Kabbalah, the mystical core of Jewish theology, teaches that before the world was created, there was an infinite expanse of divine light. In order to make room for the physical world, Hashem had to contract their infinity and pour their light into divine vessels. But the finite vessels could not hold the infinite light, so they shattered, leaving countless sparks, shards of the divine scattered across the world. Humanity was put on earth to find these sparks of light and put them back together, in a process called tikkun olam, the reparation of the world. 

Tikkun olam means pursuing justice, fixing what is broken, making ourselves and the world around us whole again. The Lubavitcher Rebbe once said, “If you see what needs to be repaired and how to repair it, then you have found a piece of the world that has been left for you to complete. But if you only see what is wrong and how ugly it is, then it is you yourself that needs repair.” Without a vision of what a world without prisons might look like, without a plan to overthrow the police, all we can learn from the carceral state is despair. If we cannot yet imagine a better world and how to go about building it, we need to prioritize our own healing and growth. Before we can liberate each other from this broken world, we must liberate ourselves from hopelessness.
 


haggadah Section: Tzafun