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Tikkun Olam: Collectivity, Responsibility, History: A Qualitative Study of Tikkun Olam Among Jewish Community Workers in Greater Vancouver
Abstract
This paper presents findings from qualitative interviews with five Jewish people — two Rabbis and three workers in various community service capacities — about their understandings and practices of the Jewish principle of tikkun olam . Tikkun olam is a Hebrew phrase that means “the repair of the world,” has its roots in Rabbinic law, the Kabbalah and the ‘ Aleinu prayer, and became a mainstream term for Jewish social justice work and community contribution in North America following the Shoah (Holocaust). In this study, participants spoke to the imperative to act and responsibility; external tikkun and internal tikkun ; collectivity and interconnectedness; the presence of Jewish history in their work, particularly in the case of the Holocaust; and the spiritual dimension of working with people. This study was undertaken with a narrative approach, to honour and preserve understandings of tikkun olam across Jewish communities. This study indicates the continuing influence of tikkun olam in settings both within and outside the Jewish community. Potential future areas of research are the role of spirituality in social workers’ commitment to social justice and the commitment expressed by several participants to work with Aboriginal people based on a shared history of cultural genocide.
... like Hinduism (Framarin, 2014), Taoism (Ma & Osula, 2011), and Jainism (Chapple, 2006), to native/indigenous/aboriginal philosophies in places like Africa (Edwards, 2015), Australia (Ypinazar et al., 2007), and America (Walker, 2001), and even includethough generally to a lesser extent, or more peripherallythe monotheistic religions of Judaism (Leslie, 2016), Christianity (Cho, 2009), and Islam (Ahmed, 2006). These teachings are not all equivalent, of Running head: THE PERSON AS A FIELD 18 course; there are meaningful differences relating to the context and tradition in question. ...
The Western-centricity of psychology means it has inherited some of the key ontological categories and distinctions at the heart of Western cultures. This paper identifies four such distinctions that have been particularly influential in psychology: mind-body; subjective-objective; self-other; and inner-outer. Together, these have created a pervasive view that the mind-and the person more broadly-is metaphorically like a "container." However, this paper proposes that a better conceptualization, or at least a complementary one, may be a "field," whereby people's being extends outwards, beyond the apparent boundary of their skin, into the world. Such perspectives have been especially prominent in other cultures and traditions (such as Buddhism), but have pedigree in the West too. The paper thus draws on various cultural sources, and numerous disciplines both within psychology and beyond. It is hoped the discussion may help psychology reflect on and re-evaluate the ontological assumptions at its core, and to engage with field-based perspectives that may be provide a useful alternative or complement to the standard container metaphor.
In the West, Auschwitz and its gas chambers became a metonym of genocide, but genocide takes place less often in purpose-built death centers than in mundane sites of daily existence, like “killing fields” in Cambodia or by the sides of roads in Rwanda. So too with the Holocaust. In the Soviet Union, the Holocaust was more mundane, integrated into daily life under Nazi occupation. Because of this, the absence documented in Soviet Holocaust liberation photography better reflects the experience of genocide than the human drama of survival captured in American and British photography. In these mundane, haunting, and sublime images, Soviet photographers have unwittingly captured the story of genocide—ghostly landscapes haunted by the dead, not the living.
Much contemporary dialogue has centered on the difficulty of establishing validity criteria in qualitative research. Developing validity standards in qualitative research is challenging because of the necessity to incorporate rigor and subjectivity as well as creativity into the scientific process. This article explores the extant issues related to the science and art of qualitative research and proposes a synthesis of contemporary viewpoints. A distinction between primary and secondary validity criteria in qualitative research is made with credibility, authenticity, criticality, and integrity identified as primary validity criteria and explicitness, vividness, creativity, thoroughness, congruence, and sensitivity identified as secondary validity criteria.
This paper explores the integration of spirituality in clinical social work practice. Social Work’s history with respect to spirituality and practice, and the tensions that have existed, are reviewed. Further, the paper outlines a rationale for the importance of this integration, while also looking at obstacles to including spirituality in practice that some social workers encounter. Interventions are posed as a possible means to facilitate the integration of spirituality and clinical social work practice.
Social work’s response to the rising levels of public and professional interest in spirituality poses some important questions: i.Why is this important to social work practice? ii.What do we mean by spirituality? iii.What are the obstacles posed by religious and spiritual traditions that must be overcome to honor social work values and wisdom? iv.What research is available to help us understand the value of spirituality to clients? v.How can spirituality help us to serve our clients? Based on research conducted as a Muttart Fellow, the writer uses these questions as a framework for exploring the role and significance of spirituality in social work. The article ends with specific, applied benefits that a credible spiritual perspective brings to social work practice.
This article presents an approach to human behavior curriculum that requires students to achieve the purpose outlined in the Council on Social Work Education's 2008 Educational Policy and Accreditation Standards to "distinguish, appraise, and integrate multiple sources of knowledge, including research-based knowledge." It emphasizes and allows for critical thinking about knowledge relevant to trauma, resilience, and survivorship, providing empirically based information to support risk and resilience theory in an ecological, life course perspective. Information from a study of Nazi Holocaust survivors is used to illustrate how personal development, family functioning, and community support occur under the most severe stress. Survivor quotes illuminate the life course perspective as a means of thinking about how individuals maintain competence into old age.
Resilience has been most frequently defined as positive adaptation despite adversity. Over the past 40 years, resilience research has gone through several stages. From an initial focus on the invulnerable or invincible child, psychologists began to recognize that much of what seems to promote resilience originates outside of the individual. This led to a search for resilience factors at the individual, family, community - and, most recently, cultural - levels. In addition to the effects that community and culture have on resilience in individuals, there is growing interest in resilience as a feature of entire communities and cultural groups. Contemporary researchers have found that resilience factors vary in different risk contexts and this has contributed to the notion that resilience is a process. In order to characterize the resilience process in a particular context, it is necessary to identify and measure the risk involved and, in this regard, perceived discrimination and historical trauma are part of the context in many Aboriginal communities. Researchers also seek to understand how particular protective factors interact with risk factors and with other protective factors to support relative resistance. For this purpose they have developed resilience models of three main types: "compensatory," "protective," and "challenge" models. Two additional concepts are resilient reintegration, in which a confrontation with adversity leads individuals to a new level of growth, and the notion endorsed by some Aboriginal educators that resilience is an innate quality that needs only to be properly awakened.The review suggests five areas for future research with an emphasis on youth: 1) studies to improve understanding of what makes some Aboriginal youth respond positively to risk and adversity and others not; 2) case studies providing empirical confirmation of the theory of resilient reintegration among Aboriginal youth; 3) more comparative studies on the role of culture as a resource for resilience; 4) studies to improve understanding of how Aboriginal youth, especially urban youth, who do not live in self-governed communities with strong cultural continuity can be helped to become, or remain, resilient; and 5) greater involvement of Aboriginal researchers who can bring a nonlinear world view to resilience research.
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