[Oe List ...] Rabbi Michael Lerner' response to the Election

[LAURELCG at aol.com]

The Democrats Needed and Need a Religious/Spiritual Left


November 3, 2004


Warm greetings to friends of the Tikkun Community!


Democrats Need a Religious Left By Rabbi Michael Lerner 


For years the Democrats have been telling themselves "it's the 

economy, stupid." Yet consistently for dozens of years millions of 

middle income Americans have voted against their economic interests 

to support Republicans who have tapped a deeper set of needs. 


Tens of millions of Americans feel betrayed by a society that seems 

to place materialism and selfishness above moral values. They know 

that "looking out for number one" has become the common sense of our 

society, but they want a life that is about something more-a 

framework of meaning and purpose to their lives that would transcend 

the grasping and narcissism that surrounds them. Sure, they will 

admit that they have material needs, and that they worry about 

adequate health care, stability in employment, and enough money to 

give their kids a college education. But even more deeply they want 

their lives to have meaning-and they respond to candidates who seem 

to care about values and some sense of transcendent purpose. 


Many of these voters have found a "politics of meaning" in the 

political Right. In the Right wing churches and synagogues these 

voters are presented with a coherent worldview that speaks to 

their "meaning needs." Most of these churches and synagogues 

demonstrate a high level of caring for their members, even if the 

flip side is a willingness to demean those on the outside. Yet what 

members experience directly is a level of mutual caring that they 

rarely find in the rest of the society. And a sense of community that 

is offered them nowhere else, a community that has as its central 

theme that life has value because it is connected to some higher 

meaning than one's success in the marketplace. 


It's easy to see how this hunger gets manipulated in ways that 

liberals find offensive and contradictory. The frantic attempts to 

preserve family by denying gays the right to get married, the talk 

about being conservatives while meanwhile supporting Bush policies 

that accelerate the destruction of the environment and do nothing to 

encourage respect for God's creation or an ethos of awe and wonder to 

replace the ethos of turning nature into a commodity, the intense 

focus on preserving the powerless fetus and a culture of life without 

a concomitant commitment to medical research (stem cell research/HIV-

AIDS), gun control and healthcare reform., the claim to care about 

others and then deny them a living wage and an ecologically 

sustainable environment-all this is rightly perceived by liberals as 

a level of inconsistency that makes them dismiss as hypocrites the 

voters who have been moving to the Right. 


Yet liberals, trapped in a long-standing disdain for religion and 

tone-deaf to the spiritual needs that underlie the move to the Right, 

have been unable to engage these voters in a serious dialogue. 

Rightly angry at the way that some religious communities have been 

mired in authoritarianism, racism, sexism and homophobia, the liberal 

world has developed such a knee-jerk hostility to religion that it 

has both marginalized those many people on the Left who actually do 

have spiritual yearnings and simultaneously refused to acknowledge 

that many who move to the Right have legitimate complaints about the 

ethos of selfishness in American life. 


Imagine if John Kerry had been able to counter George Bush by 

insisting that a serious religious person would never turn his back 

on the suffering of the poor, that the bible's injunction to love 

one's neighbor required us to provide health care for all, and that 

the New Testament's command to "turn the other cheek" should give us 

a predisposition against responding to violence with violence. 


Imagine a Democratic Party that could talk about the strength that 

comes from love and generosity and applied that to foreign policy and 

homeland security. 


Imagine a Democratic Party that could talk of a New Bottom Line, so 

that American institutions get judged efficient, rational and 

productive not only to the extent that they maximize money and power, 

but also to the extent that they maximize people's capacities to be 

loving and caring, ethically and ecologically sensitive, and capable 

of responding to the universe with awe and wonder. 


Imagine a Democratic Party that could call for schools to teach 

gratitude, generosity, caring for others, and celebration of the 

wonders that daily surround us! Such a Democratic Party, continuing 

to embrace its agenda for economic fairness and multi-cultural 

inclusiveness, would have won in 2004 and can win in the future. 

(Please don't tell me that this is happening outside the Democratic 

Party in the Greens or in other leftie groups--because except for a 

few tiny exceptions it is not! I remember how hard I tried to get 

Ralph Nader to think and talk in these terms in 2000, and how little 

response I got substantively from the Green Party when I suggested 

reformulating their excessively politically correct policy 

orientation in ways that would speak to this spiritual consciousness. 

The hostility of the Left to spirituality is so deep, in fact, that 

when they hear us in Tikkun talking this way they often can't even 

hear what we are saying--so they systematically mis-hear it and say 

that we are calling for the Left to take up the politics of the 

Right, which is exactly the opposite of our point--speaking to 

spiritual needs actually leads to a more radical critique of the 

dynamics of corporate capitalism and corporate globalization, not to 

a mimicking of right-wing policies). 


If the Democrats were to foster a religions/spiritual Left, they 

would no longer pick candidates who support preemptive wars or who 

appease corporate power. They would reject the cynical realism that 

led them to pretend to be born-again militarists, a deception that 

fooled no one and only revealed their contempt for the intelligence 

of most Americans. Instead of assuming that most Americans are either 

stupid or reactionary, a religious Left would understand that many 

Americans who are on the Right actually share the same concern for a 

world based on love and generosity that underlies Left politics, even 

though lefties often hide their value attachments. 


Yet to move in this direction, many Democrats would have to give up 

their attachment to a core belief: that those who voted for Bush are 

fundamentally stupid or evil. Its time they got over that elitist 

self-righteousness and developed strategies that could affirm their 

common humanity with those who voted for the Right. Teaching 

themselves to see the good in the rest of the American public would 

be a critical first step in liberals and progressives learning how to 

teach the rest of American society how to see that same goodness in 

the rest of the people on this planet. It is this spiritual lesson-

that our own well-being depends on the well-being of everyone else on 

the planet and on the well-being of the earth-a lesson rooted deeply 

in the spiritual wisdom of virtually every religion on the planet, 

that could be the center of a revived Democratic Party. 


Yet to take that seriously, the Democrats are going to have to get 

over the false and demeaning perception that the Americans who voted 

for Bush could never be moved to care about the well being of anyone 

but themselves. That transformation in the Democrats would make them 

into serious contenders. 


The last time Democrats had real social power was when they linked 

their legislative agenda with a spiritual politics articulated by 

Martin Luther King. We cannot wait for the reappearance of that kind 

of charasmatic leader to begin the process of re-building a 

spiritual/religious Left. ************* respectfully sent to you by 

Rabbi Michael Lerner. Rabbi Michael Lerner is national co-chair (with 

Cornel West and Susannah Heschel) of The Tikkun Community, an 

interfaith organization that seeks to build on the political vision 

articulated above and more fully explained in our Core Vision which 

you can read at www.Tikkun.org; editor of TIKKUN, a bimonthly Jewish 

Critique of Politics, Culture and Society, author of Spirit Matters: 

Global Healing and the Wisdom of the Soul, and rabbi of Beyt Tikkun 

synagogue in San Francisco. www.tikkun.org RabbiLerner at tikkun.org 


P.S. DON'T DESPAIR--YOU COULD HELP US BUILD THIS NEW APPROACH TO 

AMERICAN POLITICS


P.S. HERE IS WHAT YOU CAN DO: 1. Send this message to everyone you 

possibly can think of. 2. Call the media and demand that they cover 

this perspective and ask them to contact Tikkun to do interviews with 

us (they can call Jordan Pearlstein at 510 528 6250 to get interviews 

set up. 3. Join (yes you personally) The Tikkun Community, the 

organization that is taking the lead in trying to create this very 

kind of direction in liberal and progressive politics. Become a dues-

paying member to make it possible for this view to get heard. The 

organization we are creating has as its first and foremost 

responsibility to create this kind of discourse in American politics, 

not only by challenging the Right but also by challenging the anti-

spiritual biases and demeaning attitude toward those who don't agree 

with the Left that prevails in too many parts of the liberal and 

progressive world. So we need you not only to join, but to help us 

spread this new way of thinking. To understand it more fully, we urge 

you to read and then create a study group with friends on the book 

The Politics of Meaning or the book Spirit Matters: Global Healing 

and the Wisdom of the Soul. You can join The Tikkun Community on-line 

at www.Tikkun.org, or by calling Liz or Stephanie at 510-644- 1200 

between 9:30 a.m. and 5:30 p.m. Pacific Standard Time. If you can't 

join, you could still make a tax-deductible contribution to support 

this work--we can't get transform these ideas into a force capable of 

changing society unless we have serious financial support (know 

anyone in a foundation that you could approach for help? or someone 

with more money? could you do a fundraiser in your community? 

whatever you can raise will be most appreciated). 


Tikkun Magazine and The Tikkun Community need (unfortuantely unpaid) 

interns and volunteers at our national office in Berkeley, 

California, and volunteers and interns to work on logistics and 

organizing for our East Coast conferences in NY and D.C. (working 

initially out of our apartment at NYC). If you'd like to volunteer 

either place, contact liz at tikkun.org 


************ We are up against a very difficult period ahead. There 

will be struggles to end the war in Iraq and to protect us from what 

is likely to be very scary moves to limit civil liberties, decrease 

social supports for the poor and the powerless, increase 

militarization and even new wars. If we face all this with the kind 

of liberal and progressive movements that we've been relying on the 

past, we are likely to continue to be very ineffective. That's why 

taking the Tikkun ideas and building a new kind of social change 

movement is such a pressing priority. We are not asking people to 

become religious or spiritual if you are not; we are asking for a new 

sensitivity to this arena, and new ways of talking to people and new 

ways of framing progressive ideas, and a new sensitivity to awe and 

wonder to replace a narrow utilitarian way of approaching other human 

beings and nature (an ieda already accepted in many ecologically-

sensitive circles). Please help us! It's not enough to support our 

ideas--we need your more active support. If you can find a more 

powerful strategy, more psychologically sophisticated and more 

compassionate in its approach to the people who need to be won over 

to the side of progressive social change, let us know what it is. If 

not, join and help us build this strategy!!! 


In peace, 



Rabbi Michael Lerner 


Tikkun Magazine