The phrase “Tikkun Olam” literally means “world repair.” It is commonly used to refer to the pursuit of social action and social justice. The concept behind it originate in kabbalah, in the teachings of the 16th century mystic Isaac Luria.
One of the ways you can repair the world is by building good products to replace the ones that are currently in it. Facebook replaced Orkut and MySpace and its easy user interface and user experience enabled grandmoms to see the pictures of their children from a distance, for old friends to reunite, for global entrepreneurship to be energized. Google Search repaired the world, by pioneering Online Advertising, by investing in free video sharing, by investing and mentoring and inspiring numerous startups and of course with their free and open source Android system that lowered the cost of smartphone ownership.
Hollywood tries to repair the world by repeatedly portraying certain values. With an immense audience, Hollywood has great soft power beyond glamor or superficial entertainment. Recently it has started portraying repair the world science and global cooperation rather than American dominance.
The Walk is a great movie. Robin (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) takes in help from his accomplices Gandhi (Ben Kingsley), a George Carlin lookalike, a mathematician (yay!!), a pretty french girl fulfills his childhood dream. He audaciously walks the tallest buildings in the world , the Twin Towers at the World Trade Center. Based on a real-life story, The Walk shows an inspired French Man was instrumental in the World Trade Center’s birth as the center of the world’s greatest city. The movie is more of a poem of the architecture of the buildings too and it’s haunting to think why the actions of 19 angry men led by a stupid ideology of hatred and destruction killed that dream. I have seen the city of New York once in 2009 but it was between trade towers at the moment. Bin Laden wanted to repair the Muslim World’s dominance of corrupted dynasties supported by the West. The West reacted by unleashing war, and then squandering the entire goodwill by extending it to Iraq, a mess that endures today. In spite of everything, people are truly good at heart -that is a concept that only an idealistic teenager can have.
To repair the world, you need to assist the ones trying to heal it and you need to thwart the ones trying to steal it. Repairing the world means stopping the ones sapping the climate, the environment and the planet of precious resources.
No force can stop an idea whose time can come, but as time changes the ideas to repair the world change. What have you done to repair the world today?
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