Healing the world doesn’t mean ignoring its monsters

There was a time I found the Hebrew phrase Tikkun Olam—“to heal or repair the world”—charming, even inspiring. That was before I understood how ruthlessly it had been appropriated. Before I saw it descend from spiritual aspiration to political cudgel. Before it became a sanctimonious catchcry for self-anointed activists and self-serving ideologues who see no difference between screaming in shopping centres and blocking highways, even as working families try to get their children to school and themselves to jobs that keep our complex societies functioning.

They yell, disrupt, and accuse—declaring their acts righteous under the banner of Tikkun Olam. But I’ve come to believe they are not healing the world. They are press-ganging us into imbibing their ideological snake oil.
My understanding of this ancient idea has evolved—and sharpened—in recent years. I am not Jewish. But I am the founder and CEO of The 2023 Foundation, a nascent international organisation committed to combating antisemitism through lived experience and truth-telling. I had earlier spent three decades as a professional Australian soldier. I have walked the war-scarred roads of Iraq, Afghanistan, the Middle East, and elsewhere. I have studied the human condition at its best—and at its worst.

And I have come to believe that Tikkun Olam does not mean utopia. It does not mean placard activism or mass virtue-signalling. It means confronting evil. Repairing the world, at times, may mean defending it—decisively and even violently—against monsters.

Because there are monsters.

This fact has always been true. But for many, it took events like Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine in February 2022—or the atrocities of October 7, 2023, when Hamas terrorists butchered, raped, and incinerated 1,200 innocent people in southern Israel—for the veil to fall. To many Israelis, that day crystallised what should already have been obvious: history had not ended. Civilisation is not inevitable. Francis Fukuyama’s 1992 thesis The End of History—once so seductive in its optimism—now rings dangerously naïve.