Oasis Songs: Musings from Rav D
Friday, May 9, 2025 / 11 Iyar 5785
Summary: One reason for my early retirement from the pulpit is the desire to dedicate more time to thinking and writing. The article below explores how American Jews can forge a new, better model of Tikkun Olam. Yet in a longer form than this column permits, it is possible to support the claims below using a wealth of studies, charts, and analyses that I have been collecting over the past twenty years. Together, this evidence forcefully argues why our politics and our justice movements have failed so deeply, and why they are destined to continue to do so without a major rethinking and realignment of the heart.
Reading Time: Five minutes
The double Torah portion of Acharei Mot–Kedoshim offers one of the most profound—and countercultural—statements of moral purpose in Jewish tradition. Kedoshim tihyu, “You shall be holy,” is not presented as a private aspiration but as a collective call to infuse daily life with sanctity. What follows are not primarily abstract mystical precepts or ritual instructions but rigorous interpersonal commandments: care for the poor, honesty in business, respect for elders, and just courts. It is a fusion of the sacred and the societal, a moral architecture where holiness is not divorced from public life, emerging precisely through it.
This fusion may seem unnecessary, even silly or primitive, to modern ears. Why frame social justice work in terms of holiness? Isn’t the moral imperative to fight racism, inequality, or poverty strong enough on its own? In fact, many of today’s justice movements sidestep spiritual language altogether, preferring to speak in terms of rights, equity, and accountability.
But something is often missing in those frameworks—a fact increasingly recognized not only by critics, but also by former advocates themselves. The Torah argues that holiness must not be divorced from public life; it also contends that public life must not be divorced from holiness. In America, the strong wall separating church and state has led to this divorce, yet it is essential that we find a way to renew the enduring and necessary marriage between justice and sanctity even while preserving the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment. When we don’t, something distressing occurs.
Over many years, I have collected dozens of examples in which social movements or policy interventions produced the very opposite of their stated aims. Prohibition in the 1920s, meant to foster sobriety and moral uplift, instead fueled organized crime. The War on Drugs devastated communities it sought to protect.
Closer to home, Oregon’s Ballot Measure 110—the decriminalization of hard drugs—sought to replace punishment with treatment. But the law failed catastrophically, in part because its framers, driven by moral urgency, neglected the institutional groundwork needed for success. Lacking therapeutic infrastructure and phased implementation, the policy collapsed under its own weight. On the one hand, zeal outpaced humility—and gevurah, or judgement, operated without its counterbalance. On the other hand, an excess of chesed, lovingkindness, in the desire to decriminalize hard drugs resulted in chaos. So too, initiatives in educational reform or policing have not infrequently exacerbated the very inequities they aimed to resolve.
Contrast these instances with the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who invoked the biblical prophets, preached from pulpits, and called Americans—Black and white—to a “beloved community” in his 1957 speech, “Birth of a Nation.” His civil rights work was not framed as moral superiority but as a sacred responsibility. That spiritual grounding allowed him to remain hopeful without being naive, righteous without being self-righteous.
Nonetheless, these failed examples do not nullify the importance of working for justice. They do, however, raise the question: why does this pattern repeat so frequently? Is there a different strategy that can be taken to reduce the law of unintended consequences?
Sociology and politics offer explanations: systems are complex, incentives misalign, or human psychology resists change. But Jewish mysticism adds a deeper interpretive lens that offers the possibility of a strategic shift in how we work toward social justice. In Kabbalah, divine energy flows into the world through ten channels, or sefirot. Two of the most essential are chesed(lovingkindness) and gevurah (judgment or discipline). These opposing qualities must be held in balance; otherwise, the flow of divine energy can become distorted or even destructive.
An excess of chesed, unchecked generosity, can lead to chaos, entitlement, or moral laxity. An excess of gevurah, unchecked judgment, can turn into cruelty or repression. The balance point, known as Tiferet, is often associated with beauty, harmony, and compassion. Kabbalists taught that only when these opposing forces are held in creative tension can the world be sustained. When they fall out of balance, the divine presence becomes hidden, so chaos ensues.
This dynamic helps explain the unintended consequences of social and political movements. Many are built primarily on one side of this mystical spectrum. Some are propelled by pure moral outrage (gevurah), with little space for empathy or complexity. Others overflow with compassion (chesed) but lack the discipline to enact durable change. Movements that fail to hold these principles, judgment and mercy, in balance often collapse into the very problems they set out to correct, or they provoke equal and opposite reactions in their opponents, reinforcing polarization.
This is where kedushah, holiness, becomes essential. To pursue justice from a place of sanctity is not to dress our political preferences in the garb of religious language. This is not about marketing or packaging; rather, it is a clarion call to engage in moral work with an awareness of our limits. Holiness introduces humility. It reminds us that we are not gods, that our vision is partial, and that our opponents are also made in the image of God. It teaches us that compromise is not capitulation but the expression of necessary balance.
When the Torah says kedoshim tihyu, it adds, ki kadosh ani, “for I, the Lord your God, am holy.” The pursuit of justice becomes not just an ethical imperative, but a spiritual one. We do this not only to fix the world but to draw closer to God. That changes the posture with which we work. We still fight injustice—but with reverence, not rage and with accountability, not absolutism.
This is not a guarantee that our policies will work. But it does mean that even when our efforts fall short, they are not failures if they deepen our moral character and our spiritual awareness. Justice work becomes part of a larger path of transformation. In a very real sense, the work repairs not only society but the self as well.
In recent years, many commentators have announced the end of tikkun olam as a central organizing principle of Jewish life. Critics say it has been hollowed out, politicized, or disconnected from Jewish tradition. Some Orthodox thinkers dismiss it as a secularized moral project; some progressive Jews worry it has lost its galvanizing power or have been shocked after October 7th to discover that many of their purported allies disappeared.
But tikkun olam need not be discarded. It can be reclaimed—by returning to its roots in Jewish theology and re-infusing it with sanctity. The Torah’s model is still available to us: do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God. A justice movement grounded in kedushah may be slower, quieter, and more self-critical, but it may also prove more enduring, more honest, and ultimately more transformative. We do not need to abandon the search for justice, but we do need to sanctify it. Justice divorced from the sacred is often shrill, short-lived, or self-defeating. Justice rooted in humility, complexity, and kedushah may heal not only the world but also ourselves.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rav D
Shabbat Table Talk
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