry Jews,” commented an indignant MK Taleb a-Sanaa. While I can’t imagine many reading this column - Muslim, Christian, or Jew - are enamored of … Continue Reading
“Aniyei Ircha Kodmim”- Where Does it End? The Israeli Case
by Nir Sarig As long as the value of tikkun olam does not make aliyah, we cannot view it as a central feature of Jewish Peoplehood. I belong to the group within the Jewish People that is interested in it happening. We are not yet there. The use of the term tikkun olam is spreading in the new Jewish narrative. From my perspective, it means applying the Jewish concept of chesed beyond the borders of the Jewish People. According to the Rambam, chesed is a deed done for another human being, not based on any legal obligation. "True chesed, or gmilut chasadim in the Jewish tradition happen only when the doer does not gain any profit from the deed. One can see in the modern aspiration for tikkun olam an adaptation of the universal humanistic principle articulated in the German philosopher Immanuel … Continue Reading
Giving Priority to the Jewish People
by Jack Wertheimer At a time when Jewish communal institutions are failing to attend to the needs of Jews at home and abroad, the hot trend in Jewish philanthropic and organizational circles, incredibly, is to channel ever more of their resources to nonsectarian causes. Preachers in every corner of the Jewish community are intent on urging the faithful to drop their parochial concerns for the welfare of fellow Jews and instead think globally. How can Jews worry about their own, they ask, when so many unfortunates in Africa, Latin America, and parts of Asia are suffering even worse afflictions? Last May, at my own institution, the Jewish Theological Seminary, the commencement speaker exhorted newly ordained rabbis and cantors, along with graduating educators and communal workers, to do nothing … Continue Reading
Charity Begins at Home, But Should Not End There
by Shlomi Ravid In a witty 1903 article titled "Tikkun Haolam and Zionism" Ahad Ha'am makes the following statement: "Our youths are so used to dwelling on and dealing with the questions of "Tikkun Haolam", until too many of them this question became their spiritual focus, and unknowingly the center of all questions that engage them, including the question of Zionism (Hashelach, vol. 11, booklet 4; my translation, SR)". This article which sounds as if written today exposes a seeming contradiction: Ahad Ha'am, mostly known for raising the flag of the Jewish ethical mission in the world, expresses criticism of the Jewish search for a universal solution to the world's problems. What becomes apparent later in the article is that what Ahad Ha'am is critical of is the perception that if the world will … Continue Reading
Peoplehood is With People
by Rachel Farbiarz and Ruth W. Messinger In parsing our Peoplehood along the axes of particularism and universalism, our thoughts inevitably turn to actual, real people: to our grandparents and great-grandparents and those unknown before them. Our people were not from around here and did not live as we are privileged to live. They made their way walking, carrying, sailing, stowing, clawing and running. They came hopeful and gutted; brave, determined and scared from Russia, Romania, Turkey, Switzerland, Bulgaria, Germany, Uzbekistan and Poland. In places often of poverty, hunger and slum; rail, jail and camp they paused to catch their breath. It is these people whom we encounter as we step through the abstract maze of our Peoplehood and look more deeply. Their thick voices ring in our ears: … Continue Reading
The Boundaries of our City in the Age of Globalization
by Micha Odenheimer Should the Jewish People and Israel actively care and become urgently involved with issues of extreme poverty in the developing world? Don’t we have enough on our plate already? As the founder of a Jewish-Israeli NGO whose raison d'etre is to create just such involvement, I often encounter people who argue that we should not. "The poor of your own city take precedence," they say, quoting a Talmudic dictum, usually with some degree of indignation. If they are from the political left, they will add "There are plenty of Palestinians you should be helping first." If they are from the right, replace the word Palestinians with Jews; the rest of the formula can remain. The use of this quotation would be problematic even if our reality were the same as in the days of the … Continue Reading
Your Town’s Poor Take Precedence over Those from Other Towns
by Bambi Sheleg We live in the Armon Hanatziv neighborhood in Jerusalem. It is a colorful place where many different kinds of people are gathered. There are Jews from the United States, from the former Soviet Union, from Islamic countries, and native Israeli Jews, religious, secular, traditional, rich and poor. In the last few years I find myself thinking a lot about the neighborhood where I reside - and the gap that exists between me and the people who live here. On one hand, we have lived here for over twenty years. On the other, my life has not been particularly involved with my neighborhood. I am immersed in my journalistic work and my family, and these consume all of my time. It occurred to me that there may be a lot of things to do in this neighborhood, but I am not aware of them because … Continue Reading
Peoplehood, Universalism and Particularism
Peoplehood, Universalism and Particularism: The tension that keeps it all together by Ari Hart During a steamy Chicago August a few years back, I led a summer program called Or Tzedek that brought Jewish high schoolers to Chicago neighborhoods. Our goal was to explore Judaism and social justice. On the second day of the trip, I brought my students to Chicago's predominantly African-American South-West Side. Our project for the day was knocking on doors and distributing leaflets to people in the neighborhood about prenatal health opportunities available to pregnant women. On the van-ride down, some personal doubts emerged. "Why am I bringing these kids to this neighborhood? We're about to engage with an area and an issue that seem far removed from the Jewish People's agenda," I thought. "Is … Continue Reading
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