Israel at 60

Rabbi Michael Lerner
Editor, Tikkun




Reprinted from Tikkun Magazine www.tikkun.org and its interfaith organization the global Network of Spiritual Progressives www.spiritualprogressives.org. People who seek to change the fundamental dynamics of the world so that materialism, selfishness, war and ecological insensitivity are replaced by generosity, caring for others, and awe and wonder at the grandeur of creation are invited to visit that website and become part of the Network!

Please join with me in prayer and/or in acts of kindness and generosity this Thursday, May 8 when Israel celebrates its 60th anniversary, and also the next Thursday, May 15, when Palestinians commemorate their Al Nakba (the catastrophe)--to pray for peace, justice and well-being for Israel, to pray for peace, justice and well-being for Palestine, and to pray for peace, justice and well-being for all the people of the earth. Let love and kindness prevail, and non-violence and peace be our guide on the way. Take some time those days to re-dedicate your time and energy to heal and transform our planet. Here are some of my reflections on this occasion:

When I was a child, Zionism was the national liberation struggle of the Jewish people. While the United States and all other countries-including the Christian, Muslim, Hindu, and Buddhist countries-closed their doors to Jews seeking refuge from the murder of millions of Jews by the fascists, and while the Palestinian people's leadership used their influence with the British to ensure that Jews would not be able to settle in our ancient homeland both during and immediately after the Second World War as hundreds of thousands of survivors languished in displaced persons' camps in Europe, the Zionist movement championed the need for a state of the Jewish people with its own army and its own territory. For a people who had been stateless for twenty centuries, who were forced to depend on the often-absent "good will" of their hosts in Europe, Africa, and Asia, the prospect of a homeland, prayed for everyday by Jews around the world for two thousand years, seemed to be at once impossible and yet the only imaginable redemption from the trauma of the Holocaust and the previous centuries of suffering and insecurity.

Jews jumped from the burning buildings of Europe into Palestine not because we were servants of imperial or colonial interests, but because we were desperate and because no one wanted us or would protect us. Unfortunately and tragically, we landed on the backs of Palestinians who were already there, and we hurt many of them in our landing. So scarred were we by our own pain-having just witnessed the death of one out of every three Jews alive on the planet-that we were unable to notice or take seriously the pain that we were causing to the Palestinian people in the process. When our army uprooted Palestinians from their homes and villages, it was in the midst of a struggle for survival in which Jews were determined to be as ruthless towards others as others had been towards us.

Yet, there were alternatives. We could have remained a minority in an Arab country and hoped for the goodness of the Arab people to prevail, particularly if Jews had been able to align with Arabs in the anti-colonial struggle against the British and French. The Zionist movement could have made dramatic overtures to the feudal landlords who owned much of the land in Palestine and who feared that our ideas of socialism would lead to a revolution against their interests, though that would have furthered alienated us from the Arab masses. We could have reached out, as Martin Buber and Judah Magnes did, to a growing Palestinian nationalist movement and tried to create a bi-national state, though at the time the hostilities and acts of terror from Palestinian extremists toward the Jewish minority, and by Zionist extremists toward Palestinian civilians, made this option appear unlikely to a Jewish population that had unwisely trusted the people of Europe to act with some level of human decency, and then were betrayed and murdered. We could have rejected the Histadrut's "Jewish only" policy of membership in its powerful union and its health care system, and those efforts might actually have paved the way toward a less violent reception by the Palestinian majority. We could have put our energies into demanding that the United States open its gates and let Jews settle here, perhaps resettling Jews in Hawaii and California, though in so doing they would have had to contend against the post-WWII conviction of many Jews that only a state of our own with an army of our own could ever be trusted to provide us with security in light of the failure of the US and other Western countries to save us from fascism and its genocide, not to mention the growing conviction of many Jews that with a state of our own we could create for the first time in two thousand years a vigorous Jewish culture, a political polity that reflected our values, and a society in which Jews would not have our lives subordinated to the will of a non-Jewish majority).

In retrospect there is much to be said for the Buber/Magnes position of giving far more attention to attempting to build ties of reconciliation and mutual respect with Palestinians before establishing a Jewish state. But the Zionist movement was made up of "realists" who didn't believe in the possibility of reconciliation, the Palestinian people were led by similar "realists" who didn't believe that it would be possible to live in peace with Jews, and hence refused to allow Jewish immigrants (although immigrants of any other religion were welcome), and the British did everything in their power to set both communities against each other (as it did wherever it held colonial power, encouraging ethnic clashes so as to undermine anti-colonial unity). Both sides had embraced nationalist rhetoric, and both sides had left behind the loving messages of their respective religions. Both sides were traumatized by their own history, and by outrageous acts of violence perpetrated by the other. I've detailed this history in my book Healing Israel/Palestine (North Atlantic Books 2003). And I'm well aware that partisans on each side have plenty of "facts" to use to "prove" that it was really the other side that caused all the problems, and that there is no "moral equivalency" between, for example, the slaying of Jews in Hebron in 1929 and the slaying of Arabs in Deir Yassin in 1948. The list of atrocities is long on both sides, and only those who wish to "win" for their side continue to insist that it was they who were innocent and the others were "evil" in intent as well as in action.

The expulsion of Palestinians from their homes--some by fear of being subject to terrorist attacks consciously planned to evoke that fear by Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Shamir, and the Zionist terrorist groups that they led, some (at least a hundred thousand) by acts of the Israeli army (now fully documented by Israeli historians), and still others by fear of being caught in a war zone (but then, Jews had no place to avoid the war zone, no neighboring countries to which to flee, no more in 1948 than we had when we were being slaughtered by the millions from 1939-1945, and for us, that was decisive about why we felt we had a right to stay), intensified angers. But these relationships could have been repaired had Israel allowed the refugees to return home after the armistice was reached in 1949. It did not. Instead Israel declared those who had left, whether by force or by fear, as a "hostile population," and shot as "terrorists" those who sought to sneak over the border in ensuing years to return to their homes. Those actions, particularly the brutal murders by Ariel Sharon and his Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) unit in the early 1950s, provoked counter-acts of terror by Palestinians. The story has only intensified in killings of civilians ever since.

Surrounding Arab states have not helped the matter. Their decision by some Arab leadres(not that of ordinary Palestinians living in their homeland without democratic mechanisms to choose the people who spoke for them) led to the 1947-1949 War and to disaster for Palestinians. For at least five decades thereafter, those Arab states, with the exception of Jordan and Egypt, rejected every attempt by Israel to make peace. Except for Jordan, all of those states have been wildly insensitive to the needs of their Arab brothers and sisters, and have used their cause as a political football to embarrass Israel, whose existence they hoped to overcome. It's only in the last decade that most of these states have come to accept that there is no military solution likely to yield a better deal for the Arabs than what they could get through negotiations. Moreover, many of those Arab states have treated Palestinian refugees at least as poorly, and sometimes considerably worse (e.g. Lebanon) than have the Israelis. Yet, as the example of Egypt and Jordan shows, those states no longer act as a bloc, and even the most extreme among them have finally come to accept the reality of Israel and have given up most of their fantasies that Israel would some day disappear. Only the non-Arab state of Iran still has leadership holding on to that illusion.

When I look back and watch the irrational and self-defeating behavior of both sides, and when I interview people on both sides of this struggle, one concept shouts out to me: PTSD-Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. The trauma on both sides has led people to be unable to think rationally about what is in their own best interests. For the Palestinians that trauma led them to reject the proposal of a two-state solution that was offered them in 1947, and for them to encourage the surrounding Arab states to reject every offer made by Israel in subsequent decades even after those states were decisively defeated in the 1967 War. In later decades, starting in the 1980s, it was the Jews who rejected reasonable offers for peace, and instead imagined that their military might would allow them to crush the Palestinian national movement. Illusion after illusion after illusion.

Even today, Israel has been faced with an offer by the Arab states for full recognition and peace if Israel would simply return to the pre-1967 borders. However, Israel will not accept, though it knows full well that in the negotiations the Palestinians would allow the Jews to hold on to the Western Wall and the Jewish Quarter of the Old City and would even consider trading some close-to-the-border land to allow some of the major Israeli settlements if Israel gave an equal amount of land back to the Palestinians and made a credible and serious offer to provide reparations for Palestinian refugees. If Israel were to approach this kind of offer in a spirit of open-heartedness, it could soon work out details that would provide Israel with adequate security.

Arrogance of power? Subordination to the religious messianism of the West Bank settlers? Sure, those play a role. But in my view, it is PTSD that is decisive in keeping Israelis from looking at their actual situation: a tiny minority in a world surrounded by Arab and Muslim states whose power will only grow in the coming decades and whose anger at Israel grows in intensity as they watch the state that claims to be the representative of the Jewish people act in horrendous and cruel ways toward Palestinians. Any rational assessment would lead Israelis to accept the terms being offered to them, and to do so in a way that manifested a spirit of generosity and caring for those whom it had hurt, tortured, falsely imprisoned, killed, or wounded. Similarly, it is PTSD that can best explain how Palestinians would embrace Hamas or Hezbollah and fantasize that they can eventually destroy Israel rather than work out an agreement that allows Israel to exist as a Jewish state (that is, as a state that gives affirmative action in regard to immigration to Jews who have a reasonable claim to fear of persecution where they are currently living-but not a state that is run by Jewish religious law except in the cultural sense that Jewish holidays are given the same official public priority in that state that Christmas is given in the United States).

How do you deal with two peoples who are suffering from PTSD? Well, we know what you don't do. You don't try to coerce them into situations in which they perceive themselves as vulnerable to re-experiencing the insecurity and pain that caused the trauma in the first place.

This is why I've argued against any attempt to force Israel through coercion into accepting solutions that make it feel more vulnerable. It's not that using coercion would be wrong or immoral, but that it will have the exact opposite effect than intended. Disinvestment in Israel, for example, would only reconfirm the basic feeling (based on a great deal of historical reality) that "the whole world is against us, but that this time we will not be led like sheep to the slaughter in the way that European Jewry allowed itself to be destroyed" (a false description of European Jewry, but nevertheless the dominant perception in Israel). The Massada Complex remains a central frame through which Israelis experience their reality: the courageous Jews who preferred death to surrendering to the Roman imperialists who were seeking to outlaw Jewish life in what the Romans had named "Palestine." In this case, the Israelis are armed with hundreds of nuclear weapons. There is enough willingness on the part of the majority to use those weapons even if in the process they destroyed themselves..

Thus, the situation cannot be analogized to that which existed in the 1980s and early 1990s in South Africa. On the one hand, the entire world recognized that apartheid was fundamentally evil. There is no such consensus about Israel or its policies. Apartheid meant that there was a legal structure preventing blacks from voting, participating in the same schools or same beaches as whites. There is no such set of laws within the pre-1967 boundaries of the State of Israel. There is certainly deprivation of rights in the West Bank and Gaza, but those deprivations stem from a political assessment of the alleged dangers that Israel faces, not from a commitment to degrade all Palestinians (though this distinction is rapidly losing its force as the settlers become more active in periodic pogroms against Palestinian civilians). On the other hand, the minority of whites in South Africa were not part of a people who had always suffered systematic persecution, and though they had some reason to fear what might happen to them as a minority in a black country, they did not have reasonable claim on the conscience of the rest of the world for the world's ignoring them while they were being systematically slaughtered. Yes, it's true that in the West Bank the conditions of oppression and discrimination are in many respects worse than those which existed in South Africa-but it is not apartheid, and using that word or thinking that one can use the same strategies to challenge Israeli policy has proved to be a dead-end. So while I support boycotts and disinvestment in Western firms that make goods specifically to help the settlers and the IDF be more effective in enforcing the Occupation, I oppose any general boycott of Israel itself. And there are moral reasons to oppose it as well-after all, the amount of suffering that Israel imposes on the Palestinian people pales in comparison to what the United States continues to do to Iraq. Any boycott that doesn't also involve active campaigns for boycotting and disinvestment in U.S. firms feels like selective prosecution, and something inappropriate for majority Christian or majority Muslim societies that have not yet taken full responsibility for their own role in creating the trauma that is now being played out against Palestinians.

In fact, this last point should remind us of the larger context. Israel has been put into the same position internationally that Jews often were forced into domestically in Eastern Europe: the public face of a system of oppression that Jews did not control but which they served in part because they received protection from ruling elites. History has shown that this position is precarious, and a bad deal for Jews. But it is Western imperialism and colonialism that set this up, and Jews are only one of many peoples who suffer the consequences along with our Palestinian brothers and sisters. Yet this reality should also remind Jews that placing their faith in the allegiance of the U.S. capitalist class is a terrible strategic error almost certain to backfire. The anger generated by American imperialism around the world, often with the backing of Israel as its sole loyal ally in disgraceful acts of domination, is generating huge amounts of anger that will be passed down from generation to generation among the peoples of the world. It's a story we could have learned from the Book of Genesis in the Torah-Joseph becomes the prime minister of Egypt, comes up with economic schemes that deprive many Egyptians of their livelihood, and in future generations the Egyptians then enslave and oppress the Jews. This is not a rational strategy for long-term survival.

The problem with PTSD is that it deprives people of the capacity to think about long-term survival and instead focuses them on the perceived (and usually unrealistic) immediate threats to such an extent that they are unable to act rationally.

What can one do with such a reality? The techniques of psychotherapy have proved of only limited impact with PTSD clients, but they have some chance. Not so when trying to build a mass psychology of healing for a whole society, particularly when the society has not elected to undergo therapy! Those of us who know healing is necessary are far from being empowered to develop societal strategies that could begin the healing process. For us, part of the problem is to get the society to recognize that it could benefit from therapy. My own work with the Institute for Labor and Mental Health started on this same challenge with regard to destigmatizing the use of therapy for working class people. We developed a campaign to popularize the notion that everyone is facing stress, that one is not "crazy" if one seeks support for stress-related problems, and that talking to someone about it would be helpful and not a sign of self-identifying as mentally ill. It was a powerful strategy, and by the mid 1980s we had become so successful that the term "stress" entered the popular vocabulary with much broader meanings than it had ever had before. One of the goals of the Tikkun Community and the Network of Spiritual Progressives is to bring together psychotherapists in the West with Israeli and Palestinian therapists to explore what would be analogous work in those societies.

A central ingredient in any serious strategy will be the task of reassuring people in both societies that they are not hated and demeaned by the peoples of the world, but rather than they are understood in some deep way. That's why in Healing Israel/Palestine (North Atlantic Books, 2003) I try to tell the history in a way that shows that both sides have a legitimate story, both sides have been unnecessarily cruel to the other, both sides need to do repentance and atonement. Sure, the story can be told in a blame-oriented way. But that will only make it less likely that we can heal the two sides enough that they could actually imagine feeling safe enough to make compromises for a real peace. Those who want to advance social healing should begin writing the texts, composing the songs, and creating the t.v. and movie documentaries, that have as their goal the presentation of this kind of balanced and non-blaming compassionate perspective.

I don't underestimate the difficulties in this strategy. The very fact of telling the story in a balanced way in the Jewish community in the United States has earned Tikkun the reputation of being anti-Semitic, or run by self-hating Jews. The organized Jewish community in the United States, prodded on by the Israel Lobby (see my discussion in Tikkun Sept/Oct 2007) has been one of the major impediments to this kind of discourse, or to any peace process that cares equally for both sides. Barack Obama felt that pressure intensely enough to insert in his now-famous speech on race in Philadelphia a line about the real problem in the Middle East stemming not even in part from the clashes and tensions between Israel and its neighbors and the frustrations of hundreds of millions of Muslims watching as their Muslim brothers and sisters are subjected to systematic violations of their human rights, but only from Islamic fundamentalism. Not to be outdone, Hillary Clinton warned that were it to attack Israel she as president would "obliterate" Iran. These are only the latest example of the incredible power of the Israel Lobby to make clear that loyalty to Israel's policies is necessary for any American politician to avoid political suicide in the U.S.-one can question U.S. policy (e.g. in regard to the current war we are fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan and possibly in Iran, but we dare not question Israeli policy!

So what can we who love Israel, want to see it survive and flourish, and feel that its current path is self-destructive, actually do politically? At least for the short run, we've found that lobbying Congress is a dead-end, because most of the Congressional leaders who agree with our "progressive Middle Path that is both pro-Israel and pro-Palestine" feel scared to say so publicly, and will continue to feel this way until some mainstream political candidate is willing to run for president and make this Middle Path his or her own. Similarly, and for reasons explained above, there's no point in demonstrations that one-sidedly fault Israel, even though Israel, at the moment, has far superior power and hence far superior responsibility to take the first steps to change the situation. Of course, we'll work with the "J Street" project to help create an alternative to AIPAC, but the pressures on that "alternative" to moderate its message in ways that make it less effective will be huge, and the tendency to focus only on policy issues and not on the underlying mass psychology that has contributed to AIPAC's power is going to be immense.

What does make sense is to challenge the mass psychology through a politics of compassion and a discourse of non-violence. Those of us who wish to see Palestinians freed from subjugation, and Israel living in peace with its neighbors, have to begin to apply the wisdom of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi to the situation in the Middle East. Efforts to create dialogue, to learn how to express oneself in ways that are supportive and not hostile, to learn how to respond to violence with non-violence, must be coupled with a principled embrace of non-violence and teaching non-violence in our public schools, churches, synagogues, mosques, and religious schools.

But there is a deeper change that is needed to heal Israel/Palestine: a change in our own U.S. conception of what brings security. The Network of Spiritual Progressives/Tikkun Community evolved from its primary focus on challenging Israeli policy to challenging the Domination Strategy (the view that homeland security comes from imposing our will on others lest they impose their will on us) in Western societies. This evolution occurred not only because of the moral disaster of the Iraq War, but also because we became increasingly convinced that at the heart of the Middle East struggle was the need to undermine the Domination Strategy that has become the common sense, not only of the post 9/11 Western countries but also of the mass consciousness in Israel and Palestine. In place of that slippery-slope to violence and war, we propose a Strategy of Generosity: that homeland security can best be achieved through acts of genuine caring and generosity toward others, so that we are perceived as (and actually become) a country that recognizes our fundamental interconnection with all other human beings on the planet and with the well-being of the planet itself. It is that thinking which now leads us to give a priority attention to the Global Marshall Plan, not only because it is the best way to end global poverty, homelessness, hunger, inadequate education and inadequate healthcare, but also because it is the best way to lead by example and to show both Arab and Israeli peoples the way that could bring them lasting peace.

This, we believe, is the most important contribution we in the West could make to healing Israel/Palestine. If we could build a political movement in Western societies that was committed to the Strategy of Generosity and the Global Marshall Plan, we would help Israelis feel that acting from generosity was not some utopian fantasy but rather a way of thinking that was already legitimated in the politics of the more advanced industrial societies of the West. In this way we could re-empower the many decent people in Israel/Palestine who today avoid politics, certain that there is no point, and that no one would ever be willing to make the compromises necessary for peace.

Living in the West, we have an important role, but it is not that of imposing our solution, but rather that of modeling a way of relating to others that could infectiously transform the world's "common sense." Just as the women's movement, first dismissed as "unrealistic," has had a profound impact on every country on the planet, so a movement for love and generosity, and for a New Bottom Line, such as that detailed in our Global Marshall Plan (to read go to www.tikkun.org and click on "Current Thinking") and our Spiritual Covenant with America (to read go to www.spiritualprogressives.org) could have a profound impact on the process of healing the Middle East. To the extent that we can make that happen here, we would be making a huge contribution toward the possibility of lasting peace for Israel.

In future writing I will discuss the meaning of the situation in Israel/Palestine for those who believe in God and who want to keep Judaism alive. For now, suffice it to say that the kind of Zionism that has emerged in Israel is fundamentally incompatible with the highest values of the Jewish tradition, and must be rejected even as we develop a compassionate attitude toward the Jewish people of Israel. For those who wish to see Judaism survive the twenty-first century, a major first step is to separate the religion from its current identity with the policies of a national state that has lots of Jews living in it and that has succeeded in getting many Jews around the world identifying it as "The Jewish State." I personally feel tremendous pride in many aspects of what the Jews in Israel have accomplished on the fronts of culture, science, and technology, even as I feel tremendous shame at what they have failed to accomplish in human relations, ethics, and environmental sensitivity. But I carefully separate my sense of family-which for me is tied quite strongly to the State of Israel-from my understanding of what is required of us to serve God and to preserve Judaism in the contemporary period. For that latter goal, we must be willing to apply the prophetic tradition and ask Israelis Isaiah's powerful question: "Who asked you to trample in My Courtyard" and to defile the holiness of God's Torah?

Judaism teaches us to "love the stranger," (the Other). There is no more frequently quoted injunction in Torah than variations on the following theme: "When you come into your land, do not oppress the stranger: remember that you were strangers in the land of Egypt." A Jewish state that has been unwilling or unable to live by that command has no religious foundation and can generate no lasting support from those committed to God and Torah. Such a state, failing that central commandment, is unlikely to provide safety and security for the Jewish people in any long-term way in the twenty-first century.

Like every other people on the planet, Jews have a yearning to live in a world based on love and kindness and generosity. We will respond to those possibilities just as all peoples will if given half a chance. The task of building a Network of Spiritual Progressives is to convince all peoples that far from being a naïve utopian fantasy, building such a world of open-heartedness, compassion, and caring for others is the immediate survival task of the twenty-first century.

Please join with me in prayer and/or in acts of kindness and generosity this Thursday, May 8 when Israel celebrates its 60th anniversary, and also the next Thursday, May 15, when Palestinians commemorate their Al Nakba (catastrophe)--to pray for peace, justice and well-being for Israel, to pray for peace, justice and well-being for Palestine, and to pray for peace, justice and well-being for all the people of the earth.

Rabbi Michael Lerner is editor of Tikkun Magazine, Chair of the Network of Spiritual Progressives (NSP) and rabbi of Beyt Tikkun synagogue in San Francisco and Berkeley. He is the author of 11 books including Jewish Renewal (Putnam, 1994), Jews and Blacks: Let the Healing Begin (Putnam, 1995-with Cornel West), The Politics of Meaning (Addison Wesley, 1996), Healing Israel/Palestine (North Atlantic Books, 2003), The Geneva Accords and Other Strategies for Middle East Peace (North Atlantic Books, 2004), and The Left Hand of God (hardcover 2006, revised in paperback, 2007, Harper San Francisco). Rabbi Lerner leads Shabbat services Friday evenings in San Francisco, and teaches Torah study Saturday mornings in Berkeley (more info: www.BeytTikkun.org). He welcomes your comments on this editorial: write to him at RabbiLerner@Tikkun.org.

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A Jewish Renewal Understanding of the State of Israel

Webmaster's note: This dialogue between contributors to The Methuselah Project and Rabbi Lerner precedes the following article by Rabbi Michael Lerner:

Leoni to Uta in Jerusalem: Uta, I was most interested when you said "There is no Jewishness without the strive for Zion. Only those who disidentify from their Jewishness can disidentify from Jerusalem." Seeking more information, I emailed Rabbi Lerner (Tikkun) as below. I was deeply heartened by his response which seems to me to be the most stable and central position which can be taken re the Israeli-Palestinian crisis.

Leoni to Rabbi Lerner: Dear Rabbi Michael Lerner, I wondered if you could share your thoughts about a comment which my friend made. "There is no Jewishness without the strive for Zion. Only those who disidentify from their Jewishness can disidentify from Jerusalem." What is your opinion please?
Is it true that all true Jews strive to live in or have ownership over the land of Jerualem? Is there no other interpretation for "Jerusalem" in Judaism, but the physial plane land?; Is it true that you cannot be a real Jew if you disindentify from Jerusalem?

Rabbi Lerner: I start my class on Judaism by explaining that Judaism is the 3200 year old debate about what Judaism is. There is no pope, no one correct path. There are Jews who hold the position you quote and many who don't. There are Jews like me who believe that Jerusalem, or Yeru-shalayim means the city of peace, and only a city that is in fact a manifestation of peace is the Jerusalem for which we pray. As to ownership, the Torah is clear on this: God owns the earth, and we have no rights to it. Our relationship to the Land of ISrael is 100% conditional on our living out the vision of Torah (and that includes the oft repeated command "do not oppress the stranger, remember that you were strangers in the land of Egypt" and also "that shall LOVE the stranger." Please read my book Jewish Renewal.

A Jewish Renewal Understanding of the State of Israel

Rabbi Michael Lerner


Reprinted from Tikkun Magazine www.tikkun.org and its interfaith organization the global Network of Spiritual Progressives www.spiritualprogressives.org. People who seek to change the fundamental dynamics of the world so that materialism, selfishness, war and ecological insensitivity are replaced by generosity, caring for others, and awe and wonder at the grandeur of creation are invited to visit that website and become part of the Network!

Jews did not return to Palestine in order to be oppressors or representatives of Western colonialism or cultural imperialism. Although it is true that some early Zionist leaders sought to portray their movement as a way to serve the interests of various Western states, and although many Jews who came brought with them a Western arrogance that made it possible for them to see Palestine as "a land without a people for a people without a land," and hence to virtually ignore the Palestinian people and its own cultural and historical rights, the vast majority of those who came were seeking refuge from the murderous ravages of Western anti-Semitism or from the oppressive discrimination that they experienced in Arab countries. The Ashkenazi Jews who shaped Israel in its early years were jumping from the burning buildings of Europe--and when they landed on the backs of Palestinians, unintentionally causing a great deal of pain to the people who already lived there, they were so transfixed with their own (much greater and more acute) pain that they couldn't be bothered to notice that they were displacing and hurting others in the process of creating their own state.

Their insensitivity to the pain that they caused, and their subsequent denial of the fact that in creating Israel they had simultaneously helped create a Palestinian people most of whom were forced to live as refugees (and now, their many descendents still living as exiles and dreaming of "return" just as we Jews did for some 1800 plus years), was aided by the arrogance, stupidity and anti-Semitism of Palestinian leaders and their Arab allies in neighboring states who dreamt of ridding the area of its Jews and who, much like the Herut "revisionists" who eventually came to run Israel in the past twenty years, consistently resorted to violence and intimidation to pursue their maximalist fantasies.

By the time Palestinians had come to their senses and acknowledged the reality of Israel and the necessity of accommodating to that reality if they were ever to find a way to establish even the most minimal self-determination in the land that had once belonged to their parents and grandparents it was too late to undermine the powerful misperception of reality held by most Jews and Israelis that their state was likely to be wiped out any moment if they did not exercise the most powerful vigilance. Drenched in the memories of the Holocaust and in the internalized vision of themselves as inevitably powerless, Jews were unable to recognize that they had become the most powerful state in the region and among the top 20% of powerful countries in the world--and they used this sense of imminent potential doom to justify the continuation of the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza for over thirty years.

The occupation could only be maintained by what become an international scandal--the violation of basic human rights of the occupied, the documented and widespread use of torture, the systematic destruction of Palestinian homes, the grabbing of Palestinian lands to allow expansion of West Bank settlements that had been created for the sole purpose of ensuring that no future accommodation with Palestinians could ever allow for a viable Palestinian state in the West Bank (since, as many settlers argued, the land had been given to the Jewish people by God, hence precluding any rights to Palestinians), and the transformation of Israeli politics from a robust democracy into a system replete with verbal violence that sometimes spilled over into real violence (most notably, the assassination of prime minister Rabin because of his pursuit of peace and reconciliation with the Palestinian people).

The distortions in Israeli society required to enable the occupation to continue have been yet another dimension of the problem: first, the pervasive racism towards Arabs, manifested not only in the willingness to blame all Palestinians for the terrorist actions of a small minority but also in the willingness to treat all Israeli citizens of Palestinian descent as second class citizens (e.g. in giving lesser amounts of financial assistance to East Jerusalem or to Israeli Palestinian towns than to Jewish towns); second, in the refusal to allocate adequate funds to rectify the social inequalities between Ashkenazi and Sephardic/Mizrachi Jews; third in the willingness of both Labor and Likud to make electoral deals with ultra-orthodox parties intent on using state power to enforce religious control over Israelis' personal lives and to grab disproportionate state revenues--in order that they could count on these religious parties to back whatever their engagement or disengagement plans in the West Bank.

Perhaps the greatest victim of all these distortions has been Judaism itself. Judaism has always had within it two competing strands, one that affirmed the possibility of healing the world and transcending its violence and cruelty, the other that saw "the Other" (be that the original inhabitants of the land, who were to be subject to genocidal extermination, or later Greeks, Romans, Christians, or now Arab) as inherently evil, beyond redemption, and hence deserving of cruelty and violence. The latter strand, which I call "settler Judaism" because it reflects the ideology of settling the land that reaches its fulfillment as much in the Book of Joshua (and in some quotes in Torah) as in the reckless acts of Ariel Sharon and the current manifestations of the National Religious Party in Israel, was actually a very necessary part of keeping psychologically healthy in the long period of Jewish history when we were the oppressed and we were being psychologically brutalized by imperial occupiers or by our most immoral "hosts" in European societies. But today, when Jews are the rulers over an occupied people, or living in Western societies and sharing the upper crust of income and political power with our non-Jewish neighbors, the supremacist ideas of Settler Judaism create a religious ideology that can only appeal to those stuck in the sense that we are eternally vulnerable. For a new generation of Jews, bred in circumstances of power and success, a Judaism based on fear and demeaning of others, a Judaism used as a justification for every nuance of Israeli power and occupation, becomes a Judaism that has very little spiritual appeal. Ironically, the need to be a handmaiden to Israel distorts Judaism and causes a "crisis of continuity" as younger Jews seek spiritual insight outside their inherited tradition.

Yet Judaism has another strand, what I and others call "Renewal Judaism," which started with the Prophets and has reasserted itself in every major age of Jewish life, insisting that the God of Torah is really the Force of Healing and Transformation, and that our task is not to sanctify existing power relations but to challenge them in the name of a vision of a world of peace and justice. Perhaps the greatest danger that Israel poses to the Jewish people is the extent to which it has helped Jews become cynical about their central task: to proclaim to the world the possibility of possibility, to affirm the God of the universe as the Force that makes possible the breaking of the tendency of people to do to others the violence and cruelty that was done to them, the Force that makes possible the transcendence of "reality" as it is so that a new world can be shaped. If Israel is ever to be healed, it will only be when it is able to reject this slavish subordination to political realism and once again embrace the transformative spiritual message of renewal.

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The Obama Phenomenon


Rabbi Michael Lerner

Reprinted from Tikkun Magazine www.tikkun.org and its interfaith organization the global Network of Spiritual Progressives www.spiritualprogressives.org. People who seek to change the fundamental dynamics of the world so that materialism, selfishness, war and ecological insensitivity are replaced by generosity, caring for others, and awe and wonder at the grandeur of creation are invited to visit that website and become part of the Network!

[The article below appeared in the March/April issue of Tikkun. While Tikkun editor Rabbi Michael Lerner analyzes the phenomenon that has emerged around the candidacy of Barack Obama, neither he nor Tikkun nor the Network of Spiritual Progressives endorses Obama or any other candidate or political party. We welcome any spiritual progressive to write a response to his editorial or to speak about why you support McCain, Clinton, Nader, McKinney or anyone else, and if well written we will publish it on our website www.tikkun.org or, space permitting, as a letter to the editor inside the magazine. We welcome lively debate. Send to Dave@tikkun.org. We are also well aware that Obama is likely to be defeated in Pennsylvania primay, particularly after the media gave such a distorted impression of his speech about his relationship with his former minister Rev. Wright--but Lerner's claim is not that he will win the nomination or the election, but that he has elicited something rarely elicited in American politics.
[ If, on the other hand, you agree with Rabbi Lerner's analysis below, you'll realize that this kind of thinking is badly needed in American political discourse (it is as absent on the Left as in the Center or Right). So please help us spread these ideas and way of thinking inside the campaigns of whatever candidate you support or inside whatever party you support or whatever political or religious or social change movement you are part of--by joining the Network of Spiritual Progressives at www.spiritualprogressives.org.--The Editorial Staff of Tikkun] from the March/April issue of Tikkun Magazine

The Phenomenon is not Barack Obama. Senator Obama is a masterful organizer and teacher. But this editorial is not about Obama as much as about what he elicits in others, and should not be read as an endorsement of him.

The energy, hopefulness, and excitement that manifests in Obama's campaign has shown up before in the last fifty years, only to quickly be crushed. It was there in the 1960s and 1970s in the Civil Rights movement, the anti-war movement, the women's movement, the environmental movement, and the movement for gay liberation. One felt it flowing at rallies and demonstrations at which Robert Kennedy, Cesar Chavez, Betty Friedan, Isaac Deutscher, Joan Baez, and Martin Luther King, Jr. articulated their visions. It was there again in Earth Day, in the anti-nuclear movement, and in the movement against the war with the Contras. It was there during the campaign of Jesse Jackson in 1988 and the Clintons' campaign in 1992. And it has been there-dare we say it-in the growth of the religious right and the Campus Crusade for Christ.

What is that energy and excitement, and why does it touch people so deeply?

Since Tikkun started in 1986 we've been trying to convince the political leadership of the liberal and progressive forces that they needed to understand this phenomenon and speak to it. Sometimes we've written about it as a hunger for meaning and purpose, and prescribed a "politics of meaning" as the way to respond politically; in the last few years we've written about the need for a spiritual progressive politics to bring this energy into the public sphere.

The phenomenon in question is this: the intense desire of every human being on this planet to overcome and transcend the materialism and selfishness that shape the global economic arrangements and permeate the consciousness of all people, to overcome the looking-out-for-number one consciousness that divides us and the technocratic language that shapes our public institutions and denies us access to our common humanity, and to overcome the alienation from each other that this way of being has created so that we might once again recognize each other as embodiments of God or Spirit (or however you want to talk about the force-field of goodness, generosity, kindness, justice, peace, nonviolence, and care for each other and nature and the entirety of all that is).

We Avert Our Eyes from One Another

Every gesture, every word, every deed, every political act, every interaction with others, every message we give ourselves all combine to either reinforce our separation and estrangement from each other or to reconnect us in a deep way that allows genuine mutual recognition, the seeing and hearing of who we really are, the contact we have with the sacred in ourselves, in each other, and in the world.

We live in a world that is humanly deadening. It's not just the actual murders committed in our name. I picked up the newspaper this morning and read that U.S. forces barged into a home in the village of Door, 100 miles north of Baghdad, and began to fire at the family living there, killing four, including an eleven-year-old girl. Perhaps tomorrow they will issue a statement acknowledging that this was a mistake, as they did today about the killing of nine Iraqi civilians in Iskandariya a few days ago, and the death "under mysterious circumstances" of an Iraqi militiaman who died "in custody after being held for three days on a Baghdad arrest warrant" as a result of a bullet in the head. At some point they'll acknowledge that the U.S. invasion let loose dynamics that have led to the deaths of over one million Iraqis, and that the "surge" could only be described as "working" because it accelerated the process of some 3 million Iraqis leaving their homes while neighborhoods were being surrounded by concrete walls to provide protection to one ethnic group while the other groups fled to "safety" elsewhere. But today, most Americans remain in a state of zombie-like denial of what this country continues to do.

Nor is the deadening process confined to the various ways we deny our involvement in the world and what is happening therein. For example, our refusal to acknowledge that paying the taxes to keep the war going is part of what makes it possible; and our refusal to acknowledge that the 20,000-30,000 children who die (on average) every single day around the world because of inadequate food and healthcare are directly connected to our global economic system in which we participate daily and which we accept as "inevitable"; and the distance we maintain from those who seek fundamental change, whom we reject as unrealistic.

No, it's not just these large systems of oppression and manipulation that deaden us. It's also our own withdrawn and depressive certainty that nothing much can happen in the world of politics and economics, or even in our interactions with each other. We walk down the streets or ride the buses, subways, or airplanes, averting our eyes from the others who share our circumstances. We are certain that if we start talking to others that they will feel that their privacy has been invaded and will resent it, suspecting that we are out to sell them something or take advantage of them or manipulate them. Instead, as Tikkun associate editor Peter Gabel has so frequently articulated on these pages, we stay inside ourselves, offering ourselves to others only in tightly controlled roles, the dimensions of which have been carefully constructed to ensure that we will not awaken in the others their own hunger for love, friendship, recognition, or aliveness.

And so we deaden ourselves and deaden each other. Each time we avert our eyes, each time we pretend not to see the homeless person, the fellow worker getting into trouble, the neighbor who needs our help, the car stalled on the freeway, and each time we tighten our face and muscles to give to the other the message of "don't go there" where "there" means "don't try to force me to be real with you when I'm scared to do that," we manage to convince the others that nobody gives a damn, that they, too, are alone, and that they would be making a huge mistake to try to break out of their isolation or to think that their own desires for connection are shared by billions of others and are not simply a manifestation of some private inadequacy or pathology.

Recently, some columnists have compared Obama to a rock star because his supporters seem to treat him more like that than like a politician. They are only partially mistaken. What the best and most fulfilling rock concerts of the past several decades have offered one generation is what other multi-generational mega-churches or Super Bowls and World Series' offer to others: a chance to momentarily experience a transcendence of all those feelings of loneliness and alienation, a momentary ability to be part of a "we" that reminds us of what it feels like to be less alone. For a moment we experience a community of shared purpose, and no matter how intellectually, psychologically, or spiritually empty that moment might be, for that moment we get a distorted but, nevertheless, powerful way of reminding ourselves of how much more we could be than when we are alone and scared.

The problem, of course, is that these moments are often based on an us-versus-them vision of the world: our community requires that some other people be the bad guys. As contemporary psychodynamic psychotherapists like to point out, we are often engaged in splitting our own internalized image of ourselves as fundamentally good and decent from another part, which we see as dirty and unacceptable and hence not really part of us at all but rather part of some "evil Other," which in the West, through history, has been the Jew, the Black man, the feminist, the homosexual, the communist, the terrorist, the illegal immigrant, etc.

The Effectiveness of Not Demonizing

Obama's appeal starts from his insistence on not demonizing the Other-the very point from which Tikkun started as a project of the Institute for Labor and Mental Health (ILMH) twenty-two years ago. At ILMH we learned-through conducting an intensive study of working class consciousness-that people moving to the Right politically were not primarily motivated by racism, sexism, and hatred, but by the spiritual crisis in their lives that the Left failed to address and the Right spoke to (albeit with distorted solutions).

Obama avoids detailing his political programs precisely because he knows that in so doing he would shift the discourse from how to break through the fear we have of each other and our "certainty" that we are condemned to be alone and alienated, back to the old discourse about point X or point Y in his health care or environmental program, leaving most people behind in despair. Instead, he confronts that despair straight on.

Obama knows that most people want a very different world, but don't believe it is possible unless someone else makes it happen. He challenges his audience by telling them that there is no one else, that they themselves are the people who must make the world different. To quote Obama from his Super Tuesday speech: "So many of us have been waiting so long for the time when we could finally expect more from our politics, when we could give more of ourselves and feel truly invested in something bigger than a particular candidate or cause. This is it. We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change that we seek."

In short, Obama is telling his supporters, we are not in need of some magical leader, not even Obama himself. Rather, what we need is the confidence in ourselves to reclaim the public space, to break down our fears about ourselves and each other, and to recognize that it is only when we move beyond our personal lives and work together for our highest vision that anything substantial will change.

Obama has used his campaign to teach us that we actually can emerge from our frightened, withdrawn state, and enter into a public community and affirm each other's humanity, whether that be through our foreign relations, in our approach to immigration, in our economic lives, or, even, in overcoming the ossified categories of "the Left" and "the Right." And Obama presents himself with a sense of certainty that helps us overcome our own uncertainty-he is determined to win the election because he thinks we can do this if we are willing to "declare that we are with each other."

It is precisely this striving to create a transcendent experience of connection without demonizing the Other that has been the important element in the Obama phenomenon. Although the criticisms of his seeming inability to recognize the depth of the struggles that must be waged against the entrenched powers of global capital are well-founded, the Obama phenomenon promises to accumulate the power to challenge the powerful precisely by rejecting the demonizing of the other and following a path of nonviolence, not only in actions but also in words. This kind of nonviolent communication, a powerful extension of Gandhi's and King's methodology, may actually, in the long run, prove far more effective than pointing out the cruelty and hypocrisy of those who will not challenge the existing systems of militarism and global economic and political domination.

This is About Us, Not About Obama

Surely, one might object, we are giving far too much credit to Obama himself. After all, many on the Left argue, Obama is just a consummate politician, and not one committed to the programs that we all need. Obama voted against the war in Iraq, but he does not advocate the kind of withdrawal that we at Tikkun believe is the necessary precondition for any real healing in that country, namely a total and complete withdrawal not fudged by turning our military into "advisors" who could then stay in the country until it is stabilized. (Our troops are still in Germany and Japan sixty-three years after the end of the Second World War, so we know how hard it is for any government to acknowledge that "stabilization" has been achieved.) Obama does not support a single payer health care program of the sort that the NSP supports, and his ideas on health care have been less plausible than those of Hillary Clinton. Obama has not supported a serious tax on carbon emissions and his environmental programs have not challenged the global corporate polluters and exploiters of the earth, nor is he likely to support the kinds of radical changes in our Western levels of consumption necessary to save the planet from destruction. Obama has not been on the forefront of struggles against poverty and for the empowerment of workers. And Obama does not yet advocate for a Global Marshall Plan or for the Strategy of Generosity that has been central to this magazine and the NSP's approach to transforming the world.

All of the above would be relevant points if we were discussing whether to endorse the candidate Barack Obama. But we are not. We have never endorsed a candidate, despite the many who misperceived our enthusiasm for the language being used by the Clintons during the 1992 campaign and for Hillary Clinton's spontaneous speech when she explicitly endorsed our "politics of meaning" and then invited us to meet with her and strategize together in the White House in 1993. The truth is that even beyond the legal prohibitions that make endorsement impossible for a 501c3, we actually don't see any political party or candidate who fully articulates a spiritual politics of the sort you'll find in our Spiritual Covenant with America at www.spiritualprogressives.org. So while some of us may endorse a candidate in 2008 as private citizens, in no way does this extend to an endorsement by the magazine or the Network of Spiritual Progressives. Nor are we surprised to find that members of the NSP differ sharply in who they would endorse.

These Dead Bones Shall Yet Live

What we are talking about is the phenomenon of hope and the coming back to life of the spiritually dead. This is the good news of Spring, with nature blooming; the good news of Passover and its message that no system of slavery or deadness is inevitable because there is a Force in the universe that makes possible the transformation from that which is to that which ought to be; and the good news of Easter with its message that even the dead can be resurrected, or as our Jewish prophet Ezekiel put it, that "these dead bones shall yet live."

Or to put it another way: no matter how spiritually and emotionally dead the majority of people on the planet may appear to be, no matter how lost in their pursuit of money and fame and sexual conquest and me-first-ism and don't-bother-me-ism, the truth is that the resurrection of the dead is always at hand, always a possibility. Human beings can always be awakened again to choose life, to choose love, to choose kindness, generosity, ecological sensitivity, and awe and wonder at the grandeur of creation. That capacity of human beings is what it means to have a soul, though in my view it might be better to say that all human beings participate in the soul of the universe, which is the God of the universe.

The big task for spiritual progressives is to keep the Obama phenomenon alive whether or not he becomes the next president of the U.S; either way, the challenge is substantial. In the early days of the Clinton presidency when the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal were describing me as Hillary Clinton's guru, and Bill Clinton was steadily reading Tikkun, Hillary told me a powerful story that has stayed with me ever after. She told of a meeting that FDR had with leaders of the labor movement who were trying to convince FDR to support the Lehman Act (to grant legal status to union strikes and organizing). After four hours of discussion, FDR summarized this way: "Gentlemen, you have totally convinced me that you are right. Now, go out there into the world and force me to do it" [emphasis mine]. His point, Hillary explained, is that even as president, the forces pushing in the direction of the status quo are potentially overwhelming unless countered by a well-organized popular movement, and she and Bill did not feel that they had enough of a movement behind them to push for their most visionary ideas.

That's why the movement is so very important.

The Living Movements We Need

It matters, however, what kind of movement. The Left and the liberal progressives have not been particularly effective in building a transformative movement in large part because they've been stuck on the level of "policy and program" while ignoring the spiritual hunger for meaning and purpose, for connection and mutual recognition, that we've been talking about in Tikkun all these years.

All of the movements and campaigns that were mentioned above were originally embodiments of that larger set of spiritual concerns, and they drew their energy precisely from their ability to reconnect to the deep and abiding hunger, often well-hidden below the surface appearance, for a return to life, to the spirit, to God, or however else you choose to express this. When that hunger explodes into life, when people are resurrected from their spiritual death, everything becomes possible. And that itself can be overwhelming, as we can see from reading how scared the people were at Mt. Sinai when God revealed Herself to the people. It feels so much safer if people can find a way to turn that energy into something not quite so revolutionary: into commandments, social programs, rituals, legislation, political platforms, or concrete demands. And there's nothing fundamentally wrong with this as long as one keeps the fires burning inside, the connection to the loving and awesome energy of the God of the universe, or of the power of staying alive to each other and to oneself at every moment.

Unfortunately, what often happens in social change organizations is that the fear becomes so great that it overwhelms the hopefulness and the love, and so they barely keep alive the pale shadow of that hopefulness, and instead try to prove that they are "realistic" by focusing their energies on struggles for this or that specific program, now increasingly out of touch with the underlying desire which led them and their supporters into these struggles in the first place. And without that desire and the contact with the
aliveness that it first evoked, these struggles become deadening and people drop away, and then they are lost. Washington, D.C. and many of our major cities around the country are filled with people who are involved in these liberal or progressive organizations that have lost their fire, and many more who have dropped out because the experience was no longer humanly satisfying or sustainable.

It's not enough to conclude that one should keep the movement alive after the campaign is finished. That was the promise of the McGovern campaign in 1972, the Carter campaign in 1976, the Kennedy campaign in 1980, the Jesse Jackson campaign in 1988, and the Clinton campaign in 1992. This won't happen unless the people work to make it happen during the campaign, right now, in the midst of the struggle. And it must be done in such a way that people are not re-privatized, passivized, and then eventually demobilized. It has to be planned regardless of what happens in the actual horse race for the presidency.

And this year there is a special challenge, because the people who have returned to life and energy are not just in the Obama campaign but in the Clinton campaign, and in the Green party, and in other political parties as well, and they need to be welcomed into an ongoing movement that keeps this energy alive, without facing recriminations for not having backed whoever others think that they should have.

Win or Lose: What Obama Needs to Do Right Now

Obama himself seems to recognize, at times, that what really counts is not the horse race or even who wins the presidency, but the creation of an ongoing movement that will last. Unfortunately, he does not take the next, absolutely necessary step of telling his supporters what they can do to keep the movement going right now and endow it with the energy to last beyond the November elections. So, for example, the people in New York, California, Massachusetts, Iowa, New Hampshire and all the other states that have voted are implicitly being given the message that there is nothing for them to do right now except to donate more money to the campaigns of their candidates.

Imagine how different that could be if Obama were to ask people to meet weekly in their neighborhoods in small groups to begin to build ongoing projects of social change that would embody their highest ideals. Groups could be organized, for example, around universal health care, environmental sanity, the Global Marshall Plan as the path to homeland security, corporate social responsibility, and electoral reform. If the millions of people who have been touched by the campaigns (and yes, not only by Obama, but by Hillary Clinton, John McCain, etc.) were to begin working now for the changes they want their candidate to bring to the country, then these campaigns would stop resembling horse races and start resembling the building of mass movements and the reclaiming of social space from all those columnists, politicians, and public opinion leaders whose impact historically has been to deaden our hopes and convince us that we should just attend to our own personal lives.

This is where the NSP comes in. We are not of any particular candidacy, and not feeling conflicted about people who didn't back Obama but backed Clinton or even Huckabee or McCain or Nader or whoever. We see the big picture. We know that the key is to keep the hopeful energy alive, regardless of the outcome of the election, because that is the energy that will set the contours for what elected officials do once they have won.

That is the challenge, and for that, we need a way for people to become fully engaged in the electoral arena, and yet to recognize that what moves them is something far bigger than a great speaker and dynamic politician, but rather the goodness within them and within everyone else that has momentarily been allowed to reveal itself through the legitimating framework of an electoral campaign. But far too few people know about the NSP, and unless you help us change that (e.g. by inviting friends to a weekend afternoon or weekday evening gathering at your apartment or house and showing them the NSP video and then discussing with them our program and ideas) people will not know where to go or what to do, and instead will simply be waiting for the next round of the election from September to November, and after November will feel lost and powerless and may even feel that they've been used and tricked once again.

It has always been that way after elections. But it doesn't have to be. The movements that have been generated by Obama, Clinton, McCain, Huckabee, and others could remain alive if we choose to make them such-alive, and able to transcend sectarian political boundaries. We at NSP will do our part to make that happen, but we can't do it without your involvement.

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