Here is one typical letter:

"I want you to know that I looked up the World Can't Wait organization about the local San Diego October 5th event - and I was surprised that you are backing up this organization! San Diego is going to have a carnival with effigies of Bush to be "whacked" and getting your picture taken with him in jail. It just doesn't seem too elevating to me! I received a couple of e-mail responses - one which said that the carnival was a way to "enlighten" and the other response calling me complacent and to "just go hold your candle in the dark". Their basic values in getting the message across is angry and, to me, meanspirited. To me, it's just cultivating more anger, hate and division. I don't get that this is the direction Rabbi Lerner is going. "

I don't know the details of the San Diego World Can't Wait organization, so I don't want to comment on that. But the sensibility of this letter writer seems very close to my own-there is something "off" about the tone of the demonstrations of October 5th, even if the substance of the positions critiquing the Bush Administration, challenging the war in Iraq and the Bush Administrations new attempts to launch an attack on Iran, protesting the legalization of torture are all quite reasonable.

The Network of Spiritual Progressives (NSP) has insisted that the anti-war movement needs significant change. It needs a positive vision of what we are "for" and not only a set of slogans about what we are against. That's why we in the NSP developed a Spiritual Covenant with America that is most fully articulated in my book The Left Hand of God, and summarized briefly in our Spiritual Covenant with America (which you can read on our website at www.spiritualprogressives.org . The essential point is that we need to challenge the notion that domination of the world will provide safety. On the contrary, we believe that what would strengthen "homeland security" most is a new strategy of global generosity. That's why we've proposed a Global Marshall Plan in which the U.S. would take the lead with other G-8 countries in getting each of them (starting with the U.S. ) in dedicating 5% our Gross Domestic Product each year for the next twenty years to a fund aimed at eliminating global poverty, homeless, hunger, inadequate health care and inadequate education as well as repairing the damage done to our environment from 150 years of irresponsible forms of industrialization in both capitalist and socialist countries.

We believe that this strategy of generosity will provide far more security than the sinking to trillions of dollars into a futile and self-destructive military approach that seeks to kill people we suspect of being terrorists and conquering or imposing "regime change" on countries that we identify as sympathizing with the terrorists.

We in the leadership of the NSP would like to see our local chapters create a national day of non-violent demonstrations that are led by spiritual and religious people and that focus on this positive vision. We've picked the after-church time Sunday afternoon April 22nd , 2007 as the day for national demonstrations around this theme of a strategy of generosity. We are calling it "Generosity Sunday."

The problem is, we are a small part of the peace movement, and we don't yet have the funding or the organizers to pull off a huge demonstration in D.C. or 150 local cities that the various anti-war organizations can pull off. Meanwhile, we are faced with the reality that the Congress has just legalized torture, that the Bush Administration has made it clear that it will not end the war in Iraq and intends to maintain a permanent US presence there, and that there are serious efforts being made to build the provocations that could be used to justify the bombing of Iran.

There is no ethical way that we can "sit this one out." Most of the religious and spiritual traditions of the human race agree with the basic sentiment expressed by the Bible in its injunction against "sitting back and watching how it will all play out": THOU SHALT NOT STAND BY IDLY ON THE BLOOD OF YOUR FELLOW HUMAN BEINGS."

So, the situation requires action, and the groups that currently mobilizing action are, like us and everyone else on the planet, deeply flawed. In the case of the groups that ran previous large mobilizations, we had the ANSWER coalition which was filled with hatred and anti-Semitism parading as legitimate criticism of Israeli policies, and the United for Peace and Justice which often felt that it wasn't united for anything, and which often organized joint activities with the ANSWER people. The World Can't Wait coalition ahs the advantage that it doesn't get bogged down in vulgar anti-Semitic analyses of the Middle East, but then it has its own problems.

I agree with the critic above that the tone of the advertisements for Oct. 5th is angry. But anger (or more accurately, "righteous indignation") has always been the tone of the prophets, and isn't it appropriate to be angry at a government that takes our taxes and uses it for a war that the majority of Americans oppose and have opposed for at least a year, and now intends to spread that war to yet another country? Isn't righteous indignation appropriate when faced with a Congress that legalizes torture? Well, here the answer is complicated: because on the one hand, the anger is legitimate, and on the other hand, we have to wonder whether it is counter-productive because it may push away from us people who ought to be connected.

This concern is intensified by the notion of "Driving out the Bush Regime." Let me say unequivocally that if we though the World Can't Wait group was flirting with violence as part of its strategy, we would not want to have any part of it or any association. I've repeatedly urged them to explicitly say what will, to the best of my knowledge, be the case for 95% of the people attracted: that we are all committed to non-violence. But they don't make that clear, and I think that that is a big problem.

And the "driving out the Bush Regime" ignores the 2006 election, which is the democratic way to get political change, and whether demonstrations just before the election might be used by the Right as justification for the need for more repression and more support for those in both major parties who still think through the framework of "repression will solve our problems" paradigm. There is a huge problem with relying on elections: many of the Democrats are just as committed to the "domination" or "repression" strategy as many of the Republicans, so it's hard to argue that there is a real choice facing the nation in regard to the war in Iraq next month. The failure of Democratic Party U.S. Senators to mount a filibuster against the torture bill or against the expenditure of over $450 Billion for the military budget passed lack week that will fund the war in Iraq and Iran are only the most recent evidence that the ballot box is not soon providing a way for people to decisively vote against the war in Iraq. Possibly by the spring of 2008 we will see peace candidates opposing the Democratic and Republican incumbents in a variety of primary races, but that's two years from now, so "World Can't Wait" can legitimately argue that we need to do something NOW!

In Tikkun I've called for demonstrations to take a different form, so that people would not come into the streets just to vent their (quite legitimate) anger at the war machine and at the killings in Iraq. I've suggested that we ensure that there be a few longer talks by analysts who present different views about the best strategy for a peace movement, small group discussions of these various alternatives, and maybe even voting among the activists to determine the direction of future activities. We need our own activists to be far better informed, not only about "the facts," but about the way to argue for the demand to bring the troops home that deals with the difficult questions ( e.g. "Having created the mess in Iraq, won't the withdrawal of US troops just lead to an even worse blood bath as the country descends into civil war between religious factions-so don't we have a responsibility to stay till the situation is more stabilized?")

I've been distressed to see how few people in our anti-war organizations can really articulately answers to that and other questions that must be answered in order to win over more people to not only agree that the war is wrong but to agree that we need to bring the troops home now-- and these large demonstrations need to be used to provide this kind of education. If, instead, they continue as they have in the past to be moments to let off steam and anger and upset without this other component, they are of limited value.

On the other hand, there are three arguments for militant (though totally non-violent) demonstrations on October 5th. First, the feeling of angry demonstrations, if appropriately connected to a brilliant public relations campaign, could be used to convey the following message to the American electorate: "unless you start supporting the moderate and anti-war candidates in whatever party you support, don't be surprised if soon we are back into the extremely polarized atmosphere of the Vietnam War era, so you might want to support candidates who would support impeachment of the president to avoid that kind of development which will happen if we continue on our present path" and in this way, the legal electoral way we have available, we would be driving out the Bush Administration in a totally legitimate and non-violent way. Demonstrations have often played a role in shaping electoral outcomes, and so The World Can't Wait crowd could use this argument on behalf of Oct. 5th. Second, there is a strong value in letting people who have been experiencing the slide toward evil in our foreign and domestic policies the opportunity to realize that they are not alone, but that they are surrounded by hundreds of thousands of others who are similarly outraged. This mass mobilization aspect empowers people and makes it more likely that they would participate in ongoing educational work against the wars. And then there is the moral argument: whether or not the demonstrations change anything, it's wrong to not engage in some public activity to challenge policies (being paid for out of your own tax monies) that involve killing others. It's just wrong to let that happen and not consistently protest it.

It's this last argument that was decisive for me in deciding to become involved in supporting this demonstration, as long as it remains non-violent. Yet I agree with our critics about how this Oct. 5th (and by implication, many of the other anti-war activities) has been shaped and presented to the public.

There is, in my view, only one alternative: we have to create mass demonstrations that reflect our own vision. And we can't do that without the active involvement of thousands of people willing to reach out to others around our "strategy of generosity" approach, and to do so with a taste of the spiritual values that underlie our foreign policy/homeland security approach. Let us know if you will come volunteer in our national office in Berkeley for a few months to help coordinate our Generosity Sunday, or make a significant donation toward helping raise funds for it, or play a central role in organizing it in your local area (tell us where and what exactly we can count on you to do: build a local group of organizers? get a permit? create a coalition with local religious and spiritual leaders around this specific approach? etc.?) Let us know if, in building the foundation for this approach, you are willing to invite people to your homes to watch the NSP tape and get them to join the NSP? or what?

There's nothing mysterious about all this. If you want a different kind of peace movement than those that already exist, that will only happen if you help create it. If the ideas articulated above make sense to you, then you can make something different happen, but only if you a. Join the NSP 2. Become active with us in creating something real in your local area that follows the NSP path in developing public support for a Strategy of Generosity. If we don't get enough support, we may not go through with April 22, 2007.

We know that we don't have enough infrastructure right now to carry out the April 22nd event. We need a few hundred thousand dollars to have enough staff to provide back up. There's another possibility, which we will also explore: trying to get a large enough coalition of religious and spiritual groups to join us in the call for that Generosity Sunday. Last January I attended a meeting convened by Bob Edgar, chair of the National Council of Churches of Christ, to discuss how the different religious communities might respond to the need for action challenging the war in Iraq. I was delighted to learn that many religious communities have been working to oppose the war, but distressed to find that each one seemed to be acting as though there was no need to work together. Each one had a separate date for its Washington demonstrations, its public mobilizations, its lobbying, etc. When I suggested that we pick one date to cooperate on, I was told that these groups have very slow decision making processes and that real involvement in a coalition for these groups would take years of bureaucratic procedure before such a decision could be made. I'm hoping that the urgency of the war might speed this process, and I'll be asking each national religious organization or spiritual organization to join with us on April 22nd, or to meet in a larger planning meeting soon so that we could pick a date and project that would feel that it was "theirs" to these religious or spiritual communities. It seems so logical, for example, that we would be working with Jim Wallis' Sojourners community, with the people involved in the United Church of Christ (UCC), the Methodists, the Lutherans, progressive Catholics, the Presbyterians, the Episcopal Church, the Reform Church, progressive Baptists, Quakers, Mennonites, the Unitarian Universalist Association, the Reform Movement, the Reconstructionist movement and the Jewish Renewal movement in Judaism, the progressive Muslim mosques, the Buddhist and Hindu organizations that have some willingness to participate in tikkun olam (healing the world) consciousness. And mnay others. Unfortunately, the very difficulty in getting these organizations to coordinate and cooperate with each other is one of the reasons why we and other groups then find ourselves proceeding on our own plans because the coalition of religious and spiritual groups seems so very difficult to put together. But this is certainly the task of the NSP. But it could happen, particularly if you help light a fire in whatever religious or spiritual community you are part of---if you put a strong effort into reaching the national leadership of your community and insisting that getting together to have this discussion and exploring how each of these communities could commit serious energies, resources and people to this kind of project, and to this kind of thinking together. Ask them to get in touch with me ( RabbiLerner@tikkun.org) or Nichola@tikkun.org. This is why we so badly need a Network of Spiritual Progressives across all religious and denominational lines-to be the launchers of this kind of thinking and this kind of interfaith cooperation. Can you do this in your local area. And if not now, when?

But while it's not there yet, it makes sense to participate in flawed activities like Oct. 5th. That's why I'l be speaking at the San Francisco demonstration on Thursday at the 4-6 rally in Justin Herman Plaza, and why other NSP people willb e participating in the many demonstrations around the country. I invite you to use this very statement as the basis of a leaflet or pamphlet that you could hand to people out on the streets, inviting them to your next NSP chapter meeting, or if you don't yet have a chapter, inviting them to a gathering at your home in which you could present some of the NSP ideas, show the video, and given them plenty of loving energies and opportunity to talk about some of the issues raised in this Spiritual Covenant with America. You might get some who will be more comfortable being part of a study group on The Left Hand of God, and others who will want to be involved in the planning of April 22nd or other actions to help build a generosity-oriented peace movement. Thanks for whatever you do to bring about peace and justice on this planet.

Many blessings,
Rabbi Michael Lerner
Chair, The Network of Spiritual Progressives
editor, Tikkun Magazine
Author: The Left Hand of God: Taking Back our Countr form the Religious Right
RabbiLerner@tikkun.org