Tikkun

Tikkun means repair, restoration, setting right. In Lurianic Kabbalah it names the third moment of a cosmic drama: after the withdrawal of tzimtzum and the shattering of the vessels, the sparks of divine light scattered and held captive in the husks are to be raised and restored to their place. What does the raising is the performance of the commandments with proper intention. The result is a theology in which human action has genuine cosmic consequence, the restoration of the divine order is not accomplished by God alone, and Israel's ordinary observance is assigned a share in it.

The phrase tikkun olam has a longer and quite separate history. It appears in the Mishnah in a legal sense, mipnei tikkun ha-olam, "for the sake of the ordering of the world", as the stated justification for rabbinic enactments adjusting the law so that society continues to function, the prosbul and a series of rules governing divorce documents among them (Gittin 4:2-5:3). It appears again in the Aleinu prayer, in the phrase le-takken olam be-malkhut Shaddai, to perfect or establish the world under the sovereignty of the Almighty, which in its liturgical context is an eschatological hope for the universal recognition of God, not a programme of action.

From the 1950s, and rapidly from the 1970s, tikkun olam was taken up in North American Judaism, especially in Reform, Conservative and Reconstructionist settings, as the standard term for social justice understood as a religious obligation. The usage is now thoroughly established in synagogue life, youth movements and communal organisations.

It is also contested. Some Orthodox writers, and some historians who have traced the phrase, argue that the modern usage is discontinuous with both the halakhic and the kabbalistic senses, and that it risks substituting a general political programme for the specific content of Jewish obligation. Defenders reply that the prophetic and legal traditions ground a social mandate abundantly whatever this particular phrase once meant, that religious vocabularies are always redeployed, and that the objection is often to the politics rather than to the philology. The argument is live and is conducted by serious people on both sides.

Beyond the cosmic drama of Lurianic theology, the word tikkun names a number of specific, concrete devotional practices in Jewish life, and setting them out shows how a technical kabbalistic term settled into ordinary religious calendar and custom.

Tikkun Chatzot, the midnight rectification, is a set of prayers recited by kabbalistically inclined and Hasidic Jews in the middle of the night, mourning the destruction of the Temple and the exile of the Shekhinah and expressing longing for redemption; it is associated with circles influenced by Isaac Luria's own Safed community and later spread through Hasidism, understood as a personal contribution, through grief and prayer, to the larger cosmic repair the Lurianic system describes.

Tikkun Leil Shavuot, the rectification of the night of Shavuot, is the custom of staying awake all night studying a fixed anthology of biblical, rabbinic and kabbalistic texts on the eve of the festival that commemorates the giving of the Torah at Sinai. The custom is traced to the sixteenth-century kabbalists of Safed, including Moses Cordovero and Isaac Luria's circle, and rests on a specific rationale, that Israel is traditionally said to have overslept on the original morning of the revelation at Sinai, so that the vigil corrects, or repairs, that ancient lapse. A comparable practice, Tikkun Leil Hoshana Rabbah, keeps vigil the night before the last day of Sukkot.

Tikkun, without qualification, also names a printed volume for ritual use, most commonly a Tikkun Korim, laying out the Torah scroll's text for a reader to rehearse cantillation before a public reading, since the scroll itself is unpointed, a wholly practical sense sharing only its etymology with the theological uses described elsewhere.