Thursday, February 16, 2006

hebrew word of the day

tikkun:

1.) The "raising" of a Holy Spark back to its source, and
2.) the reconcilliation of two seeming opposites, either in ourselves or in the world.

"What does this mean? It means -- to paraphrase what Rabbi Gamaliel's most famous student, Saul of Tarsus, said -- that knowledge without works is meaningless. In this respect, "Tikkunim" are to Kabbalah what engineering is to physics: through their application the Laws of Kabbalah are constellated in action."

To further illustrate:

Simeon [the son of Rabbi Gamaliel] said: "All my life I have been brought up among the Sages, and I have found nothing better for a person than silence; study is not the most important thing, but doing [what it is you study]." -- Pirke Avoth 1:17

**

Every last word of this entry was lifted from www.kheper.net/topics/Kabbalah/tikkun-definition.htm, and inspired by... well... curiousity. There's a great magazine called "Tikkun" -- google it, it's cool. It is: "A Bimonthly Jewish Critique of Politics, Culture, & Society" -- that's lifted from their website, the address of which I might as well paste on here too since I've gone mad for cutting and pasting... www.tikkun.org -- there. Simple.

Tikkun is a great magazine I stumbled across a few years ago and I was just thinking of it tonight (while actively ignoring my consumer law professor because his class is awful) -- thank god for wireless in the classrooms or I guess I'd actually have to get a *legal* education here, as opposed to the sort of freelance, web-based self-education I'm getting instead. Though I could've stayed home for that, I guess, and saved myself a lot in student loans...

But I *fucking* digress! Check this magazine out if you're burnt on the lefty rags like me. The Progressive? The Utne Reader? The Nation? All nice and fine and relatively homogenous. Blech. I'm sick of them all. Check out Tikkun. It's good.

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