Dear Barack,
I have faith that you are going to advance the cause of human liberation and act as a faithful servant of God during your presidency. And to do that, I think you are going to need the support of spiritual progressives who can counter all the inside-the-Beltway realists who will be surrounding you in the coming years and who will do their best to drown out the voices of those who actually made your presidency possible: the tens of millions of Americans who seek not just a competent president (almost anyone would appear competent in comparison with our national leadership of the past eight years), but also a transformative presidency.
I developed this faith in you after you spoke at the Tikkun conference in Chicago in 1996, when we first met. And I was strengthened in that faith after hearing from our local Chicago chapter activists between 1996 and 2006 that you strongly endorsed our progressive middle path on Middle East peace, and our call to be both pro-Israel and pro-Palestine, recognizing that the best interests of the Jewish people lie with peace and reconciliation with the Arab and Muslim states that surround Israel rather than a continued state of hostilities and quasi-war. During the 2008 election, when some sought to portray you as “pro-Arab” and “anti-Israel,” I was confident that the reason you surrounded yourself with the center-right figures of the foreign policy establishment was to reassure the Jewish world and the American public that you have always been a strong supporter of Israel, but not to abandon your tikkun-ish perspective that real support for Israel means strong support for the peace forces in Israel and a recognition that both sides have a legitimate story and that both sides have been unnecessarily provocative and hurtful to the other.
My faith in you was strengthened when you told me that you had read some of my books and that you were reading The Left Hand of God, but even more by our meeting in 2006 when we discussed the Global Marshall Plan. You suggested to me that we reduce the percentage of GMP proposed from 5 percent to 1 percent or 2 percent (we did so). You suggested to me that even with that lower figure, it would take a major transformation of consciousness in Washington, D.C., to get people inside the Beltway to recognize that homeland security could be achieved more effectively by a strategy of generosity and demonstrating real caring for the peoples of the world than through militarism and domination as the sole aspect of our foreign policy—unless we could mount a massive grassroots campaign on behalf of that perspective. You made it clear that you would not lead such a campaign but would respond to it positively if we could mobilize people in every congressional district sufficient to build a strong congressional base for the Network of Spiritual Progressives’ version of the Global Marshall Plan.
OK, that’s the “community organizer” element in you, and I respect that, and we at the Network of Spiritual Progressives are committed to using the next four years to build that kind of local support.
There are lots of policy ideas that we’ve developed in Tikkun magazine, in the Network of Spiritual Progressives’ “Spiritual Covenant with America” (see: spiritualprogressives.org), and in the memos that we’ve assembled in this issue of Tikkun. Some of these ideas you may want to run with, others you may want to distance from, depending on your assessment of the political possibilities.
But political possibilities are shaped in part by the public discourse of the president and the administration, and it is here that you can have a huge impact.
Your presidency will have lasting significance if you dedicate your energy to legitimizing a new set of values for our society, or what the Network of Spiritual Progressives calls a New Bottom Line for American society. Instead of judging institutions, social policies, corporations, legislation, a presidency, an economic plan, or even personal behavior as “rational,” “productive,” or “efficient” primarily in terms of how much money or power has been accumulated, we need to also focus our attention on how much love and kindness, generosity and caring for others, and ethical and ecological sensitivity have been generated. We should measure our progress by how much we’ve increased our capacities to recognize others as embodiments of the sacred, by how much we’ve increased our capacities to respond to the grandeur and mystery of the universe with awe, wonder, and radical amazement. If you can help Americans recognize that our well-being depends on the well-being of everyone else on the planet and the well-being of the planet itself, and that well-being has to be judged in terms of a New Bottom Line that includes material well-being but goes far beyond that, you will earn a significant place in the history of the human race.
On the other hand, if you choose to follow the advice of community organizers such as Saul Alinsky, eschewing larger changes in consciousness and focusing solely on concrete achievements like passing legislation, your legislative victories will have little lasting impact. People who have bought into the dominant worldviews in American society think of success in primarily material terms. They believe that “progress” means the accumulation of more and more things, and that a society is “rich” to the extent that it has maximized consumer goods for growing numbers of people. These worldviews encourage people to think of themselves as isolated monads seeking their own well-being even at the expense of everyone around them, or at least without regard to how others are doing. They encourage us to believe that our security depends primarily on our ability to dominate and control others lest they dominate and control us first. If these remain the predominant ideas, it doesn’t matter how many “liberal” or “progressive” pieces of legislation you will have managed to get passed by Congress.
We saw the failure of the “non-ideological” approach in the Clinton years. President Clinton passed many valuable pieces of legislation, but most of what he had achieved was quickly wiped out by the Bush/Cheney administration because he had won his victories by playing within the old framework of politics, a framework that could be and was as easily mobilized to dismantle his accomplishments as to sustain them. Legislative victories won through clever manipulation of Congress and the media amount to very little in the long run, unless they are based on a successful change in mass consciousness.
Contrast that, please, with the victories of the Civil Rights, women’s, and environmental movements. By changing mass consciousness, they created a reality in which even the most conservative elements in the society eventually had to give not only lip service but even policy nods to equality and to environmental sanity.
Well, you may protest, you can’t be a social change movement—you are “only” a president. That’s about where I got to in the days when Hillary Clinton endorsed an earlier version of the New Bottom Line, which in those days I called the “politics of meaning.” Hillary told me she couldn’t convince Bill to implement the politics of meaning in evaluating their own legislative agenda, but what she could do was use “the bully pulpit” to put forward those ideas.
What she quickly learned was that the inside-the-Beltway representatives of America’s economic and political elites were even more reactive to a new ideological formulation than to any specific political program. Those elites understand as well as we at Tikkun do that the current system depends on ideological obeisance at the altar of individualism, materialism, and competitiveness. The current system depends on the goal of “progress” understood as the accumulation of goods, rather than as the improvement of our quality of life or the development of our soul and our capacities to be loving and generous. It depends on security understood in terms of power over others rather than generosity and caring for others. So when Hillary dared to challenge those basic principles, she was portrayed as naïve, unrealistic, utopian, or adolescent in her vision.
President Obama, the most important challenge you face is to reverse that notion of what it is to be rational in the contemporary world. You must reject the current vision of “being realistic” and explain to Americans why that notion is based on a mistaken calculation of our interests as Americans and as members of the human race. You must help people understand that the old way of looking at the world, the Old Bottom Line, is dysfunctional and leads to the dissolution of American society and to the destruction of the planet.
I know that your temptation will be to try to articulate your ideals within the context of the American discourse of the past. That discourse is about individual freedom and opportunity—and your presidency will be able to demonstrate that some women and some Blacks have in fact been able to achieve great success, beyond the wildest dreams of previous generations. And if your economic programs succeed, you will be able to show that America “works” once again in terms of what made America think of itself as a success in the twentieth century. These may seem like great accomplishments, Mr. President, but in fact they are insufficient in the face of the challenges of the twenty-first century.
In the twenty-first century, we need a whole new way of thinking. If we are to mobilize the creativity of the human race to solve the environmental challenges we ourselves created by looking at the world as a bottomless cookie jar—as a resource we could exploit for our own satisfaction without regard to the well-being of the planet itself—we will need a whole different consciousness. We are not going to get other nations to act as though “we are all in it together” and get them to care about what is in our best environmental interests if we are not just as caring about whether their children are well nourished and have as much hope for economic security as our own children. In short, Mr. President, it can’t be a world in which we only say, “God bless the United States of America,” unless we quickly add, “and God bless everyone else on this planet, as well.”
Nor can we think of blessings only in material terms. The dynamics of “me-firstism” have led to an economic collapse of monumental proportions, and it is a huge mistake to try to rebuild the economic system without challenging that way of thinking which allows each corporation and each individual to judge success in purely personal, material terms. But the collapse of our economy is only one part of the larger moral and spiritual collapse that has been eating at our spiritual and psychological well-being for several decades and which manifests at least as much as economic decline in the insecurity of family life, the growing levels of isolation and fear, and the decline in friendships and communities that connect us to higher meaning and purpose beyond personal material success. Human beings need meaning and love and mutual recognition as much as they need a job and a good health care program.
To speak to these needs, you have to move far beyond the language of individual rights and economic entitlements, the heartland of the old liberalism, to address a progressive spiritual politics. You have to insist that our goal is to create a world that is safe for love and caring, a world that educates its youth to recognize that their success as individuals is in part reflected in how much love and caring they can show to others and to the planet Earth, a world in which we overcome the tendency to look at others or the planet merely as instrumentally valuable for what they can give us as individuals. We need to look at the world and at other human beings as embodiments of the sacred, as fundamentally valuable not for what they can do for us but simply as ends in themselves.
President Obama, that may seem a huge task, but it is the task facing us if we intend to survive the twenty-first century. And you will either embrace the challenge and educate Americans to this new consciousness, or you will be another flash-in-the-pan hero who will always be honored as the first Black president, but not as one who actually made that big a difference in the long run. And to the extent that you don’t contribute to the needed new consciousness, and instead become the darling of the establishment media by showing how savvy you are at working within the “realistic” confines set by ruling elites, you will actually be an obstacle to what the human race needs, even if in the process you manage to bring America into the modern world by establishing for us the same kind of health care and other benefits for working people and the poor that already exist in the other advanced industrial countries of the world.
Sound like a daunting task? It doesn’t have to be if you turn to the American people, articulate this agenda explicitly, and call upon people to organize a social movement for this New Bottom Line and this new way of thinking. There are already tens of millions of people who share this consciousness, but they have no way of recognizing each other and moving together as a political entity. You could provide that for them if you were to use your presidency to urge them to form a unified movement around this goal of articulating and popularizing a new way of thinking.
This is very different from getting people organized to back your particular legislative goals, many of which will necessarily be compromises that do not fully reflect this new way of thinking. If people are organized solely to back those compromised goals, the tendency will be to steer away from ideological clarity and toward the goal of “supporting Obama’s legislation.” You may win some legislative victories, but you will not have made a lasting difference in American thinking if that is what you use your popularity to achieve.
Instead, you could create a democratic framework in which people are encouraged to champion these larger goals of a New Bottom Line—and even to challenge your legislative compromises in terms of those goals. If you empower people to do that, you will find that they are able to push the public discourse beyond the frame provided by the powerful, and that your own compromises in office will be less distasteful to yourself because your program will have benefited from the political action of Americans who are less “realistic” in the old terms and more utopian, which is to say, closer to the values that you actually hold. Tell people you want such a movement, and then create a time once every few months in which you meet with the elected representatives of such a movement and simply listen to their ideas, including their criticisms of the compromises you have already made as president.
The inside-the-Beltway crowd is positively ecstatic about the way you’ve “reached out” to people who were not part of your campaign originally—to the right-of-center crowd in the Democratic Party and to Republicans and to the old-time Washington establishment. They are overjoyed that all your talk of “change” has produced a cabinet whose most important positions are being filled with people who served with Clinton, Bush, or Reagan, or with the corporate power elite. I’m sure by the time you read this, you will have given a few positions to the Democratic Party’s center-left and the John Podesta crowd, as well. But I’m not asking you to give more voice to the lefties, though you should certainly do that also. Nor am I talking about taking your existing list of millions of volunteers and turning them into an effective grassroots campaign for your legislation, though you should certainly do that also. I’m talking about creating a space for people to go for a higher set of values and then be able to challenge you on the basis of those values—values that you yourself have assured me and others that you really do hold.
If doing that seems too bold a step at this time, then at least do the following: create a quarterly meeting of two days’ duration in which you meet with spiritual progressives who share the vision of a New Bottom Line and who will talk to you about how you could take steps to support that vision. Here, again, the idea could be quickly compromised into shallow meaninglessness, if you repeat what happened at the Democratic National Convention when its “Faith Caucus” devolved into a group of cheerleaders telling each other how wonderful you are and what a great job the Democratic Party is doing. These kinds of “people of faith” may help you win elections, but they won’t give you the guidance and challenge you need.
Since you’ve packed your cabinet with traditional insiders, you actually need a gathering of prophetic figures who are not afraid to talk to you in a language that is both more visionary and more confrontational than the insiders have any inclination to be. Remember the story of the biblical King David, confronted and challenged by the Prophet Nathan after David had gone astray? The key there was that Nathan had enough access to be able to deliver that message. At a historical moment when the media rarely gives voice to those who hold “unrealistic” messages (i.e. messages that do not conform to the current distribution of wealth and power), and when the official Left has accepted a narrow framework that calls for more rights and more entitlements but does not speak about a world of love and generosity, of awe and wonder and radical amazement, of a New Bottom Line and a rejection of materialist conceptions of progress and success, you need to create a space into which the prophetic figures of our time can encounter you and challenge you. To do so would be to make a contribution to American political life that only you can deliver.
President Obama, I trust you and have faith that this is the kind of presidency you would like to have. I base that not only on what you’ve said to me and what you’ve said to the Tikkun Community in the past, not only on your writings and on the moving talks you’ve given to the American people, but also on my own sense of you as a deep and spiritually alive human being. I understand that you think what you have to do is work within existing reality and do as much as you can. What I’m saying is that you can do far more, and still be successful as a president, if you take the path that I’ve outlined here. Your achievements will last longer and be more significant, and you will have used the gifts God has given you more fully, if you choose this path.
Whichever path you choose, you can count on the Tikkun Community and the Network of Spiritual Progressives to be here as your supporters, providing support through prophetic critique. We will remain the voice of your highest vision. We will call you to be true to the deepest teachings of the spiritual and religious communities that we represent. We will be loyal to you by challenging you and your Administration to be loyal to the vision of love and generosity, peace and social justice, and nonviolence and ecological sanity that has momentarily asserted itself through the democratic process of American society choosing you as president. To the extent that you reflect that voice and that vision, others will step forward to support you and to push you forward. To the extent that you become “more realistic,” others will drop away, disappointed and despairing, and cynicism will again prevail. In either case, Tikkun and the Network of Spiritual Progressives will keep alive that voice and pray that you hear us and respond. In any event, we celebrate this incredible moment in human history, thankful to the Force of Healing and Transformation in the universe that makes possible the transformation from that which is to that which ought to be. Recognizing the great possibilities that have been opened, and the great responsibilities that we all have to push you, President Obama, toward your own most visionary and hopeful self, we affirm the ancient statement of the Psalms: This is the day that the Transformative Power of the universe has created; we will rejoice and be happy within it.
On behalf of all the Tikkun staff, authors, members of the Tikkun Community and Network of Spiritual Progressives (NSP), and members of our advisory board and clergy advisory board, and on behalf of the donors who have generously kept us alive these past twenty-three years, we wish you Godspeed and great success as president of the United States.
--Rabbi Michael Lerner
RabbiLerner@Tikkun.org
