Please consider supporting our mission to help everyone better understand and become smarter about the Jewish world. A gift of any amount helps keep our platform free of advertising and accessible to all.
This is a guest essay by Melissa Brodsky, a writer focused on media literacy, modern antisemitism, and history.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
Somewhere along the way, being a “good Jew” became inextricably knotted together with being willing to put Jews last.
Care about everybody. Fight everybody else’s bigotry. Defend everybody else’s rights. Learn everybody else’s grievances. Understand everybody else’s rage. Make room for everybody else’s fear. And when the subject finally turns to Jews, make absolutely certain everyone knows you care about the rest of humanity too.
Preferably first and foremost.
We have obligations to other people. Lots of them. They’re all over Torah. But much of American Judaism has elevated two words, tikkun olam, into something larger: a measure of Jewish goodness increasingly tied to how universal our concern is and how little we appear to ask for ourselves.
Take that far enough and choosing to sacrifice yourself stops being a personal decision and starts becoming a moral expectation of Jews. That version of tikkun olam ends in martyrdom.
Today, tikkun olam is translated as “repair the world” — attached to every worthy cause imaginable: feeding the hungry, welcoming refugees, fighting racism, protecting the environment, and pursuing social justice. But that broader meaning is mostly an American development of the 20th century. Jews weren’t using the phrase this way for most of Jewish history.
In the Mishnah (the first major written collection of the Jewish Oral Law), compiled around 200 CE, mipnei tikkun ha-olam shows up in discussions about laws meant to keep society functioning and prevent harm, such as divorce documents, freeing slaves, and ransoming captives. Very practical problems. Nobody appears to be standing around shouting at Jews that they are personally responsible for fixing the planet.
Centuries later, Jewish mysticism did something completely different with tikkun. Rabbi Isaac Luria’s Kabbalistic tradition understood creation itself as spiritually shattered. Human beings helped repair it through mitzvot, the commandments and obligations of Jewish life. Cosmic repair through Jewish religious practice. Also not quite a reusable grocery bag telling you to vote.
The version we’re all familiar with came much later. Jewish educator Shlomo Bardin was using tikkun olam as a call to social action by the 1950s, and it caught on. By the 1970s and 1980s, it was spreading through American Jewish organizations and movements. Historian Jonathan Krasner has pointed out that a Jew living in 19th-century Poland, Iraq, or New York might not have thought tikkun olam was particularly important at all.
That doesn’t mean Jews suddenly discovered social justice in the 20th century. We’ve had plenty to keep us busy for a few thousand years. Torah tells us to care for the poor, the widow, the orphan, and the stranger; give tzedakah (charity); practice gemilut chasadim (the bestowal of loving-kindness); maintain honest courts; and treat people with dignity.
American Jewish culture eventually bundled a whole lot of that together and called it tikkun olam. And somewhere in there, two Hebrew words picked up an additional burden: Apparently repairing the world might occasionally mean Jews should stop worrying quite so much about the Jews.
This made me curious about what Judaism actually says when helping somebody else comes into direct conflict with staying alive yourself.
There’s a Jewish principle called pikuach nefesh, saving life. It’s a pretty big deal. Preserving human life overrides almost every other commandment. If fasting on Yom Kippur could kill you, you don’t fast. If somebody’s life is in danger on Shabbat, you don’t stand there debating whether saving them counts as work. You save them.
The Talmud gets this partly from the biblical command to “live by” the commandments. Live by them.
Then I found the water.
In Bava Metzia (a foundational tractate of the Talmud), two people are walking through the desert. One has a jug containing enough water for one person to complete the journey. If they share it, neither will make it. Ben Petura, an early second-century Jewish sage, taught that they should share the water rather than have one witness the death of the other. Neither traveler chooses himself. They share the water, and both die.
Rabbi Akiva disagreed: “Your life takes precedence over the life of the other.”
The person holding the water has obligations toward his companion. Those obligations do not include dying with him. Jewish ethics can demand generosity, sacrifice, and concern for another human being while still allowing the person carrying the water to drink it.
Hillel the Elder put the balance into a few lines: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? And if I am only for myself, what am I?”
We seem awfully fond of the second question. “If I am only for myself, what am I?” Look outward. Care about other people. Don’t become so concerned with yourself that you stop seeing everyone else. Absolutely. But Hillel first mentioned another, pretty big obligation: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me?” Both belong in the same sentence, which seems to me a pretty good indication that both belong in Judaism.
American politics has added another layer to this: Jews are regularly asked to tolerate things they would recognize immediately as unacceptable if they came from the other political camp.
Abdul El-Sayed recently stood before Michigan Jewish Democrats and invoked the Jewish “value of tikkun olam, to repair the world.” This came after months of controversy over his response to the terrorist attack on nearby Temple Israel, when he followed his initial condemnation by explaining that the attacker had lost relatives in an Israeli strike and saying, “Hurt people hurt people.” (He has since apologized and said there is never justification for terrorism.)
El-Sayed has also resisted demands that he break with Hasan Piker, a political ally who recently warned that if American Jews keep presenting themselves as especially invested in Israel, eventually “someone is going to come around and take action” against American Jews.
Tikkun olam doesn’t need agreement with Abdul El-Sayed because the Republican candidate is worse. Hasan Piker doesn’t get a pass because he supports causes you support. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s positions on Israel remain fair game for criticism even if you love his positions on housing, immigration, or affordability.
We have become so accustomed to sorting people into “Team Good Jew” and “Team Bad Jew” that moral judgment sometimes disappears entirely. A person can support policies you believe would help millions of people and still say something you should oppose. A person can be excellent on Israel and terrible on something else. Nobody gets a certified kosher stamp on his entire worldview passport because he passed one issue.
The Right doesn’t get one either.
Tucker Carlson sat down for a friendly two-hour conversation with Nick Fuentes, who spoke about “organized Jewry,” complained about “these Zionist Jews” and described Jewish conservatives as people who needed to be defeated. Carlson pushed back when Fuentes generalized his argument to “the Jews,” but he also gave an avowed antisemite a massive platform and treated much of the conversation as legitimate political discussion.
Dan Bilzerian has called “Jewish supremacy” the greatest threat to America and the world, blamed “Jewish Special Interests” for running the country into the ground, questioned the number of Jews murdered in the Holocaust, and trafficked in conspiracy theories about Jewish control. Candace Owens has spent years pushing her own collection of conspiratorial claims involving Jews and Israel.
Someone on the Right saying the correct things about Hamas, immigration, universities, or Israel doesn’t erase any of that. Antisemitism doesn’t acquire a political exemption because the person delivering it agrees with you about taxes.
The quantities don’t have to match. The motivations don’t have to match. The political consequences don’t have to match. The standard does.
Jews don’t owe the Left our tolerance of antisemitism because it promises to protect vulnerable people. Guess what? We’re vulnerable people. And as a whole, the people who spend an exorbitant amount of time talking about protecting vulnerable groups don’t seem particularly interested in extending that protection to us.
We don’t owe the Right our tolerance of antisemitism either. Although, and it pains me a little to admit this, the situation isn’t identical. Outside the Alt-Right (and the growing collection of people willing to entertain its garbage), much of the American Right currently lumps Israel and Jews into the big category of people it considers worth defending. I’ll take it. I’m not going to pretend I don’t see it simply because it complicates the political symmetry.
But gratitude doesn’t buy immunity or straight-ticket voting. Supporting Israel doesn’t erase antisemitism. Defending Jews on Monday doesn’t give anyone permission to entertain conspiracy theories about us on Tuesday. I don’t have to choose between pretending the Left has our backs when it doesn’t and pretending every person on the Right who waves an Israeli flag is automatically safe for Jews.
Neither political camp gets custody of Jewish morality. And neither gets to decide how much antisemitism Jews should tolerate as the price of admission.
Remember the two travelers in the desert. There isn’t enough water for both. Rabbi Akiva says the person holding it drinks first.
Tikkun olam doesn’t mean becoming a martyr. It means drink the freakin’ water.
This article shows clearly why progressive/liberal Jewish politicians like Dana Nessel, who claims tikkun olam requires Jewish martyrdom, are so dangerous to other Jews. Their religion isn’t Judaism, it’s the Democratic Party. They are willing to overlook or explain away the rampant and growing antisemitism within the Democratic Party because, in their worldview, the only thing worse than a Jew hater like Mamdani, Piker or el Sayed is a Republican. What these progressive/liberal Jewish politicians don’t understand is that once they help the “movement” gain power, they become expendable.
I am quite disgusted that Al Sayed attempted to appropriate the term ‘Tikkun olam’ to play with the idea that he’s somehow acceptable to the Jewish people. Jew haters quit attempting to ‘kasher’ yourself with our writings.