IB World Religions 6.1.4. Mashiach, Tikkun Olam and Pikuach Nefesh Notes

6.1.4. Mashiach, Tikkun Olam and Pikuach Nefesh

Mashiach and anointing

1. Mashiach means anointed, from the oil poured on the head of a king or a priest at his installation. The Greek translation of the word is Christos, which is how it reached European languages.
2. In the Tenakh the word describes figures already in office rather than a future deliverer. Saul and David are called the Lord's anointed, and Isaiah 45 applies it even to Cyrus, the Persian king who let the exiles return.
3. Expectation of a future anointed one grew out of the promise to David that his line would not fail. Once the monarchy had ended, prophecy about a shoot from the stock of Jesse was read as pointing forward.
4. In Jewish expectation the Mashiach is a human being. He is a descendant of David, a keeper and teacher of Torah and a political leader, and Jewish sources do not describe him as divine or as an object of worship.
5. He is not a figure who atones either. Judaism holds teshuvah to be available to anyone directly, so his work is the restoration of the people and the world rather than the forgiveness of individuals.
6. The rabbis discouraged predicting his arrival. The Talmud curses those who calculate the end, on the ground that failed dates teach people to give up on the promise altogether.

The Messianic Age

1. What the Mashiach is expected to bring matters more in Jewish sources than who he is. The age is described as gathered exiles, a rebuilt Temple, restored observance of Torah and peace between nations.
2. Isaiah supplies the imagery that has travelled furthest. Nations beat their swords into ploughshares and learn war no more, and the wolf lies down with the lamb.
3. Maimonides read those pictures soberly. He held that the world would carry on in its ordinary course, and that the change would be the end of oppression and the freedom to study Torah without hindrance.
4. He made the expectation a principle of faith. His twelfth principle states belief in the coming of the Mashiach, and the words ani ma'amin, I believe with perfect faith that he will come though he tarry, were sung by Jews on the way to death in the Holocaust.
5. Disappointment shaped the doctrine as much as hope did. Bar Kokhba was hailed as Mashiach by Rabbi Akiva before his revolt was crushed in 135 CE, and Shabbetai Tzvi drew a mass following in 1665 before converting to Islam under Ottoman pressure.
6. The movements now differ sharply. Orthodoxy holds to a personal Mashiach, most Reform and Liberal thought replaced him with a Messianic Age brought nearer by human effort, and some Chabad Hasidim identify their late rebbe as the Mashiach, a claim other Orthodox authorities reject.

Tikkun olam

1. Tikkun olam means the repair or ordering of the world. The first half matters, since tikkun is a word for mending something that already exists rather than for building something new.
2. Its liturgical home is the Aleinu, said at the close of every service, which looks to the day of l'takken olam b'malkhut Shaddai, repairing the world under the sovereignty of God.
3. Its earliest legal use is much narrower. The Mishnah allows the rabbis to adjust a law mipnei tikkun ha-olam, for the sake of the world's good order, where strict application would cause harm.
4. Hillel's prozbul is the standard case. The sabbatical year cancelled debts, so lenders stopped lending as it approached, and Hillel devised a document transferring debts to the court so that the poor could still borrow.
5. The mystical sense came much later. In the Kabbalah of Isaac Luria in sixteenth century Safed, the vessels holding the divine light shattered at creation and scattered sparks throughout the world.
6. On that account the mending is human work. Every mitzvah performed with intention is held to raise a fallen spark, so ordinary observance becomes repair on a cosmic scale.

Repair in modern Judaism

1. The phrase became prominent in North American Jewish life from the middle of the twentieth century. There it came to name social action of every kind, from hunger relief and civil rights work to refugee aid and environmental campaigning.
2. Reform Judaism placed it near the centre of its self understanding. Congregations run tikkun olam committees, and bodies such as Mazon and American Jewish World Service were founded in that language.
3. A theological argument sits behind the usage. Jewish sources hold that creation was left unfinished on purpose and that human beings are partners in completing it, so social repair is presented as covenant work rather than as optional charity.
4. Not everyone welcomes the modern usage. Critics within the Jewish world, among them the Reform rabbi Arnold Jacob Wolf, argued that a liturgical and mystical phrase had been stretched until it meant any progressive cause.
5. Orthodox writers more often reach for older vocabulary. Tzedakah (righteous giving), chesed (loving kindness) and gemilut chasadim (acts of kindness) name the same duties without the cosmic framing.
6. The argument is about proportion rather than about obligation. Every movement holds Jews bound to relieve poverty and injustice, and they disagree over whether tikkun olam is the whole purpose of Judaism or one strand in a life of mitzvot.

Pikuach nefesh

1. Pikuach nefesh means watching over a life, and it is the principle that saving human life sets aside almost every other obligation. Jewish sources treat it as a duty rather than as a permission.
2. Its derivation rests on a single clause. Leviticus 18 says a person shall live by the commandments, and the Talmud in tractate Yoma reads that as live by them and not die by them.
3. The Mishnah states the valuation behind it. Whoever destroys a single life is regarded as having destroyed a whole world, and whoever saves a single life as having saved a whole world.
4. The scope is deliberately wide. A doubt is enough, so possible danger to life is treated as actual danger, and the rabbis insist that the most learned rather than the least should be the one to break Shabbat.
5. Three obligations are not set aside. A Jew is required to die rather than commit idolatry, murder, or the sexual offences the tradition groups as gilui arayot, a rule stated as yehareg v'al ya'avor.
6. Everything else gives way. Eating on Yom Kippur, breaking Shabbat and eating forbidden food are not merely permitted but required where a life is at stake.

Life, repair and expectation

1. Pikuach nefesh shapes ordinary Jewish medical practice. Observant doctors and nurses work on Shabbat, ambulances are driven and telephones used, and volunteer emergency services such as Hatzalah are staffed by Orthodox Jews on Shabbat and festivals.
2. Public health rulings follow the same logic. Leading Orthodox authorities have urged vaccination, and during the 2020 pandemic many permitted or required synagogues to close, on the ground that danger to life outranks communal prayer.
3. Harder cases are argued rather than assumed. Organ donation from a donor declared brain dead divides Orthodox authorities over the definition of death, while Conservative, Reform and Liberal bodies have generally encouraged it.
4. The principle ties the three concepts together. If a single life counts as a whole world, then repairing the world starts with keeping people alive.
5. This is also why Jewish sources resist waiting for the Mashiach. Rabbinic teaching advises a person planting a sapling who hears that the Mashiach has come to finish the planting first and then go out to greet him.
6. The three ideas therefore point the same way. Judaism holds the world to be unfinished, human beings to be responsible for its repair, and each human life to be the unit in which that repair is counted.