During a “fireside chat” in Singapore on Friday, Google chief financial officer Patrick Pichette described our existing world as “broken.” Google, he said, wants to fix it.

It’s not the first time Pichette has employed that exact rhetorical framing. Two years ago, in Australia, he told an interviewer that “Google is really an engineering company with all these computer scientists that see the world as a completely broken place. And so, if you see the world as a broken place, there’s so many opportunities to actually solve problems.”

To which, I must ask, is Google an engineering company overstocked with kabbalistic Jewish mystics?

The notion that the world is broken has deep roots in Jewish religion. From very early on, humanity’s purpose on earth was to “repair” the damage. The 16th century rabbi Isaac Luria envisioned possibly the most dramatic version of this primeval sundering, teaching that creation itself was inseparable from the shattering of vessels containing divine light. Luria proposed that the proper observation of Jewish ritual would raise “one of the holy sparks out of the hands of the forces of evil and restore it to the upper world.” Much more recently, social reformers have invested the concept of repairing the world as a mandate for socially responsible activism. Healthcare reform, you could argue, might be one strategy for repairing the broken world.

Or self-driving cars, if you work for Google. In Singapore, Pichette offered up traffic jams as an example of something that Google planned to fix. In Australia, he referenced a more core Googleistic obsession: making sure that when you go searching online for something you want to buy that you actually find it.

I’m not sure a perfect shopping experience is exactly what the kabbalists had in mind, nor what they would make of a Google patent application that recently came to light, in which the company seeks to own a method for dynamically adjusting pricing for the repurchase of electronically distributed goods such as movies or ringtones.

(Google believes it can figure out whether you are more or less likely to repurchase that Tarantino movie you already bought on-demand once, and adjust the pricing for that repurchase up or down accordingly. Is this something that was broken? )