Healing the World?

A few years back I was asked to give a talk for the Toronto chapter of the Jewish Motorcycle Association, a riders’ club and benevolent organization. Riders came in from practically everywhere — the U.S., Australia, South Africa, Israel, several European countries, and, of course, Canada, approximately 900 attendees, many leather-jacketed, tough-looking specimens of Alpha manhood, others, spiffily dressed professionals from New England.

I spoke at the Symposium dinner on diverse themes treating Jewish culture, politics, and religion, primarily regarding the biblical and Talmudic concept of Jewish philanthropy and the pressing need to help restore a violent and broken world. (It is no accident that Israeli medical teams are dispatched almost everywhere that disaster strikes or that Israeli doctors tend to wounded Muslim terrorists as they do to their own people.)

The burden of my talk focussed on the Kabbalistic notion of Tikkun Olam, that is, the canonical injunction to repair a fallen world — Tikkun means “repair,” Olam, “for all time”—and the Seven Noahide Laws complementing the Ten Commandments, recognized by the U.S. and ratified by the 102nd Congress as Public Law 102-14.

Briefly, Kabbalah is a mystical philosophy dating back to the 12th century and formalized by the 16th-century Safed rabbi Isaac Luria, which seeks to explain the nature of the cosmos, man’s place and purpose in it, and the esoteric meanings implicit in the Hebrew Bible. One might posit that the Noahide Laws, their inception dating variously from the 2nd century BC to the 2nd century AD, which prescribed ritual and moral duties upon the sons of Noah (i.e., Jewish congregants) is the historic and theological precursor of Kabbalah. The Seven Laws are listed in a different sequence, depending on which source one consults, but for our purposes, it is the traditionally accepted Seventh Law that is most important. The standard formulation of this imperative reads: Establish courts of law to ensure justice in our world, thus providing for harmony to be restored to mankind as it conforms to a transcendent order. This is the essence of Tikkun Olam.

Nevertheless, Tikkun Olam can have harmful effects. The Jewish liberal/left in the U.S., Canada, and Israel is so busy saving the world, lobbying for all suffering humanity — especially social and cultural minorities who have little or no sympathy for their benefactors — that it has forgotten that it always at risk in a world in which anti-Semitism has never died. There have been genocides before and after the Shoah, but these atrocities have largely faded and future generations need not expect a massive racial cleansing.

This is not the case with the world’s most irrational and undying hatred. Anti-Semitism is forever as if embedded in humanity’s DNA. This is the fundamental difference to be acknowledged. An Armenian can walk down a street in Amsterdam, Paris, London, Malmo, or Berlin without fear; a Jew, not so much. South Africa is no haven. Sweden is a danger zone. Even peaceable Canada has its pockets of anti-Jewish sentiment.

The U.S. is no exception. Troops of Louis Farrakhans can spring up anywhere. Keith Ellison was Deputy Chair of the DNC. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is closely associated with Jew-baiting Thomas Lopez-Pierre, he of “greedy Jewish landlords” fame. As Karin McQuillan pointed out in American Thinker, “She hates Israel and supports Muslim terrorists, whom she compares to Muslim protesters in Ferguson.” Other Democrats such as Ilhan Omar, Linda Sarsour, Scott Wallace, and Leslie Cockburn have joined the anti-Semitic hatefest. “How much of this,” McQuillan asked rhetorically, “will mainstream Jewish Democrats… be willing to swallow?” Such evils have to be expected and constantly challenged. Indeed, the alt-Left (which is now the Left almost in toto) is typically anti-Semitic, anti-Israel, and, of course, anti-American. Cut Israel down to size. Make America Grim Again.

My counsel to the conferees was simple: be always vigilant, consider yourselves and your families first, and only then worry about the world. Tikkun Olam is all fine and dandy, but to set that messianic task before the imperative of self-preservation is foolishness personified — or, as we say in Yiddish, gantz meshugàs. The many Jews enamored of the socialist and communist ideologies of their progressivist colleagues are a testimony not only to their folly but to the power of certain scriptural precepts — especially to the influence of Talmudic exhortation and the Book of the prophet Amos, which inveighs against those indifferent to the plight of the disadvantaged yet does not distinguish earned prosperity from crass exploitation.

As I argued, the world you want to save does not necessarily love you. Therefore, stay alert and temper your ideological extravagances. Don’t listen to me if you are offended, I conceded, but at least consider your wives and children. Almost immediately, the entire New York assembly rose to a man and conspicuously walked out.

Naturally, I was initially taken aback, but the mass exodus only served to reinforce my fears, for it was clear they were far too mesmerized by the principle of Tikkun Olam to take its dark side into account. The Jewish preoccupation with repairing the world, with little regard for the possibility of future cataclysms or isolated evils, is a species of sanctimonious negligence. Jewish leftism may be understandable, but that does not prevent it from being the height of naivety and ultimately ruinous.

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But we are not dealing with an exclusively Jewish problem. The Judeo-Christian West is also in thrall to Tikkun Olam and is assiduously working against its own interests, having welcomed a calamitous inundation of adverse cultures, including murderers, rapists, marauders, and economic parasites, into its midst. Helping the stranger is an exalted mission but, applied uncritically, it can have devastating effects, as is evident from the vast influx of unreconstructed refugees and jihadists swarming in great numbers into Western nations.

A report from the RAND Corporation revealed the enormous and unsustainable cost of this domestic invasion. Along with the destructive and bloody terror attacks visited regularly upon host nations and the consequent disruption of civil life, it is estimated “that since 2004, terrorism has cost the EU about €185 billion in lost Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and around €5.6 billion in lost lives, injuries, and damage to infrastructure. It is argued that terrorism also harms trade, foreign direct investment, and tourism… as well as transport.” The cost continues to mount. As for “merrie olde England,” it is pretty well cooked.

The U.S. and my own country, Canada, are by no means exempt from the economic and demographic catastrophe that awaits them as a result of such migration and refugee flows. Kaye Forest and Sierra Rayne, in an American Thinker article analyzing the RAND report, go one better than Donald Trump in advocating “a complete moratorium on further immigration from the geographies and ideologies of concern.”

Similarly, in the words of Michael Walsh, “The issue of ‘immigration’ has now reached a critical mass on both sides of the Atlantic, with Latin Americans marching on the U.S. across the southern border and mostly Muslim ‘migrants’ trekking to the European version of El Norte — France, Germany, and England.” As we reach the inflection point, assuming we have not yet passed it, the effect of celebrating the “diversity” and “tolerance” canard is to bring “the civilized First World down to the nasty, brutish level” of the Third World.

So much for policy-driven compassion and magnanimity, principles which are now being rethought and reversed by various nations and affected regions — Italy, Spain, Austria, and the Visogràd Group. The Noahide Laws, specifically the Seventh, and Tikkun Olam have not healed the world, though they will have benefitted the alien and often hostile cultures that have installed themselves among us. A noble cause can be lethal. Of course, the cause is not always noble. Tikkun Olam will also be used as a cover for cynical or corrupt pursuits, to facilitate a globalist ideology or party voting prospects.

Nonetheless, one thing is clear. Whether in the Jewish community in particular or the Judeo-Christian West as a whole, programmatic solicitude for the fugitive, the disadvantaged, and the suffering of other nations and cultures can, if not properly monitored, wreak havoc and perhaps lasting damage on our societies. It is not as if we don’t have lots of problems of our own — which are only exacerbated by the problems we have imported. Israel and the West make common cause. As Jonathan Neumann writes in To Heal the World? “From the eschatological perspective, the distinction between particular and universal is collapsed.”

There is, in fact, no such thing as “universal humanity” in the sense that we all want the same things. We don’t. Some peoples and cultures are manifestly not civilizational partners. If we are determined to extend our concern and hospitality to the afflicted in and from other parts of the world, let us at least ensure that those we allow into our country share our customs, civics, and values and are willing and eager to integrate, and are able to contribute to the well-being and prosperity of the nation.

Failing this obligation, we can look forward to increasing levels of social turmoil, cultural fragmentation, and economic vandalism — in short, a general decline in both our standard of living and our rules of civil order. Let us hope it is not too late to realize the prohibitive cost of Tikkun Olam. The clock is ticking, like a bomb.