Twitter, Teshuva and Tikkun Olam in the White House
Thursday, August 20th, 2009 | posted byDo Good. Share this post across the internet! Try it :) 
Obama says Health Care Reform is Tikkun Olam
“There will certainly be rabbis and congregants on all sides of the debate, but one thing common to all Jews is Tikkun Olam — the commitment to making the world around us a better place — and today no issue is more central to that work than making our health care system work better for all Americans.”
This White House statement, appearing in yesterday’s The New York Times, refers to US President Barack Obama’s address to one thousand rabbis on the topic of health care. He was invited by the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism to speak specifically on this topic, to help the rabbis prepare their upcoming Rosh Hashana sermons. A huge banner on the RAC’s home page calls on Jews to support Health Care Reform.
In his address, President Obama connected the Jewish New Year, traditionally a time for reckoning and renewal, with what he described as a moment of reckoning for the health care system. He recited one of the central high holiday prayers, U’Netaneh Tokef ,“On Rosh Hashana will be inscribed and on Yom Kippur will be sealed, how many will pass from the earth and how many will be created; who will live and who will die; who will die at his predestined time and who before his time,” adding that this prayer is thousands of years old, yet the suffering it describes — people dying before their time, by plague and by famine — still persists.
According to the NYT, “Many religious leaders prefer not to make overtly political pitches to their congregations, and one rabbi asked Mr. Obama how to reconcile the sanctity of the high holidays with the partisan politics of the health care reform fight. The president responded, another participant said, by framing it as a moral rather than a political question, stressing the 47 million Americans who lack insurance.”
Of interest to the social media community, the NYT quotes the Twitter feed of Rabbi Jack Moline of Alexandria, Virginia as saying that Obama asked the rabbis to help push for Health care reform. Rabbi Moline, whose twitter page reveals that he only began tweeting in July and has a modest 47 followers and 5 tweets to his name, apparently regrets his public tweeting of an address that the participants were asked to keep confidential.
Rabbi Moline tweets his repentance
The tweet the NYT referred to has been replaced with the bland, “Obama: ‘shanah tovah to all of you’“, and his latest tweet reads, “My lack of tech literacy results in a huge mistake — apologies to all for my tweets this afternoon. They have been deleted.”
The rabbi’s new tweet is actually a perfect demonstration of the five-step Teshuva (Jewish repentance) process just in time for the holidays:
- 1) Recognizing the mistake – in this case publicly by tweeting it
- 2) Ceasing to repeat it – by removing the offending tweets
- 3) Asking for forgiveness from the people who were hurt
- 4) Regret – Clearly expressed in this tweet
- 5) Resolve not to repeat the mistake.
Now that the rabbi has learned the power of Twitter, it will be interesting to see how he uses it!
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To make a difference wherever you are, check out these JGooders projects helping in the health care field around the world:
Save a Child with Medical Care (Odessa) – Tikva
Help Yana Fight Cancer (Kiev, FSU) – World ORT
Nutritional Supplements for children with Cystic Fibrosis (USA) - Child Life Society
Pediatric Emergency Room (Israel) – Kaplan Medical Center
Tags: Health Care, Jewish New Year, Obama, Rosh Hashana, Tikkun Olam
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2 Responses to “Twitter, Teshuva and Tikkun Olam in the White House”
what a great way to tie all that together!
nice post and interesting. i asked a Hartman institute Rabbinic Leadership Fellow who was in on the conversation to send me a short item on it, which I posted on our blog – http://hartmaninstitute.wordpress.com/2009/08/20/quick-report-from-obama-phone-conference-with-rabbis/ – seems innocuous enough to me; and how can you ask 1,000+ to keep something private.