Tikkun olam. Interfaith work? Tikkun olam. Anti-racism? Tikkun olam. Often, these causes were laudable. But when untethered from covenantal identity, they mutated into a form of moral universalism that was no longer recognizably Jewish. As one educator quipped, “If tikkun olam is Judaism, then Greenpeace is a better synagogue.”
In his polemic To Heal the World?: How the Jewish Left Corrupts Judaism and Endangers Israel, Jonathan Neumann contends that the American Jewish establishment has appropriated tikkun olam as a secular leftist creed, emptying it of theological and national meaning. Neumann sees in this transformation not just a distortion, but a betrayal: the replacement of Jewish mission with political fashion. He argues that contemporary American Jews have recast Judaism into a pale reflection of progressive politics, all while distancing themselves from the Jewish state and its particularist claims.
Yet as Moment magazine’s review of the book notes, Neumann’s critique may itself be too sweeping. In his zeal to indict the Jewish left, he overlooks important thinkers who tried to hold universalism and particularism in tension. Figures like Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook and Rabbi Herzog saw tikkun olam as rooted in nationhood and Torah, but also expansive in its ethical reach. Educators like Alexander Dushkin and Shlomo Bardin used the language of repair not to undermine In the aftermath of October 7, many American Jews found themselves shocked not only by the brutality of Hamas’s massacre, but by the chilling response of their children’s classmates, professors, and even Jewish peers. How, many wondered, could a generation raised in Jewish institutions—day schools, camps, youth groups—so quickly turn on Israel, or at best, respond to Jewish trauma with apathy, equivocation, or outright hostility?
Some of the answers lie in the broader cultural shifts of the last decade. But others are uncomfortably close to home. In truth, we are reaping the consequences of decades of Jewish education that centered ethical universalism while neglecting particularist identity. We taught our children to love the stranger, but not their own people. We imbued them with the language of social justice, but not of Jewish peoplehood. We filled their hearts with compassion for the oppressed, but left them unequipped to understand when Jews are the target of hate. We called it tikkun olam. But we forgot that a world cannot be repaired if a people forget who they are.
Beginning in the post-war period and accelerating after the 1960s, liberal Jewish education increasingly framed Jewish identity in universalist terms. Rather than anchoring Jewish belonging in covenant, commandments, or collective memory, institutions shifted toward a narrative of Judaism-as-ethics: a religion of progressive values, equality, and human rights.
This was not done maliciously—it was, in fact, a response to deep trauma and assimilation. The Shoah demanded a moral reckoning. The civil rights movement offered Jews a place of ethical partnership. Jewish social justice leaders like Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel marched with Dr. King and famously declared that when he prayed with his feet, he felt he was doing Judaism.
But a generation later, that moral language had been unmoored from its tribal roots. As Dr. Jack Wertheimer has written, many synagogues and schools presented Judaism as “a path to being a good person,” with little emphasis on Jewish observance or peoplehood. Zionism, once a unifying force, was increasingly reframed as a political liability—something to be bracketed, softened, or replaced with universal activism.
Worse, this pedagogical shift was frequently accompanied by a suspicion of Jewish power. The very idea of a sovereign Jewish state, let alone one capable of wielding military strength, was treated as morally suspect. Jewish distinctiveness was to be downplayed in favor of identification with the underdog, even when the underdog sought our destruction. In this way, ethical education severed from Jewish memory began to undermine the core instincts of Jewish solidarity and survival.
The phrase tikkun olam has deep Jewish roots, but its meaning has evolved radically. In Mishnah Gittin 4:2, mipnei tikkun ha-olam refers to pragmatic legal fixes to maintain social order—internal to the Jewish people. In Aleinu, the phrase l’takein olam b’malchut Shaddai calls for cosmic redemption under God’s sovereignty, not political activism. These sources ground tikkun olam not in abstract humanitarianism, but in halakhic obligation and theological vision.
By the late 20th century, however, tikkun olam had been transformed into a banner for progressive causes. EnvironmentalismJewish identity but to strengthen it through Zionist education.
This richer understanding of tikkun olam was not limited to secular liberals or postwar Americans. In the 1920s, even deeply traditional scholars in Mandate Palestine were already linking world repair to systemic social justice. One of the most prominent mystical thinkers of the 20th century—best known for his groundbreaking commentary on the Zohar—argued that spiritual repair was impossible without economic repair. He called for a society rooted in shared responsibility and equity—what we might now call democratic socialism. For him, repairing the world was not an abstraction; it was a material and collective mandate.
The Moment review rightly cautions against throwing out the baby with the bathwater. The problem is not tikkun olam per se, but the way it has been taught—as a freestanding moral code, divorced from mitzvot, memory, and Jewish peoplehood. Rebuilding Jewish education means rescuing tikkun olam from both extremes: from a universalism so abstract it forgets the Jew, and from a polemic that denies the richness of our ethical and mystical traditions.
When we raise a generation to believe that Judaism means standing with the marginalized, but fail to teach them Jewish history, Jewish peoplehood, and Jewish vulnerability, they will inevitably turn against Israel when it exercises power.
In elite college environments, justice is framed in binary terms: oppressor vs. oppressed. In this framework, Israel is seen as a white, colonial power. And tragically, many Jewish students lack the historical depth or communal loyalty to challenge that claim.
They were taught to fight injustice, but not to defend Jews. They were taught to love the stranger, but not to stand with their siblings. They heard from the river to the sea and paused, parsed, or even agreed—because we never taught them what that slogan meant for their own people.
Biblical ethics are deeply particular. “You shall not oppress the stranger… for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Exodus 22:20, Leviticus 19:33–34). Justice is demanded because of Jewish memory.
Jewish chosenness (“am segulah”, Deuteronomy 14:2) is not supremacy—it is responsibility. Ethical demands are covenantal, not abstract. As Sifre Devarim 96 explains, our moral imperatives are rooted in imitation of God (imitatio Dei), not secular humanism. And as Sanhedrin 27b reminds us: Kol Yisrael arevim zeh bazeh—all Jews are responsible for one another. There is no universal ethics without tribal solidarity. Even Pirkei Avot 1:14, Hillel’s famous triad, begins: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me?” Progressive education too often skips that first line.
This is not a call to abandon our moral commitments to others. On the contrary, it is a call to deepen them by rooting them in who we are. Jewish ethics cannot survive if they are not also Jewish.
The sages were aware of the dangers of overextended piety. Kohelet Rabbah 7:16 cautions: “Do not be overly righteous… why destroy yourself?” There is such a thing as moral overreach. Compassion unmoored from responsibility can lead to folly.
Even Maimonides, in Hilchot Rotzeach 1:6, rules that someone who can save another and does not is culpable. Not all neutrality is neutral. There are times when to withhold defense is to sin. This must be our ethical north star: if we cannot defend Jewish life, then all our lofty talk of justice is hypocrisy.
We must rebuild a Judaism where ethics flow from covenant, not Twitter. Where love of the stranger is rooted in love of our own people. Where our children know their story before they inherit someone else’s narrative. As Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik writes in Kol Dodi Dofek, Jewish fate binds us together regardless of ideology. As Rabbi Jonathan Sacks warned, “A universalism that is not rooted in particularity will ultimately collapse.”
If we are to repair Jewish education, we must restore the richer interpretive lineage of tikkun olam—not merely as global activism, but as covenantal, communal, and national service. We need the vision of Rabbi Kook and Alexander Dushkin: a Judaism that repairs society by beginning with Jewish life, Jewish land, Jewish sovereignty. To heal the world, we must first know who we are. And we must be unafraid to say it.
We wanted to raise good people. But we forgot to raise proud Jews. In doing so, we left our children vulnerable—not just to anti-Zionist propaganda, but to an identity crisis with existential stakes.
Now is the time to begin again. With courage, with faith, and with the humility to say: we got some things wrong. The world still needs repair. But that work must start with knowing who we are, and where we stand. Only then can we teach our children to love the world—without forgetting their own people.
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