Tikkun Olam — to improve the world
A couple of months ago, I snipped off some rosemary shoots and propagated them in a glass of water. Within two weeks, baby roots started to unfurl, and I gingerly transferred them into a bigger pot to to call home.
Over the weeks to come, I spent many afternoons with a pot of tea by my balcony and watched them grow. They started off as three-inch baby shoots and, patient as anything, grew into a big, healthy pot. I liked the slowness of it and the patience between the waiting. It is hard work to grow something from a cutting, and yet easy—a small act with generous returns.
A friend, Faustine, has a tidy faith in cause and effect. She told me that if you put the right positive energy into the world, the world will return it. She means it could be something small, yet deliberate and intentional, something that shifts the weather around you. It could be helping your intern proofread their draft before submission, folding the laundry for your roommate, an offered hand. Putting out the right energy holds the power to transform us internally, which ripples and vibrates out into ever-expanding circles. We get what we put out into the universe.
From my work in holistic dominance and psychoanalysis, I often see the opposite at work: kinks manifesting from a very dark place. The shadow self has an uncanny ability to lurk in the darkest recesses of one’s mind, even when one thinks it’s not there, but it lies, sowing the seeds of negative energy, anger and unhappiness. The only horizon they can imagine is a petty, dark and smaller one.
There’s a Hebrew phase, Tikkun Olam, which translates to improving the world. Tikkun Olam presumes that the world is innately good, and that our Creator left opportunities for us to improve the world and to continue His good work. In Senator Lieberman’s autobiography, In Praise of Public Life, he describes, ‘It [Tikkun Olam] accepts our imperfections and concludes that we, as individuals and as society, are constantly in the process of improving and becoming complete. Each of us has the opportunity and responsibility to advance that process both within ourselves and the wider world around us.’
There is a lot of truth in that. If we focus just on our ego, we see things through what we need and what we lust for, and that will become a black hole that can never be filled. Then, we would start to see the world as ugly, that only seeks to compound our unhappiness. To the man walking around with a hammer as the only tool he knows how to weld, everything becomes a nail.
Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson has a beautiful quote about Tikkun Olam, which I like a lot: ‘If you see what needs to be repaired and how to repair it, then you have found a piece of the world that God has left for you to complete. But if you only see what is wrong and what is ugly in the world, then it is you yourself that needs repair.’ Make a deliberate and intentional practice, put a little good energy into the room and watch what takes root.
Take hope.
PS: Time to make hair tonic from rosemary cuttings.