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March 9, 2012

Rethinking the spiritual axis

Rabbi Michael Lerner discusses his book on Israel/Palestine.
BASYA LAYE

The seemingly intractable nature of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict exhausts even its most ardent stakeholders. Finding a new angle, one that encourages both sides to reject the deadlock and move towards a place of agreement is no simple task, but that is what Rabbi Michael Lerner has attempted to do in the recently published book, Embracing Israel/Palestine: A Strategy to Heal and Transform the Middle East (North Atlantic, 2011).

Lerner begins with the supposition that, by necessity, the only reasonable position is to be both pro-Israel and pro-Palestine. He builds his argument around the basic premise that the inhabitants of Israel and their Palestinian neighbors have related primarily through opposing trauma narratives that see both sides being “unnecessarily cruel and insensitive to the other side.” To resolve the conflict, therefore, is to transform the increasingly hostile and empty political will into a spiritual consciousness focused on mutual compassion, generosity and justice for those on both sides of the divide. Further, Lerner writes, the emphasis on military victory, materialism and economic domination is bankrupting our relationship with God, which is a distressing proposition in a world where young Jews are becoming increasingly less interested in being Jewish and the world is becoming more polarized between secular fundamentalists and radical religionists, both of whom stand in the way of creating a more peaceful and equitable world. According to Lerner, the spiritual transformation required demands a new appraisal of our relationship with God in order to alleviate historically rooted pain and to loosen the stubborn strictures of the conflict.

Lerner is used to creating movements for change. The Berkeley-based rabbi, author and activist has been building a progressive Jewish spiritual movement since his days as a anti-war student activist. Best know as the founder and editor of Tikkun magazine, which published its first issue in 1986, he is the author of nine books, the chair of the Network of Spiritual Progressives and the spiritual leader of Bayt Tikkun, a Renewal synagogue in the Bay area.

Speaking to the Independent from his Berkeley, Calif., office, Lerner described his impetus for writing the book.

“There’s increasing polarization in the Jewish world, more and more young Jews telling each other and telling people like me that they’re unable to feel identified with Judaism because of the growing requirement that you give total loyalty to whatever the policies are of the state of Israel. It deeply, deeply troubles me because my goal is bring people to Judaism, to bring Jews to Judaism, and I’ve found that this has become an ever-growing obstacle. So, more and more young Jews are saying, ‘My parents were Jewish,’ and I say, ‘What?’ Then they say, ‘I’ve been told that I’m not wanted,’ and then, when I ask why, it’s Israel – you’re not wanted unless you toe the line,” he said.

“Go into any synagogue in America, every part of North America, and you can say, ‘I don’t believe in God, I don’t follow the mitzvot,’ anything like that, and people will shrug their shoulders and say, ‘Welcome, come on in.’ But, if you say, ‘I don’t support Israel,’ forget it. You can say, ‘I do believe in God and I do follow the mitzvot, but I don’t support Israel,’ forget it. So, what’s turned out is that Israel has become the new god.

“I understand how this happened,” he continued, “because people’s conception of God as a great power that is sitting up in heaven deciding when to intervene and when not to intervene in human history got shattered when God didn’t intervene in the Holocaust.”

Average Jews, he suggested, “were holding onto that Big-Man-in-Heaven conception of God and, once that God disappears – doesn’t show up in the Holocaust – people say, well then, there can’t be any God whatsoever. Then, wanting to have some basis for the continuity of the Jewish community, they turn to the state of Israel,” an understandable psychological transition in a time of unbelievable trauma.

This spiritual crisis created a fault line in the Jewish spiritual narrative as Jews “gave up God in a very deep way,” he added. “[T]hey also gave up God in the sense of there being a force in the universe that makes possible the transformation from that which is to that which ought to be. [This] is the conception of God that I argue for in my book Jewish Renewal, that God is the force for healing the universe … the force that makes possible the breaking of the ‘repetition compulsion,’ which is our tendency to pass pain on from generation to generation. God is what makes it possible to overcome that tendency [and] instead, having received pain or cruelty in our lives, to be able to transcend that and pass on love. What makes that possible – whatever that is – that’s God.”

However, “in giving up God,” he explained, “they also gave up … the possibility or the belief [of] the loving and just and peace-oriented and generosity-oriented force in the universe … and, instead, have embraced what I call the Right Hand of God, that the world is governed by power.” This vision of reality holds “the notion that human beings are thrown in here by ourselves, surrounded by hurtful or self-seeking others, that they only see you in terms of what they can get from you to maximize their own advantage,” a serious impediment on the path to peace, he said.

Lerner suggests reclaiming an emphasis on the Left Hand of God, “which is the view that human beings actually come into the world through a loving mother, and that experience at the beginning of our lives gives us a head start towards the possibility of a very different human reality, in which people are genuinely caring for each other, in which security comes through building generosity and loving relationships,” he clarified. “In the Torah, you get both views, and the reason for that is, because the Torah is God’s transmission to human beings – but human beings only receive what they can receive based on their own spiritual and psychological development. So, in Torah, you will sometimes hear the voice of God as the voice of pain, cruelty, power over, domination, and sometimes you will hear the voice of love as love, kindness and generosity.”

The Torah contains both voices. “The Left Hand of God is … a central part of the Torah,” Lerner pointed out, “but it has been obscured, particularly in the last 50 or 60 years in the Jewish experience after the Holocaust, it’s taken less and less seriously. Emancipatory Judaism is an attempt to reclaim that voice of love that’s there in the tradition, but that has been obscured and replaced as God is seen more and more as power, the force of power, domination, control, and our testimony to this God is the power of the state of Israel. So the highest loyalty goes to the state of Israel instead of a God of love, instead of into the task that we have to bring about a world of generosity and caring and peace and social justice.”

The central tenet in postwar Jewish life has rotated around the power axis – whether or not we have it, how we can keep it and how we might lose it, said Lerner. The focus on power, where might is right, intensified after Israel’s pivotal victories in the Six Day War, he suggested. “You won the struggle, therefore, you’re validated,” he explained. “Well, I don’t know. Why is that true? That’s never how it was in the past in Judaism, that winning was the determinant of who was on whose side. If winning was the determinant, then we would have agreed that God had abandoned us in 586 BC[E],” when Jerusalem was destroyed by the Babylonians and the Jewish people were exiled.

In the book, Lerner describes his vision of an emancipatory Judaism, a Judaism that he believes has the capacity to heal Jewish post-traumatic stress after the defining tragedy of the Holocaust. It also holds the energy needed to transform our relationships with each other and with God.

“An emancipatory Judaism … says that our primary task in the universe is to testify to the possibility of a world based on love and a world based on kindness, a world based on generosity, a world based on caring or, as I put it in the Network of Spiritual Progressives, a ‘new bottom line,’ so that institutions and social practices, government policies, corporations, our health-care system, our legal system, our medical system, our education system, they should all be judged efficient or rational or productive not only to the extent that they maximize money or power – which is the old bottom line – but also to the extent that they maximize caring, kindness and generosity, ethical and ecological sensitivity, enhance our capacity to respond to other human beings as the embodiment of the Sacred, and enhance our capacity to respond to the universe with awe, wonder and radical amazement at the grandeur of all that is,” he said.

“This is not something new, this is actually my reading of what the original emphasis of Judaism was…. This is why [Judaism] always seemed so bizarre to all the powers of the world … because we were testifying to a new force in the universe, to a God that wasn’t about winning battles. It was a God that was about telling you that, not only should you love your neighbor, but you should love the stranger, ‘v’ahavta la’ger’ – the stranger, the other, it was a revolutionary conception.”

One of the substantive suggestions in Embracing Israel/Palestine is to implement a “Global Marshall Plan,” an idea that has been proposed by different thinkers and policy analysts over the years that is modeled after the massive economic program that helped to rebuild Europe after the Second World War.

“The book talks about long-term transformation,” Lerner said, “but we’re not unaware of the intervening steps that are needed. The Global Marshall Plan is a way of taking the primary notion that I’ve argued for in this book, which is that we need to recognize the humanity of the other and that each side needs to recognize that their own well-being depends on the well-being of the other or, more generally, that each of our well-being in the 21st century depends on the well-being of everyone else on the planet. What used to be the size of community is now the size for the world, or the other way around, that the size of the world is now the size of what used to be just the local community because it’s shrunk down so much. Interactions are so intense and interrelationships so important that there’s just no way for Israel to achieve peace and security for itself unless Palestine receives peace and security for itself and, conversely, Palestinians can’t get what they need without Israelis getting what they need. Taking care of each other becomes the fundamental truth of the 21st century and people who are stuck in competitive nationalism are really doing a disservice to their people.” It is through compassion, generosity and love, Lerner added, that we will successfully ward off the appeal of religious, nationalist and economic fundamentalisms.

There are critics on the left and right who question the practicality of Lerner’s plan for peace but, he said, there is historical precedent for such large shifts in human consciousness, including the seismic changes brought about by the women’s and civil rights movements, and the move towards full equality for gays and lesbians. “Consciousness shifts of incredible dimension can happen,” he assured.

 One other major illustrative consciousness shift, he continued, was “the emergence of Zionism. The saying that is most famous of Herzl’s was his response to the realists. He said, ‘Im tirzu ... ein zu aggadah,’ ‘If the community wills it, it will not be a fantasy.’ He came up with that because everyone was telling him, ‘You’re a fantasizer! A state of Israel in the Middle East?’…. So that’s what I say to the realist critique.”

 Lerner’s book-jacket endorsements are sure to raise some eyebrows; they include praise by Archbishop Desmond Tutu and former president Jimmy Carter. Lerner does not believe that these endorsements – two among several positive ones from less controversial figures, including Avraham Burg, a former member of Knesset and chair of the Jewish Agency for Israel and the World Zionist Organization – should distance more mainstream Jewish readers.

“It’s alienating to those people who think that Jimmy Carter is an antisemite, but he’s not an antisemite, he’s not anti-Israel,” Lerner maintained, though he said he did consider what objections his critics might raise. “He’s somebody who brokered the only peace treaty with the Arabs that ever lasted. Right? He was the one who worked out the arrangement with Egypt and that has been a treaty that has actually worked, at least … almost 34 years later … I know this guy and he’s not an antisemite – he’s not someone who wants to see Israel destroyed. When he said, in the title of his book, will this lead to apartheid, he wasn’t saying Israel was an apartheid state, he was saying that the dynamics in the West Bank will lead – or might lead – in that direction if Israel doesn’t go in a different direction.”

He added, “All my advisors, and I asked this question to hundreds of people before I decided to use Jimmy Carter and Bishop Tutu ... most of them said, ‘If they’ll discount the book because it also has the recommendation of the one president who actually created a peace treaty … they’re going to discount this book in a hundred other ways. Instead, talk not to the people who think because you raised critical questions about Israel you’re an antisemite, but to the very large section of Jews and the very large section of non-Jews who are troubled by what’s going on there and want to make sense of it.’

“I want [these Jews] to have a framework that won’t leave them open to the antisemitic interpretations, or into the ‘Screw it! I don’t want to know anything about it, I don’t want to deal with Israel,’ which is what you hear from huge numbers of young Jews,” he continued. “I’m trying to provide an alternate voice to the anti-Israel voice that says that Israel is fundamentally an evil force in the world, Zionism is a fundamentally evil force in the world. I’m creating a discourse that actually validates what Israel is fundamentally about.”

Lerner acknowledged that the progressive spiritual movement that he has spent his life building is still a work in progress. However, there have been many achievements. “There’s Tikkun magazine, now finishing its 26th year of existence, our website is read by about 150,000 a month – that’s distinct people – and we have a huge impact in both the Jewish and non-Jewish world, and we’re frequently quoted in mainstream newspapers and [by] columnists and so forth. Have we built the world that we want yet? No. Our struggle to replace domination with generosity and love has not yet been won. But, are growing numbers of people interested in this perspective and giving it credibility? Yes, absolutely.”

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