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

[Ann Shafer]

Rabbi Lerner for president!
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From: <LAURELCG at aol.com>
To: <Dialogue at wedgeblade.net>; <OE at wedgeblade.net>
Sent: Thursday, November 04, 2004 4:09 PM
Subject: [Oe List ...] Rabbi Michael Lerner' response to the Election


> 
> 
> 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 
> 
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