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.

The monsters never left. It is my judgment that we simply lost our instinct for danger.

Some people—early adopters of clarity—recognised this reality long ago. Others followed more recently, shaken into awareness by unmistakable evil. Friends of mine have referred to themselves as October 8th Jews and October 8th Gentiles—those who awoke the day after the massacre with a renewed sense of moral purpose and unshakable solidarity.

But there remains a stubborn cohort of laggards—ensconced on the campuses of Columbia, Harvard, in London, Sydney, and Melbourne—who still cling to outdated paradigms, moral relativism, and intellectual vanity. They are not simply behind the curve. They are the white noise of our civilisation—deluded, distracting, and dangerously irrelevant in a world that demands moral courage and practical resolve. These are not the kinds of people we want teaching—or indoctrinating—tomorrow’s generation. Having recently completed my third master’s degree, with studies in both Sydney and New York, it gives me no pleasure to report that these types are dug in like paralysis ticks in our centres of higher learning—tenacious, toxic, and in urgent need of exposure, challenge, and replacement.

In truth, Tikkun Olam originates in rabbinic Judaism as a call to sustain society—particularly through justice and fulfilment of divine commandments. Over centuries, it acquired a more mystical and moral dimension. The Kabbalistic tradition described the world as shattered at creation, and humanity’s role as assisting in its repair. This isn’t soft sentiment. It’s a duty that demands courage, clarity, and confrontation with chaos.

The Talmud teaches, “If someone comes to kill you, rise early and kill him first” (Sanhedrin 72a). This is not a celebration of violence—it is a tragic acknowledgement of the human condition. Jewish tradition does not glorify war. But neither does it flinch from the moral imperative to resist annihilation. Tikkun Olam can mean many things, but in a world of genocidal ideologies and fanatical regimes, it may at times mean confronting evil—decisively—before it strikes.

Consider the Islamic Republic of Iran. Since the fall of the Shah in 1979, Iran’s leaders have made no secret of their genocidal intent. “Death to Israel” and “Death to America” are not rhetorical flourishes. They are the regime’s ideological backbone. Iran’s Supreme Leader and the IRGC have long dreamt of a world without Jews, without Americans, without Western civilisation. That dream was dangerously close to being realised through a clandestine nuclear program—until recent joint kinetic actions by Israel and the United States began to dismantle it. These operations were not acts of aggression; they were acts of necessity. When the threat is existential, pre-emption is not only justified—it is morally required.
To ignore this is not idealism—it is delusion.

And yes, I care about the environment. We all should. Climate change is serious—perhaps one of the top 20 challenges confronting responsible governments. But to imagine that environmental collapse is the greatest existential threat to humanity is to fundamentally misread history. A third world war, ignited by unrestrained autocracies armed with weapons of mass destruction, would not only dwarf our emissions concerns—it could bring civilisation to an end. A nuclear, biological, or chemical winter is no longer just a scientific hypothesis. It is a looming possibility we edge toward every time tyrannical state and non-state actors are allowed to go unchecked.

Einstein once said that if he had an hour to save the world, he’d spend 55 minutes understanding the problem and five minutes solving it. My evolving understanding of Tikkun Olam has followed a similar arc. The problem is not simply carbon, inequality, or historical injustice—though all are real. The deeper problem is moral clarity. And the solution, I believe, lies in cultivating the kind of resilience, responsibility, and realism that too many modern societies have abandoned.

Maybe Ronald Reagan said it best: “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.” It is not inherited. It must be fought for, protected, handed on. As a father—and in the wake of October 7—I have thought long and deeply about the world I hope to one day bequeath to my unborn grandchildren. Not putting off until tomorrow what ought to be done today, nor making “hope” my method, are now pillars of my worldview. These convictions have driven me to act.

To combat antisemitism—that oldest and most enduring hatred—in its most modern and insidious manifestation: anti-Zionism disguised as virtue. Today’s antisemitism doesn’t wear a swastika; it wraps itself in progressive slogans while calling for the destruction of the world’s only Jewish state.
From the vantage point of June 2025, as Iranian missiles strike family homes in Tel Aviv, and Israel—supported by the United States—moves to dismantle a genocidal materiel threat 46 years in the making, I reflect on the real meaning of Tikkun Olam. The Iranian regime’s Jew-hatred has long gone unanswered. At last, wrongs are being righted.

For too long, many in the West—especially in the comfortable, post-Cold War decades—thought we had reached some pinnacle of enlightened stability. We lost sight of the lower rungs of Maslow’s famous hierarchy: safety, security, survival. These are not solved problems. They are the foundation upon which all higher ideals rest. When those rungs collapse, the entire pyramid crumbles.

To heal the world, then, is not to utopianise it. It is to protect it, to steward it, and in time, to bequeath it. And at times, that means having the moral strength to call evil by its name—and the strategic resolve to act accordingly.

If that means rising early to fight—metaphorically or literally—then so be it. That, too, is Tikkun Olam. The alternative is Auschwitz. That must never happen. Ever again.

And perhaps, just perhaps, reclaiming this ancient idea for what it truly is—an obligation to confront chaos, not decorate it—will help us all see more clearly in an age darkened by confusion, cowardice, and compromise.

Michael Scott CSC is the CEO and Founder of The 2023 Foundation, a charity focused on combating antisemitism. The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not reflect the positions of the Australian Defence Force or the Commonwealth Government of Australia.