Always busy doing good deeds like recycling, feeding birds, working in the garden and donating items to others, a little boy has earned the nickname “Tikkun Olam Ted.”

Always busy doing good deeds like recycling, feeding birds, working in the garden and donating items to others, a young boy has earned the nickname "Tikkun Olam Ted."

This is the second book of the anticipated 10-volume Mesorah Matrix series and is called: Tikun Olam; Repair/Perfect the World: Judaism, Humanism and Transcendence. Mesorah Matrix is a major - and potentially landmark - intellectual-spiritual-philosophical endeavor. The plan well-underway is to publish 10 separate books - each on a very focused Jewish theme - under the Mesorah Matrix umbrella.

A devastating critique of the presumed theological basis of the Jewish social justice movement—the concept of healing the world. What is tikkun olam? This obscure Hebrew phrase means literally “healing the world,” and according to Jonathan Neumann, it is the master concept that rests at the core of Jewish left wing activism and its agenda of transformative change. Believers in this notion claim that the Bible asks for more than piety and moral behavior; Jews must also endeavor to make the world a better place. In a remarkably short time, this seemingly benign and wholesome notion has permeated Jewish teaching, preaching, scholarship and political engagement. There is no corner of modern Jewish life that has not been touched by it. This idea has led to overwhelming Jewish participation in the social justice movement, as such actions are believed to be biblically mandated. There's only one problem: the Bible says no such thing. In this lively theological polemic, Neumann shows how tikkun olam, an invention of the Jewish left, has diluted millennia of Jewish practice and belief into a vague feel-good religion of social justice. Neumann uses religious and political history to debunk this pernicious idea, and shows how the Bible was twisted by Jewish liberals to support a radical left-wing agenda. In To Heal the World?, Neumann explains how the Jewish Renewal movement aligned itself with the New Left of the 1960s, and redirected the perspective of the Jewish community toward liberalism and social justice. He exposes the key figures responsible for this effort, shows that it lacks any real biblical basis, and outlines the debilitating effect it has had on Judaism itself.

The lived theology movement is built on the work of an emerging generation of theologians and scholars who pursue research, teaching, and writing as a form of public discipleship, motivated by the conviction that theology can enhance lived experience. This volume--based on a two-year collaboration with the Project on Lived Theology at the University of Virginia--offers a series of illustrations and styles of lived theology, in conversation with other major approaches to the religious interpretation of embodied life.

Princess Kazunomiya, half-sister of the Emperor of Japan, relates in her diary and in poems the confusing events occurring in the Imperial Palace in 1858, including political and romantic intrigue.