The first person to tell me about "tikkun olam" was an artist who translated the Hebrew phrase as “lifting the sparks.” Later other artists taught me more about how to be inspired, uplifted and healed.
“Tikkun olam," which also can be translated as “repairing the world,” is found in rabbinical teachings about the power of the divine in the world. The idea has fueled campaigns against slavery and inspired efforts in aid of the politically or socially marginalized. It was Melanie Kline, a jewelry maker and painter, who told me she learned the phrase meant “lifting the sparks” when she was a child. As an adult, she told me that in her day-to-day life, the concept of tikkun olam pushes her to keep trying new things as she pursues a goal of “elevating everything to its best.”
"If I can see a way to improve something, I have to go do it," Melanie told me.
What Melanie saw in her small Colorado town of Montrose were its struggles to remain vital and vibrant in the 21st century. She also saw residents who were veterans of the Iraq, Afghanistan and other wars who were finding it difficult to reintegrate into civilian life. In my 2018 book, "Home of the Brave," I recount how she rallied townspeople to offer mental health support, job and housing advice and other aid for the vets, who in turn, among other things, helped build a water park in the town’s river. The vets bought to the community an energy informed by what they had endured.
Another friend, Yael Nyholm, spent last summer in Kyoto, Japan learning kintsugi, the craft of repairing broken pottery with a mixture of lacquer and powdered gold, silver, or platinum.
When Yael returned from Kyoto, she asked friends for broken objects on which she could practice. I gave her a treasured bowl made by painter, sculptor and sometime potter Joni Brenner from which a thumbnail-size shard had chipped away along the rim. It's part of a set we call the Joni bowls, as in: "Shall we serve pasta in Joni bowls tonight?"
Yael transformed the bowl’s chip into what looked like an eye outlined in golden kohl. It's exactly the bowl I want gazing calmly at me when I sit down to dinner.
Yael, who is also a novelist and flash fiction writer, returned the bowl with a palm-sized booklet that she had bound with red thread. In it, she mapped her process in photos and prose. Delighted, I sent Joni photos of both her bowl, now also Yael’s, and the pages of the booklet.
Joni sent back responses to lines in the booklet, creating what reads like a poem that she (in italics) and Yael mended together. It expresses the philosophy of kintsugi, which is to approach repair as part of the journey of an object, in which the evidence of intervention is to be contemplated rather than hidden. And, as tikkun olam counsels, it helps us consider the power of moving on because of, not despite, trauma.
the crack defines the path not the mender
a reminder to follow not control
sometimes the break is just the beginning
a reminder to not give up
rushing weakens the bond
a reminder to sit with, not blot over
repair is not a return to what was, but a turning towards what is
facing the breaks and the cracks.