There’s a word that is tossed around a good deal in April and especially around Earth day1, tikkun, most often translated as repair2 and found in the phrase, tikkun olam, repairing or healing the world. Yes. We should. We should be mindful of our impact on the earth. But repair doesn’t just mean being eco-conscious, or thinking about social justice.
Tikkun is part of me, as it’s something I, and many others do: we repair and we teach.
There is no cosmic or divine obligation for this. It is our practice. It is our reflex. It is as much a part of us as breathing.
Nearly anyone who has spent time creating knows this. You drop a stitch and you go back to fix it. You measure three inches of a sleeve and realize the tension is off, so you frog it and start again. (For the uninitiated: frogging is unraveling your knitting (or crochet), named because you “rip it, rip it.”) Maybe you find a project at the bottom of a bag that you set aside two or twenty years ago, and you sit with it for a minute. Then you figure out where you left off and keep going.
None of this is failure. It’s just the work.
What I’ve noticed in my work with various groups is that this mindset isn’t only found in their knitting and crochet, it’s “jumped the yarn”. Yes, someone will bring a blanket with a dropped stitch, or three. But they are also bringing in the day or week that went sideways. The thing they said that they’re still turning over. The plan that didn’t survive contact with reality. Even if they don’t voice their specific concerns, the action of being surrounded and held by the group performs tikkun. For the person it is the same as it was with their project: there’s a safe space to sit and reflect, the lost end is found, and avenues to repair.
Repair is the default. We are not fixing everything, nor will it be perfect (whatever that means).
It’s the acceptance that things, physical and personal, can be examined, worked on, and picked back up.
To me that’s a practical version of tikkun. It’s not the theology. It’s a weekday afternoon version: something went wrong, so we figure out what to do next. There’s yarn. There’s time. And there’s togetherness.
That’s enough to start.
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