Core Vision and Founding Principles
Tikkun Community
Tikkun | 11.19.2001

Many of us are involved in or greatly admire the accomplishments of social change movements like the women's movement, the environmental movement, the movement for economic justice, the civil rights movement, the gay rights movement, the labor movement, and the disability movement, to name just a few.

We seek to create that alternative. We are a community of people from many faiths and traditions, called together by TIKKUN magazine and its vision of healing and transforming our world. We include in this call both the outer transformation needed to achieve social justice, ecological sanity, and world peace, and the inner healing needed to foster loving relationships, a generous attitude toward the world and toward others unimpeded by the distortions of our egos, a habit of generosity and trust, and the ability to respond to the grandeur of creation with awe, wonder and radical amazement. We are guided in our work by our belief in the principle of solidarity.

For us, this principle has spiritual roots in the Jewish commandment to remember that we were all slaves in Egypt; we believe that we are all harmed by oppression directed at any group or individual. But it manifests also in many other faith traditions, and we draw from the wisdom of all of them.
(Continued at www.tikkun.org)

TIKKUN is seeking to create a new kind of spiritual politics with a social change organization that could become an interfaith version of the Jesuits or the Franciscans or the Hasidim blended with something like the Sierra Club, and committed to A New Bottom Line for our world, so that instead of judging institutions to be efficient, rational and productive to the extent that they maximize money and power, they are also judged efficient, rational and productive to the extent that they maximize love and caring, ethical and ecological sensitivity, and enhance our capacities to see the sacred in each other and our capacities to respond to the universe with awe, wonder and radical amazement at the grandeur of creation.

Imagine a group of people spread through the world who are committed to each other and to this New Bottom Line, and working in diverse ways to achieve a world of love and kindness, generosity and peace-and who are unafraid to be boldly utopian in their vision, yet insisting on a commitment to pursue global transformation in a loving and non-violent way commensurate with our ultimate vision, and yet again compassionate enough to understand that in trying to move in this direction we may at time falter because of our personal limitations and distortions.

Among our programs:
*A Progressive Middle Path to Middle East Peace-affirming that both sides have legitimate historical narrative, and both sides have been unnecessarily cruel and hurtful to the other, and both sides need to do repentance because the only possibility for solution lies in a path that affirms both sides' needs and does so in a spirit of contrition, atonement, and open-heartedness toward the Other.

*The Social Responsibility Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: Every corporation with incomes above $30 million a year must get a new corporate charter once every ten years which will only be granted to those corporations which can prove that they've had a satisfactory history of social responsibility-to a jury of ordinary citizens.

*New Bottom Line in the Professions and the World of Work. Help us create a group in your profession or work place who will begin to develop detailed plans for what your profession or work place would look like with Tikkun's New Bottom Line.

*Tikkun Campus Network For students in high schools, colleges, and graduate/professional schools: a national grouping of students who no longer want to get caught between those whose pro-Israel perspective leads them to demean Palestinians and those whose pro-Palestine perspective leads them to demean Israel.

*A Network of Spiritual Activists Gatherings for those of all spiritual traditions who seek to heal and transform the world, focused on how we can coordinate our actions to be mutually supportive.

From the National Office
Michael Lerner | 12.05.2001

WE NEED VOLUNTEERS IN OUR NATIONAL OFFICE in San Francisco. But we also could use the help of people in their own homes. Let us know if you'd like to volunteer, and what your skills are and what time you are available.
Contact: magazine@tikkun.org or call 510 644-1200.

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