Uncovering Why Rosh Hashanah Gave Us Tikkun Olam

As Jews prepare for Rosh Hashanah and the High Holiday season, we look back to build a vision that moves us forward. When we reflect over the ten days of awe, we recommit not only to become the people we want to be, but also to help the world reflect the values that we hold most dear.  

That feels like a tall order right now. As we welcome the Jewish new year of 5787, so much of reality feels defined by global backsliding. In the throes of social upheaval and a new technological era, our world is falling back into the familiar frailties we worked so hard to overcome. We see it in the global resurgence of xenophobic nativism and in the mainstreaming of antisemitism. We see it in the rejection of a world order centered on the universal commitment to human rights that was born from the ashes of World War II. We see it in the growing embrace of authoritarian impulses that erode our democratic institutions. Jews know viscerally the danger of turning back to this well-worn path.   

We assumed that most societies aspired to welcome, inclusion, and compassion, even if we often fell short in their realization. Now, these values are increasingly considered weaknesses to be uprooted. 

In the United States, a culture of welcome has devolved into doors slammed shut. As awful as this reversion has been, we still retained the confidence that we could undo such harms, and we could pry the gates open once more – that the moment we’ve been in might be a terrible, deeply unfortunate blip. 

But for Jews like me who feel obligated by the inherent dignity of every person, our confidence has dwindled having witnessed campaigns of mass deportation and arbitrary detention. We have struggled to respond to the systematic stripping of legal status and undermining of due process – as those who once had clear pathways for remaining safely in the U.S. have become suddenly subject to removal. For those caught in this uncertainty, the consequences extend far beyond policy change. Behind every announcement from the government is a family wondering whether safety will endure, or a refugee questioning whether the welcome they were promised was ever real. 

Reversing the legal chaos introduced into our immigration system will take years to fix on a technical level. Rebuilding any kind of faith in the promise of the U.S. will take decades. Addressing the trauma inflicted on refugees, asylum seekers, and immigrants will take generations.  

We enter this new year confronted with the daunting task of adjusting our course not by a degree or two, but by turning this ship around completely. That recalibration requires a different kind of spiritual fortitude and historical perspective. When the world feels beyond fixing, our tradition asks a deeper question: what are we supposed to do when faith in progress itself begins to erode? 

It is no accident that the holiday of Rosh Hashanah first gives us the Aleinu prayer. It is a prayer sober to a broken reality. It emerged from a place of powerlessness in our inability to shape the world around us. In its origin, it placed the responsibility to perfect the world – tikkun olam – in divine hands and limited our role to cheering God on from the sidelines.  

That is not the tikkun olam we know today. Prayer reflects theology and theology is an attempt to make sense of the world. When the world changes, it compels our beliefs to evolve as well. Even when the words of our prayers do not transform, we transform their meaning. Our modern understanding of tikkun olam emerged as an embrace of societal optimism and everything that could still be possible.    

“[The Aleinu] is the first instance of the phrase tikkun olam,” notes theologian Elliot Dorff. “Here, though, we pray that God, not we, will perfect the world … In the sixteenth century Isaac Luria gave the phrase tikkun olam a different meaning, according to which human beings who observe commandments thereby fix the brokenness of the world and even ‘fix’ God who is broken too. Only recently has the phrase come to mean a Jewish mission to fix the world through social action specifically.” 

Some critics use the recency of our justice-imbued understanding of tikkun olam as a reason to challenge its legitimacy. They posit that newness and authenticity are inherently at odds. But I find a commitment to such spiritual stagnation as unfeasible as it is unbearable. Moreover, the theological chutzpah implied in our notion of tikkun olam also captures an ethos that reverberates throughout Jewish tradition. It shares the same impulse as the Torah and our sages in the declaration “lo bashamayim hee” – that the law is not in heaven (Deuteronomy 30:12, Baba Metzia 59b). That’s right – it’s not. It is with us. Aleinu.     

For generations, many of us embraced tikkun olam in an era when progress felt possible, even inevitable. That confidence has been shaken. But Jewish responsibility was never contingent on optimism. 

As we enter this new year, we are called to recover a spiritual chutzpah older and more resilient than hope itself: the conviction that we remain responsible for the world even when we cannot yet see how to repair it in full. The obligation to pursue justice does not disappear when the path grows longer. The work of welcome does not end when others abandon it. 

Throughout these high holidays, we must look back and mine our tradition for every ounce of spiritual chutzpah that we can find. We’ll need it to build the vision that moves us forward.   

Join HIAS in taking action to welcome the stranger and protect refugees and immigrants.