- Tikkun at 30
Ok, i’ll admit it—I am proud of our role as a prophetic voice for peace, love, environmental sanity, social transformation, and unabashedly utopian aspirations for the world that can be.
Over these past thirty years Tikkun has been a platform for young writers to emerge as public intellectuals and for established thinkers and academics to posit groundbreaking philosophies and radical ideas. It has also been a stage for novelists and poets to flex their minds and for spiritual progressives and social change activists to urge self-reflection, inner psychological and spiritual healing, and direct action.
Our goal of tikkun olam—the healing and transformation of the world—is far from having been achieved (duh!). But the Tikkun community has made some important contributions along the way, including a perspective on the psycho-dynamics of American politics which, had it been adopted by liberals and progressives, might have spared us some of the most troubling features of American politics in 2016. Our writers and thinkers have much to contribute to the world, and for this 30th anniversary issue of the magazine, we want to celebrate some of those ideas.
When I say “Tikkun community,” I mean it. Tikkun has been a product of the creativity and hard work of thousands of authors, artists, editors, interns, and volunteers—plus the support of tens of thousands of readers who have donated to make it possible for the unique voices in Tikkun to be heard in the public sphere. We don’t have major outside funding these days, and without readers’ generous tax-deductible donations, Tikkun would not be able to stay alive. I am also grateful to the publishers who have contributed so much to our enterprise; Nan Fink Gefen, the co-founder and original publisher of Tikkun; Danny and Victor Goldberg in the mid and late 1990s; Trish Lerner Vradenburg and George Vradenburg for the first decade of the 21st century; and Duke University Press (current).
In this, our 30th anniversary issue (loosely themed “Tikkun: The First Decade”), we highlight some of the ideas that we’ve helped pioneer and re-present some of the most compelling articles we’ve run. We selected some of our favorite pieces from the first ten years of Tikkun’s existence (1986 through 1996). Because there were so many we wanted to include, we mostly printed shorter excerpts of the articles. We urge you to read the full versions online at www.tikkun.org/tikkunat30. Think of each excerpt as a small taste of the whole piece. Why from only the first ten years? Simple. There have been so many amazing articles throughout the last 30 years that we’d need at least ten full issues of the magazine just to present a sample of those we liked best (and even for the first ten years we had to leave so many great pieces out because of space). On our website we not only print the full versions of articles we’ve excerpted here, we also print full versions of many other articles that equally deserve your attention from that same period.
But before we get to those excerpts, let me recount how the Tikkun community and the magazine came into existence and share our mission for the next thirty years.
Roots
We trace our mission and worldview to the heritage of the Jewish people, who shared with previous religious traditions a sense of awe and wonder at the grandeur of the universe. Yet most of those spiritual traditions had been shaped by ruling elites who wanted ordinary people to embrace a world of unequal power and injustice, in part by claiming that the gods had shaped a fixed hierarchical social structure that could not be changed and was built into the structure of the universe.
In contrast, the Jewish people’s message was that the social world was constructed by human beings who were fundamentally good or had the unlimited potential to be good, but had gone astray, and that we, the human race, have the potential to create a very different kind of reality. What makes that possible is...
