TIKKUN OLAM:
Repairing the world one step at a time
By Larry Goldbaum
February 2001
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Growing up in Colorado, I learned early what it feels like to be in a minority. We were the only Jewish family in the neighborhood, and I was one of just a handful of Jewish kids in school.
My parents were also the only Democrats on the block, except for the parents of a severely retarded boy, Steve. He and I became good friends. It didn’t matter to Steve that I was Jewish; and it didn’t matter to me that he talked funny. He had the best coin collection I’ve ever seen, and he knew every coin and how much it was worth by heart. He was retarded but had a photographic memory! That taught me a lesson about stereotypes. As my mother is so fond of saying, “Never judge a book by its cover.”
I also learned from my parents that as Jews we have an obligation to make the world a better place. In Hebrew it’s called “tikkun olam”—which means “repairing the world.” We don’t have to fix the world all by ourselves, but we have to do whatever we can.
Early on, my mother showed me what “tikkun olam” really means. She ran a small real estate business out of our basement, and when I was ten years old she sold the house across the street to an African American family. The man was a popular phys ed teacher at our high school, but the neighbors didn’t like it when my mom sold him that house. Some of them stopped speaking to my parents.
That experience taught me a lot about racism, and also about my mother. Every time I think about it I feel proud of her, and sick to my stomach at how those neighbors reacted. Not really much different than how many of the other kids treated my retarded friend Steve. They would taunt him and tease him mercilessly, especially about the horses he loved so dearly. To this day I still shake my head in disbelief at how cruelly we can sometimes treat each other, especially those people who appear different on the outside.
I also learned some valuable lessons from my father. He was born in Poland, but his family moved to Cuba when he was six, to escape the poverty and anti-Semitism of Eastern Europe. (They couldn’t come directly to the U.S. because of restrictive immigration quotas which had been created to stem the influx of Eastern European Jews.) In Havana, he attended a public school where classes were in Spanish and Yiddish!
My father was a travelling salesman, driving hundreds of miles to the small towns of Colorado, New Mexico, Texas, Utah, Kansas, and Wyoming. Most of the shoe repairers he visited were poor, and many spoke Spanish. (My father still speaks fluent Spanish.) He was always respectful towards the people he worked with, regardless of their language, skin color, or social status.
Many of the Jews who came to the U.S. from the “Old Country” were socialists, anarchists, communists, or trade unionists. They spent their lives trying to repair the world, first in Europe, and then as immigrants in the United States.
My grandfather was a proud member of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. The ILGWU was founded largely by Jewish trade unionists fighting for the rights of immigrant workers who labored under terrible conditions in the sweatshops of New York’s Lower East Side.
So trade unionism and progressive politics run deep in my family and in the Jewish community. It’s a tradition that makes me very proud. The Jewish tradition of “tikkun olam,” and the lessons my parents taught me about social justice, have motivated me to do whatever I can to “repair the world.”
But I can’t do it alone. So I hope we can find ways to work together to bridge the ethnic, racial, religious, and class differences that too often have kept us apart. We are, after all, brothers and sisters in the same human family.
Larry Goldbaum is director of the Office of Jewish Affairs at UMass Amherst.
This article originally appeared in the newsletter of AFSCME Local 1776.
