Tikkun Olam Quotes

“…Then it hits me.

Maybe we’re the pieces,

What?

Maybe that’s it. With what you were talking about before. The world being broken. Maybe it isn’t that we’re supposed to find the pieces and put them back together. Maybe we’re the pieces. Maybe, what we’re supposed to do is come together. That’s how we stop the breaking.

Tikkun olam.”
― David Levithan, Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist

“One part of Judaism called tikkum olam. It says that the world has been broken into pieces. All this chaos, all this discord. And our job – everyone’s job – is to try to put the pieces back together. To make things whole again ... Maybe we’re the pieces. Maybe what we’re supposed to do is come together. That’s how we stop the breaking.”
― Rachel Cohn, Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist

“La grandeur du peuple juif, c'est justement d'apporter aux autres, même si les autres ne veulent pas entendre - c'est tikkun olam même pour ceux qui ne veulent pas entendre.
[youtube, watch?v=jlVMft1jtiE]”
― Jacques Attali

“Whereas the received Law of revelation emboldens the Jewish mystic, the true materialist substitutes for Torah practical law or technology—technique, τέχνη. This positions the materialist over the cosmos, not as a member of the cosmos. Materialism always masks an underlying existentialism, and existentialism contains the inevitable character of process and arbitration. This finds the cosmos in need of fixing, in need of work, and for intelligence to act upon it and master it to that end: the divine coming into itself through work. The goal of existentialism, then, is work: as wages are compensation for toil, writ large is the universal tragedy whose last act, its redemption—its “payday”—is yet to come. Where our everyday work finds its necessity is in the cosmic Work whereby the ultimate meaning, the Sublime and the Divine, enters into the world once humanity organizes its rampant chaos.”
― J. Phillip Johnson, The Invention of Work