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Tikkun Olam is a Hebrew phrase which translates as "repair the universe" or "healing the universe". It is a belief from Kabbalah, esoteric Jewish mysticism, which is developed in the Zohar, a classic book of Jewish mysticism.
Source
Kabbalists (people who adhere to the teachings of Kabbalah) hold that the very creation of the universe by God was unstable, and that the early universe could not hold the holy light of God. In this view, the original form of the universe shattered in shards; the universe that we see today is literally broken, and in need of repair.
According to Kabbalah, the practice of following Jewish law and tradition has a real and physical effect on the spiritual structure of the universe. Following Jewish law can repair the tattered shards of creation and repair the universe as God originally intended it to be, making mankind a partner in God's creation. This means that by scrupulously observing all of Jewish law, including the laws of Shabbat, Kashrut, Family purity, etc, a person helps repair tears in the fabric of our universe. All Hasidic Jews and many non-Hasidic Orthodox Jews follow Kabbalah.
Other views
Many Orthodox and most Conservative Jews do not accept Kabbalah. They still teach that one should follow halakha (Jewish law and tradition) as normative (i.e. what one ought to do) for a variety of other religious reasons. In this view, the failure to observe halakha is a sin, but has no ontological consequence.
Reform Judaism and Reconstructionist Judaism generally do not accept Kabbalah. These movements also reject the idea that Jews should follow halakha as normative (i.e. what one ought to do.) Rather, they hold that personal autonomy takes precedence over Jewish tradition. In this view, one learns about the mitzvot, and certain ones are followed if the individual judges that these action brings holiness into their lives. Other laws and customs do not need to be followed at all. In this view, the failure to observe Jewish law is not a sin, and also has no ontological consequence.
Redefining the term
In recent years, in the religiously liberal Jewish community - which generally does not accept Kabbalah as literally true - this phrase has become redefined in a variety of ways. Many religiously liberal Jews use the phrase Tikkun Olam to refer to an imperative to transform the world through social action - a general belief that the world we live in is imperfect, but that everyone can make things better ('repair it') by doing good deeds.
Isaac Luria
For many Jewish scholars, the term's primary resonance is as part of the worldview of sixteenth-century Kabbalist Isaac Luria. Luria taught that the creation of the world happened via emanations of divinity streaming from God into finitude; God's light was too strong to be contained in finite vessels, so the vessels shattered. According to Luria's cosmogony, sparks or shards of divinity were scattered throughout the created universe. Brokenness was, for Luria, an essential quality of embodied creation, and balancing that brokenness is the Jewish (some would say human) obligation to repair what is broken. In this sense, tikkun olam means lifting up holy sparks to redeem them in God.
References
- Aryeh Kaplan. Inner Space: Introduction to Kabbalah, Meditation and Prophecy Moznaim Publishing Corp. 1990.
- Gershom Scholem, Kabbalah, Jewish Publication Society
- The Wisdom of The Zohar: An Anthology of Texts, 3 volume set, Ed. Isaiah Tishby, translated from the Hebrew by David Goldstein, The Littman Library.
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