Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/author/a_lernerm2/page/60/)
Rabbi Michael Lerner holds a Ph.D. in philosophy (1972) and a second Ph.D. in psychology (1977), is editor of Tikkun www.tikkun.org, executive director of the Institute for Labor and Mental Health, rabbi of Beyt Tikkun Synagogue-Without-Walls in Berkeley, chair of the international Network of Spiritual Progressives, and author of 12 books, most recently Revolutionary Love published by the University of California Press (more info about this book at www.tikkun.org/lj). Lerner was recently described by Professor Cornel West of Harvard U. as “one of the most significant prophetic public intellectuals and spiritual leaders of our generation” and Keith Ellison, Attorney General of the State of Minnesota, says: “The caring society is the only realistic path for humanity to survive, and in Revolutionary Love Rabbi Lerner lays out a powerful and compassionate plan for building that caring society.” Talking about his book Revolutionary Love, Gloria Steinem, a founding editor of Ms. Magazine, says “Michael Lerner takes the universal qualities wrongly diminished as ‘feminine’—caring, kindness, empathy, love—and dares to make them guides to a new kind of politics that can challenge the cruelty, competition, and dominance wrongly elevated as ‘masculine.’ Revolutionary Love opens our minds and hearts to a fully human way of living and governing.”
We regret and deplore the killings which took place as Israeli troops, in defiance of international law, boarded and assaulted, wounded many and killed some of the participants in a flotilla seeking to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza (itself a morally outrageous policy) to bring humanitarian aid.
Progressives have been blessed in the past two years with three significant opportunities to change the fundamentals of American society. We’ve already blown the first and are missing the second and third.
Every night since the attack on my home by right-wing Zionists, I’ve been saying a prayer of forgiveness for them. While the political meaning of that act, and of the demeaning of critics of Israel, will be explored more fully in the July/August issue of Tikkun, on the spiritual level it is very important to not let negativity, even terrorism or violence, get the upper hand by bringing us down to the same level of anger or hatred that motivates those who act violently or those who demean and attempt to delegitimate the critics of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. If we are to build a world of love, we have to constantly work against the impulse to respond to anger and hatred with our own angry or hateful response. So, every night, I work on forgiving those who have assaulted my home, those who publicly demean me or Tikkun or the NSP, and those who spread hatred against the many people in our world who legitimately critique the policies of the State of Israel toward Palestinians. It was in this context that I thought I’d post some notes taken by therapist Linda Graham at a recent weekend retreat on forgiveness conducted by Jack Kornfield and Fred Luskin.
. . . it relies on the idea of providing temporary worker visas to lower-skilled immigrants who are apparently expected to send their money home, providing American farmers, agribusiness, and other employers with a source of cheap labor that can depress the wages of other laborers.
Yet what the critics maintain is that Obama and congressional Democrats, inheriting an economy and political system in crisis after decades of ideological Republican policies committed to downsizing government and serving the tax-cutting interests of the rich and the corporate elites, blew a unique opportunity to teach Americans a new way of thinking about politics and economy.
Debates continue to rage over the UC Berkeley Student Senate’s call for divestment from two companies that help Israel maintain the Occupation of the West Bank.
The passage of the health care bill was not an embodiment of the vision of universal health care that many of us aspire to, but it was a major turn-around in American politics, a moment in which Barack Obama was able to regain some of the moral authority that inspired his landslide election only a year and a half ago and gave many of us reason to hope a space was opening up for the creation of a more progressive, more social connected, more loving and caring society. But Obama will not succeed in fending off the Sarah Palin-led Tea Party revolt against this progressive vision without the decisive emergence of a different kind of progressive voice into public space, a voice on the spiritual left of Obama which strengthens his own resolve and shows him how a new spiritual progressive vision can be both morally compelling and realistic in political terms.
Yet, this is very complicated, because Obama’s programs actually erode the support for progressive politics. Most people think Obama IS the Left: the progressives, liberals, even “the far left.” So when they hear about his or Congressional Democrats’ policies, or get their lives touched by their fallout, (e.g. his and their support for trillions of dollars to the banks and large corporations, but only symbolic acts to stop the millions of home foreclosures and to create jobs; his war in Afghanistan; his allowing the oil and gas conglomerates to ruin the environment through drilling on the coasts of many American states; his abandonment of his promises to end the human rights abuses of the Bush Administration; and the list goes on), many people become disillusioned, and blame the whole mess created by global capitalism on “big government,” thus giving an amazing opening both to the Tea Party movement and to the large business and financial interests. From the standpoint of the large corporate interests, nothing could be better than to de-fund government or dramatically downsize it, because then it can’t constrain their economic power.
From Peter Rollins on ways in which he denies the resurrection … and so do we all.
Here is a series of articles that may help you negotiate through the Passover holiday and the ethical morass facing those who wish to celebrate the holiday of our freedom from slavery without going dead to the reality of the Jewish people’s role in the suffering of the Palestinian people, today, right now, as we celebrate this year’s Passover!
I’d like to share an excerpt from the Passover supplement published in the March/April 2010 issue of Tikkun. Passover is not meant to be merely a celebration of the Jewish victory for liberation in our past, but is rather meant to stimulate us to extend that liberation to the whole world. Such liberation would bring an end to the destruction of the environment. It would bring an end to the cheapening of cultural life by the dominance of an ethos of “looking out for number one.” It would bring an end to rampant materialism and our society’s belief in salvation through mechanical objects and technological fixes …
Health care reform is finally in the works. What now?
How do you deal with two peoples who are suffering from PTSD? Well, we know what you don’t do. You don’t try to coerce them into situations in which they perceive themselves as vulnerable to re-experiencing the insecurity and pain that caused the trauma in the first place.
I am firmly convinced that ending the Occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, if done by Israel in a spirit of generosity and open-heartedness, would be the necessary prerequisite for a lasting peace between Israel and the Palestinian people. A plan to achieve that—the Geneva Accord—has defined many of the contours of what that peace could look like. The Tikkun Community was the first national organization to embrace and promote that Accord, though always with the caveat that it is not enough to have a legal agreement unless each side embraces a spiritual consciousness that affirms the humanity of the other, recognizes its own sins in having treated the other side disrespectfully, and seeks genuine repentance and atonement.