The phrase tikkun olam appears in the Aleinu prayer, 'to repair the world under the kingdom of Shaddai', likely early rabbinic, and in the Mishnah as a principle of legal repair (Gittin 4). Isaac Luria (the Ari, Safed, d. 1572) gave it cosmological weight: at creation the vessels shattered (shevirat ha-kelim), scattering holy sparks into the husks, and every commandment performed with intention raises the sparks, tikkun as humanity's literal reassembly of the divine. Luria's teachings survive through Hayyim Vital's Etz Hayyim.
In modern American Judaism, tikkun olam functions primarily as the mandate for social action, a usage traced largely to mid-20th-century liberal Jewish thought, distant from the Lurianic sparks. Traditionalists note the swap: mystic cosmology traded for ethics, with the prayer book covering the retreat.
Luria's version is the stranger and stronger claim: evil is not a force but a fragmentation, and ethics is cosmology, every small act relocates a shard of light. Tikkun is the rare doctrine where washing a dish with full attention is metaphysics.
If the world is shattered light, is repair a mystic's job or a voter's?