Repair the World
How can we use knowledge of history to become the best version of ourselves?
How can we improve the world that surrounds us?
Tikkun Olam, a concept in Judaism, translates into “repair of the world”.
After the Second World War, Jewish life in Europe was almost completely destroyed, so the survivors rebuilt their lives. Tikkun Olam encourages Jews to behave and act constructively, for the benefit of the common good. The term was first used two thousand years ago telling people to establish and spread “Godly qualities throughout the world.” In the Mishnah (an oral teaching on how to specifically fulfill the commandments of the Torah according to their literal meaning), the concept of “tikkun olam” has a socio-political meaning, calling for responsibility in relation to “poorly protected sections of the population”: the poor, orphans, widows. Community life at all times meant mutual assistance and the desire for social justice. Tikkun Olam means showing compassion to all people and spreading goodness. You don’t have to be Jewish to promote Tikkun Olam. In fact, most religions have similar concepts of spreading goodness, such as the Golden Rule: Treat others the way you want to be treated.
It is important to acknowledge and commemorate the Soviet Jewish victims whose stories were suppressed until the fall of the USSR, and to use that knowledge for good, like being an upstander when witnessing injustice. Tikkun Olam is not a passive concept, you need to be active in repairing the world. It will not do that by itself.
Flag of Esperanto
There have been attempts to establish a unifying language so that people may prosper and work together more easily. Most Jews in the Russian Empire spoke Yiddish, so they could understand each other and communicate easily. But every region where Jews lived had its own Yiddish dialect, so sometimes there were misunderstandings.
One man tried to standardise the Yiddish language, meaning that he wanted to eliminate the different dialects and implement a language for all Jews in the Russian Empire. This man was Ludwik Lejzer Zamenhof (or L.L. Zamenhof), a linguist born and raised in Belostok in the Russian Empire. Today, Belostok is situated in Poland, known as Bialystok, just on the border with Belarus (it was briefly part of Belarus too). Zamenhof abandoned his project of standardising Yiddish, because he diverted his attention to one of the biggest ever linguistic projects: Esperanto, a combination of Europe’s most main languages.
Esperanto under Stalin
Esperanto was encouraged in the Soviet Union’s early days. The Soviet government even established a Soviet Esperanto Association. However, as Nazism and Communism rose across Europe in the 1930s, Esperanto began being repressed, for different reasons. In the USSR Esperanto was banned in 1937, and sometimes used as an excuse to imprison and execute people (many of them Soviet Jews) during the Great Purge. Stalin, who himself apparently had studied Esperanto, feared that it was a symbol of individuality. When Soviet Esperantists were arrested, quite often the accusation was:
“You are an active member of an international spy organisation which hides itself under the name of ‘Association of Soviet Esperantists’ on the territory of the Soviet Union.”
Until the end of the Stalin era, it was dangerous to use Esperanto in the Soviet Union.
Esperanto under HItler
Hitler also banned Esperanto after he had specifically claimed in his book Mein Kampf that Esperanto was the language that could be used by an international Jewish conspiracy once they have achieved world domination. In Nazi Germany, there was a move to ban Esperanto because Zamenhof was Jewish, and the internationalist nature of Esperanto which was perceived as “Bolshevist“. Hitler associated Bolshevism with Jews, as many of the early Bolshevists were Jewish. Both merited his wrath. Esperantists were targeted in the Holocaust, especially Zamenhof’s family (Zamenhof himself had died in 1917) – all three of his children were killed by the Nazis.
Hitler and Stalin both banned Esperanto because they believed it was a part of a wider Jewish conspiracy for world domination. They effectively stopped the language from gaining the popularity it had been gathering before the war, and Esperanto fell into obscurity.
Today, there has been a resurgence of people learning it, due to the internet. Tools like language apps have contributed to this, and today there are around a hundred thousand Esperanto speakers in the world. While they share a language through which they can communicate and understand each other, it is important to note that language is not everything one needs to truly be together. If anything, history has shown that common language may impede on unity. For example, the Hamburg Jews in the Minsk Ghetto, who were German and Austrian Jews deported to Belarus, trusted the German soldiers more than the Soviet Jews because the soldiers spoke German. In the end, those who they trusted murdered them.
Righteous Among the Nations
There are many stories about non-Jews who rescued them during the Holocaust. To honour them, Israel established the honorary title of Righteous Among the Nations. This is a reward for helping and saving Jews. They received it for what they did at the behest of their hearts, and not for the sake of material rewards and risked their lives and those of their loved ones. As of 2022, according to the Yad Vashem centre, 28,217 people have been awarded this title. They represent Tikkun Olam. They saw the suffering of people and helped them survive. These 28,217 people are from 51 countries, and 7,232 were from Poland, which is more than any other country. To be awarded the title of Righteous among the Nations, documentary evidence of the actions and deeds or written reports of those who were saved are required.
Unfortunately, because documented proof was suppressed by the Soviet government after the war, many accounts of Belarusians saving Jews were lost or forgotten. This is why, even though Poland and Belarus border each other, there are only 683 Belarusians included in the Righteous Among the Nations.
The countries where Holocaust history was not suppressed were able to provide proof of the lifesaving deeds performed by their citizens. Unfortunately, Soviet countries, where millions of Jews had lived and died, did not allow this information to be gathered.
Stories of people saving Jews during the Holocaust are still being discovered today. The villagers of Porechye, which saved 40 children from the Minsk Ghetto, might be obvious candidates for consideration to be in the Righteous Among the Nations, but this has not yet been achieved.
How does one repair the world today?
Through stories like that of Esperanto, we learn that striving for “sameness” ironically drives us more apart. While as a concept, it should work, in reality it is impossible. This is why diversity and difference are so important.
To repair the world, one must accept, respect and celebrate each other’s differences. If you support one football club and your friend supports their rivals, while you may disagree on some things, what brings you together is that you both love football. This applies to any aspect of one’s identity, be it race, religion, gender or skin colour. Diversity is the true way of being together. Not everyone needs to have the same views and opinions to be together and respectful of one another.