The Book of Common Repair
A broken dishwasher, the Jewish idea of Tikkun Olam and fixing the world. A Thought For The Day on BBC Radio 4’s Today.
Our dishwasher, which had packed up, has been fixed. This is headline news in our house because I fixed it myself… and I can’t fix anything.
A broken glass was clogging up the rhythm section (I believe that’s what it was called) and the manufacturers online instruction manual showed me how to open up the machine and conduct this delicate procedure.
Within an hour I had proudly entered my parents lost generation… those who make do and mend.
There is something impossibly satisfying about being able to do something you had no idea you could do — more so when it involves the act of repair. The saving in time and money is joined by the feeling that in some infinitesimal way you’re reducing the amount of waste in a throw-away world.
On Monday John Lewis, partnering with the Timpson Group, famous for shoe repairs, begins a five city trial in which customers can take in a worn-out but greatly loved piece of clothing and get it repaired. Or a cushion or a handbag.
Other chains, like Selfridge’s, pilot similar schemes. Extending the life of a piece of clothing by nine months is estimated to reduce its carbon, waste and water footprints by nearly a third.
In the world’s most prosperous economies we have been sleepwalking into an ecological dead end where replacement is more convenient than repair and obscelence is built in.
But also where we may sometimes write off ourselves — or each other — as beyond fixing.
It was a Dutch rabbi, Awraham Soetendorp, who introduced me to the elegant Jewish tradition of Tikkun Olam. The idea, he said, was that as the world is evidently broken… what are humans here for, except to repair it?
The notion of Tikkun Olam conjures up a sense that life itself is a kind of cosmic repair shop and that the calling on the human community is to both fix the world inside us … and fix the world around us.
That none of us are obsolete or beyond repair.
One of the most rewarding parts of joining in the circular economy of a faith community is the promise of some kind of weekly reset. A community you plug into which both recharges and repairs you.
On a good day, ancient faith practices — from meditation or singing to sharing food or organizing in political protest — offer us a way of both healing our souls and repairing our world.
Maybe the C16th Book of Common Prayer could be renamed The Book of Common Repair. ‘Create in me a clean heart…’ as it reads. ‘And renew a right spirit within me.’
