In 2012, at a speech before AIPAC (the American Israel Public Affairs Committee), then-president Barack Obama spoke of “the concept of Tikkun Olam that has enriched and guided my life.”1 It wasn’t the first time he used the phrase, which, as he explained as a candidate in a 2008 speech (also before AIPAC), he understood to mean as “a commitment embedded in the Jewish faith and tradition: to freedom and fairness; to social justice and equal opportunity.