Tikkun Magazine, September/October 2010
A NOTE ON LETTERS TO THE EDITOR:
We welcome your responses to our articles. Send your letters to the editor to Letters@Tikkun.org. Please remember, however, not to attribute to Tikkun views other than those expressed in our editorials. We email, post, and print many articles with which we have strong disagreements, because that is what makes Tikkun a location for a true diversity of ideas. Tikkun reserves the right to edit your letters to fit available space in the magazine.
QUEER SPIRITUALITY AND POLITICS
I am writing to thank you for the July/August 2010 issue of Tikkun magazine. I am a psychological counselor at Gettysburg College and the mother of a transgender woman. I participate in a women's theological discussion group at St. James Lutheran Church in Gettysburg. My class is interested in participating in the current discussion on sexuality in the Lutheran Church. I was hoping to facilitate this discussion with stories from GLBT people that would further educate us and trigger discussion. Your issue feels like a Godsend to me. Literally. My class has decided to read and discuss this issue of Tikkun one article at a time.
Tears came to my eyes when I read Jay Michaelson's description of the love he feels when his soul turns to God. I identify with his feelings of loneliness during the time that he was closeted and when he currently doubts himself. I felt it when I was keeping the news of who my oldest child is a secret. The process of coming out to my community has liberated my soul and enriched my relationships and my work in ways that I did not anticipate. I have no doubt that God is with my daughter and our whole family as we struggle to be true to ourselves and to each other.
Shirley Armstrong
Gettysburg, PA
SELF-INFLICTED ANTI-SEMITISM
I can understand Ralph Seliger's anguished, if confused, response to the unsettling issues raised by my article in the May/June 2010 issue of Tikkun ("Are Israeli Policies Entrenching Anti-Semitism Worldwide?"), but this does not give him license to misrepresent my views as he did in his letter to the editor, "Entrenching Anti-Semitism," which appeared in the July/August 2010 issue.
I do not hold the conviction that "this is entirely the fault of the Jews." Heaven forbid.
What does concern me, though, is that Israel's long-term future in the region of which it has chosen to be a part may be in jeopardy if there is not a comprehensive peace in the near future that is conducive to normal relations between Israel, the Palestinians, and Israel's other neighbors. It follows that it is a quintessential Israeli interest to conduct itself in a manner that advances this end and for Israeli governments to actively encourage all initiatives that promote it. Their woeful record in this regard in the post-Oslo years, including the effective rejection of the Arab Peace Initiative, has charted a course to seclusion. Its essence, of course, is the deadly forty-three-year occupation of another people's land and lives and the belligerent settlement project that it nourishes and by which it is nourished in turn. For this willful policy, Israeli governments are indeed to blame.
And of course these unwise, unjust, and unpopular policies-when overtly supported by organized Jewish communities in other countries-are bound to have knock-on consequences for the standing of Jews around the world. It's not rocket science. Defensiveness and other forms of self-denial are indulgences we can no longer afford. The issues have to be faced squarely.
The vital point in my article was that the Palestinians, with the backing of their supporters, would have opposed and resisted their treatment whatever the ethnic, religious, or national character of the state they held responsible for their plight and original dispossession, be it Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, Christian, secular, or whatever. It is important to understand this, for the alternative explanation-strangely appealing to some Jewish and pro-Israel circles-that (rising) antipathy to Israel and opposition to its policies are nearly always motivated by (rising) anti-Semitism (not to say they never are), and that Israel must therefore stand firm and concede nothing, is the surest path to further isolation and national self-destruction.
It is not too late to change course. But more than ever, Israel and Israelis need honest assessments and sound counsel from their shrinking base of friends and supporters around the world. And first we need to work on liberating ourselves from the old mental shackles and lemming-like tendencies.
Tony Klug
London, UK
ISRAEL/PALESTINE
I consider myself to be pro-Israel. I love Am Yisrael, Eretz Yisrael, and Torat Yisrael. That love, however, leads me to be critical of many Israeli government policies (i.e., perpetuation of the Occupation, the present form of the Gaza blockade, etc.). Because I love Israel, I want it to be the best that it can be-to live up to the ideals in its declaration of independence as well as those in the prophetic tradition and the teachings of many of our great rabbis. Among Jews I am very open about my criticism of some of the things that Israel does, but I am hesitant to be the same way among non-Jews. I think that I am like many Jews who are pro-Israel and pro-peace: afraid that those who are anti-Israel (as opposed to simply pro-Palestine or pro-peace or pro-no one) will twist my criticisms, which come out of love, into something that they are not.
Max Yadin
Gaithersburg, MD
Michael Lerner Responds:
Those of us who love Israel must be guided by our concern for what is best for Israel's security and survival, not by who might be able to twist what we are saying for other purposes (something that goes with the territory, no matter how careful one is). What's best for Israel's security? Ending the Occupation and changing Israel's whole approach to Palestinians from one of hostile occupier to one of generous and openhearted neighbor. We at Tikkun and in our Network of Spiritual Progressives (NSP) call it a "Strategy of Generosity." When Israel is perceived not as the toughest guy in the neighborhood, but the most generous, it will have secured its future to stay in the Middle East.
Such a change in Israel's approach to security will not happen without us in America changing our own approach to the misconceived "war on terrorism." That's one of many reasons we at the NSP have launched a campaign for a Global Marshall Plan (please download and read it at www.spiritualprogressives.org/GMP)-because while the plan itself is unlikely to be funded (though it is now introduced into Congress as H. Res. 1016), the campaign for it is a way to raise public understanding about our underlying message: homeland security is better achieved through a strategy of generosity than a strategy of domination.
That same message needs to be brought to Israel, which is one reason why we are advocating that the Global Marshall Plan ought to be tried first in the Middle East.
Neither Israel nor the United States will adopt this approach as long as secular "realists" cannot imagine how spiritual values such as "caring for others," "love," "empathy," and "generosity" can break through the barrier of fear of being disrespected or humiliated by the West that is at the core of the psychodynamics that have afflicted both Israelis and Palestinians, and indeed much of the Muslim world, for the past hundred years or more. No wonder, then, that they continue to rely on negotiations that will go nowhere until there has been a spiritual breakthrough. That's why the work of the NSP and the Global Marshall Plan are actually, though dismissible as "unrealistic" or "utopian," the only realistic path to a lasting peace agreement that could bring both security and justice to both sides.
I hope you will join our Network of Spiritual Progressives, which comes with a free subscription to Tikkun, and start circulating Tikkun to your friends, so that they too can understand that the best way to serve Israel is to advance a message of love, generosity, and openheartedness. That will help them see that our criticisms of Israel are leshem shamayim (for the sake of heaven), even though they have led us to be constantly attacked from every side and angle. Please do join or make a tax-deductible contribution to Tikkun.
THE VANDALIZATION OF LERNER'S HOME
In "Reflections After My Home Was Vandalized" (Tikkun, July/August 2010) you write, "Hamas is a violent group, and Tikkun has frequently denounced its violence, just as we have denounced the violence of the Israeli Occupation" (italics mine).
To make an equivalence between Hamas and the Israeli Occupation reflects a special kind of moral obtuseness. When was the last time Israel sent thousands of deadly rockets into Palestinian towns? When was the last time Israelis blew up Palestinian schools and buses? Does Israel hold Palestinian captives for ransom, refusing them even Red Cross visitation, as Hamas holds Shalit? Or do you consider inconveniences at Israeli checkpoints to be the same as ballistic violence?
With the days of teshuvah (repentance) upon us, it would be advisable for Tikkun magazine to make a tikkun on its moral compass.
Rabbi Emanuel Feldman
Jerusalem, Israel
I am glad no one was hurt by this act of terror [the vandalization of Rabbi Lerner's home]. I am shocked and appalled by this act of violence, but I am not surprised. Activities of this sort have been perpetrated by radical Zionists for years. In many cases the result was much more violent, as it was in the case of Yitzchak Rabin.
My question is, why should we expect anything different? Who are the Zionists? They are simply another group of nationalists-no more, no less. There is nothing special about them. They are the philosophical descendants of European communists, socialists, anarchists, and assimilationists (who ofttimes wished to be international capitalists).
There is nothing inherently Jewish about the Zionist state. They abandoned Judaism before they took up the banner of nationalism. The fact that they usurped the name Israel, which was given to my father Jacob, does not make them his spiritual descendants. I cannot put any credence in the government of those who have disassociated themselves from our ancient beliefs. I cannot abide by their laws. I cannot justify their actions. I cannot agree that either the means or the ends are acceptable, commendable, or desirable. I cannot consider them in any way related to me spiritually, morally, or intellectually.
The path of the Torah is the path of pleasantness, and all its ways lead to completion (Sholom). Does anyone even in his or her wildest fantasy believe that of the path of Zionism or any other nationalist cause?
Yosef Rosenblatt
Colchester, CT
What sparked this letter is what you wrote at the end of the article: "Starting the day after the attack on my home, I have prayed for God to forgive those who did it, to forgive Dershowitz and others who demean me and my fellow rabbis ... "
Why should those people be forgiven? Should people who destroy people's homes, drive them out and turn them into refugees, be forgiven? What about mass murderers, rapists, brutes and sadists, Hitler and Stalin? Where do you draw the line? What is the meaning of the word "forgive" when applied to people who've never asked for forgiveness and indeed have no notion of having done anything wrong?
There are actions that fill me with anger, and when that anger motivates a quest for justice I consider it good and right to be angry. I would suggest that too-easy forgiveness delegitimizes forgiveness itself and wrongly delegitimizes well-placed anger.
Julie Wornan
Paris, France
Michael Lerner Responds:
I feel saddened by the level of inhumanity of those who have attacked me personally, attacked my home, minimized in the media the import of that attack (as did Dershowitz), and called me with death threats. Yet I believe that these attacks are motivated in part by a genuine love for the Jewish people, albeit deeply misguided and distorted, and their outrageous actions come more from fear and inner terror (which I believe they have been dealing with all their lives and is now displaced into attacking those critical of Israeli policies). I affirm the need for righteous indignation at their deeds and will continue to challenge those deeds and statements in the public realm. But our peace-, justice-, and love-oriented spiritual movement must not sink to their level, but instead reflect the same compassion for them that we have toward everyone else on the planet.
