Tikkun.org



www.tikkun.org

Basic History
Tikkun magazine began publication in 1986 as the liberal alternative to the voices of Jewish conservatism and spiritual deadness in the Jewish world and as the spiritual alternative to the voices of materialism and selfishness in Western society. Tikkun provides a space for both affiliated and non-affiliated Jews who seek to renew their Judaism, and a space for Jews and non-Jews alike to shape a politics out of spiritual values. 

Tikkun gets its name from the Hebrew word, "tikkun," which means "to transform, heal and repair." This concept was developed in the Zohar, a central text of the Kabbalah, to refer to the kind of healing and transformation of the world, "tikkun olam," in which each of us can participate. 

Tikkun emerged from a group of social change activists who had formed the Institute for Labor and Mental Health in the 1970s to study the psychodynamics of American society and to understand why Americans were increasingly embracing the message of the Right. After trying unsuccessfully to raise these concerns with liberal and progressive forces, some of the therapists at the Institute for Labor and Mental Health decided to found Tikkun as a way to educate the public about America's spiritual crisis and to pose a cure: to insist that there is and should be an important relationship between our economic and political institutions and our inner psychological and spiritual experience.

Basic Beliefs
Tikkun is not affiliated with any particular stream of Judaism; the renewal sought is taking place in all of Judaism's current denominations. Moreover, many of their readers and writers are secular Jews. Tikkun speaks to the thousands of Jews who have been turned off to Judaism by the conservatism, spiritual emptiness, sexism, homophobia, or joylessness they encountered growing up in the Jewish world - and it seeks to show these Jews, many of them unaffiliated, that there is a deeply spiritual and joyous Judaism that can be encountered in any of the denominations of Jewish life. 

Tikkun also seeks to create an ongoing dialogue on spirituality and healing with non-Jews who are involved in the healing and repair of the world. In part, their goal has been to reshape American political and economic institutions according to a new bottom line of love and caring. This solution is called the Politics of Meaning. The central focus of this politic is to expand the definitions of productivity, efficiency, and rationality so that they include as part of their meaning not only the maximization of wealth and power, but the maximization of love and caring, ethical and ecological sensitivity, and awe and wonder at the glory of the universe. This kind of change in understanding of society would create a radical and fundamental tikkun, or social healing.

Leadership
Editor—Michael Lerner
Associate Editor—Peter Gabel
Senior Editor—Jo Ellen Green Kaiser

Basic Facts
Unique views and a willingness to take strong stands have led Tikkun to become one of the most respected and frequently quoted intellectual/cultural magazines in the United States. Much of the discourse in the Tikkun world has been directed to understanding what it would take to make social healing happen. For example, they’ve developed a legal task force which has sought to re-imagine the legal system
In medicine, they have envisioned a spiritually-oriented health care system, while detailing the pathologies of the current system. In education, they have shown how the values taught in the public schools are at sharp variance with deeper progressive and spiritual values. Economists explore the problems of globalization, while others have been in the forefront of the biotechnology debates, and have chronicled environmental destructiveness and attempted to formulate a new environmental ethos based on awe and wonder.

Tikkun's Politics of Meaning momentarily gained fame when Hillary Clinton embraced it in her famous "It takes a village" speech and quoted Tikkun's editor, Michael Lerner, in a variety of interviews.

Location
Tikkun Magazine
2107 Van Ness Avenue
Suite 302
San Francisco, CA 94109
Phone (415) 575-1200
Fax (415) 575-1434