Tikkun Olam

From the Hebrew tikkun ('repair') and olam ('world'), the phrase first appears in the Mishnah (c. 200 CE) in the tractate Gittin, describing legal amendments made 'for the sake of repairing the world.' The concept was later transformed by 16th-century kabbalist Isaac Luria into a mystical framework of restoring scattered divine sparks, and in the modern era reinterpreted as a call to social justice.