“Tikkun Olam—Healing a Fractured World”
By Raymond Scupin PhD
Professor Emeritus Anthropology and International Studies
Lindenwood University
St Charles, MO
The film “Tikkun Olam” directed by Pakistani-American film director Bob (Babar) Ahmed is a submission for the 2022 Academy Awards® in the Short Film Live Action category. Ahmed is a Cambridge University graduate who studied at the New York Film Academy and is now based in the Washington, DC area. He is one of the very few Pakistani-American directors and his work focuses on building bridges across communities and across societies.
Ahmed learned about the concept of Tikkun Olam through a family friend, Rabbi Lord Johnathan Sacks. This Hebrew term is linked to the ancient rabbinic religious concept found in the Mishnah texts (compilations of oral traditions; the Oral Torah) referring to “repairing the world, mending the world, or healing the earthly world” that reflected Prophetic Judaism, the Jewish equivalent of the Christian Social Gospel. The Jewish Prophets such as Amos, Isaiah, Micah promoted social justice and humanitarian values and norms that have relevance for the contemporary world.
The medieval Sephardic Jewish philosopher, Maimonides based in Córdoba in the Islamic Almoravid Empire (of present-day Spain) during the period of La Covinencia (co-existence—when Jews, Christians, and Muslims coexisted and pursued knowledge) emphasized Tikkun Olam as promoting acts of kindness and building a model society. Tikkun Olam has become part of the current Jewish vernacular for social action and the pursuit of social justice.
Ahmed titled his film Tikkun Olam as it addresses the issues of social justice, including persistent homelessness, alienation, isolation, and the lack of hope that are afflictions within so many contemporary cities in the US. The location of the film is on the streets of Washington, DC. It begins with a mother and her 8-year-old boy passing a homeless Vietnam veteran who appears to be visibly broken. The boy looks at the veteran with both interest and compassion, possibly his first time encountering such a tragic situation. In a subsequent scene, the homeless veteran fingers his medal—the Distinguished Service Cross, the US Army’s decoration for soldiers who display extraordinary heroism in combat—and tosses it aside in the brush near where he sleeps evoking his hopelessness. The boy and his mother pass the veteran again as he is sleeping on the sidewalk in mid-day, a common sight on the Washington, DC streets, which has one of the highest rates of homelessness in the US. Many people walk by this sleeping man paying no attention to his plight highlighting the anomie, impersonality, and lack of empathy within large urban areas.
In another scene the veteran is shown in front of the White House in a deranged mental state having PTSD flashbacks of combat and the Vietnam war. There are some signs on the fence in front of the White House saying “Their Lives Matter” symbolizing how the homeless veteran is associated with other vulnerable groups in society as evident by the Black Lives Matter movement. The film moves on to show a very touching scene with the boy finding the war medal of the veteran and bringing it to the homeless man and placing it over his neck in a symbolic demonstration of love and compassion. The veteran reciprocates and bends down to lace the sneaker of the boy as if to say ‘thank you for your kindness and the future will be yours.’
The film illustrates Tikkun Olam as an aspiration to behave and act constructively for the benefit of our common humanity. And has been given numerous awards and global acclaim on the festival circuit such as the Best Short Film awards at the ShorTS International Film Festival in Trieste, Italy, and at the Marano Ragazzi Spot Festival in Naples, Italy.
After viewing the film at the 2021 Birmingham Film Festival in the UK, the human rights activist, Ziauddin Yousafzai, (father of the well-known Women’s rights and education activist and youngest recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, Malala Yousafzai), said Ahmed’s film “connects the old generation with the new generation through our common humanity, through kindness and compassion”.
Although the overt theme of the film is homelessness in urban America, the deeper themes of Tikkun Olam are expressed by the young boy’s act of kindness and compassion to a stranger who is vulnerable through old age, poverty, and loneliness. And the understanding of these themes is ever so relevant in our pandemic world today.
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