Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/category/uncategorized/page/16/)
Politics is not about perfection. Anyone who has ever faced the choice of a not-so-good Democrat running against a horrendous Republican knows what I’m talking about. In the vernacular, it’s the lesser-evil dilemma, and most people handle it sensibly. You do the best you can at any given moment. But finding ourselves up against the lesser-evil problem means that we may have missed earlier points of intervention.
For those on the front lines of the fight to defend and improve public education, the 2016 presidential election is already a minefield. On July 11, 2015, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) president Randi Weingarten announced that the roughly one-million-member organization would officially throw its weight behind Hillary Clinton’s candidacy for president of the United States. The million members had zero opportunity to discuss or vote on the matter.
The question of whether to vote for the lesser evil in the upcoming presidential election is being resolved even as we wrestle with it. The last few years of global capitalist change and the response thereto in Greece show the historic moment now breaking out of such dead ends. Greece, like the United States, was long dominated by two old parties. As they divided governmental power between themselves, they became ever more alike. One, the Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK), “moderated” over time and eventually even embraced the vicious austerity imposed on Greece by Europe’s conservatives.
The case for lesser-evil voting boils down to this: when choosing between X and Y, rational agents who think that X is better than Y ought to choose X. The logic is unassailable. But even if we stipulate that, come November 2016, the winner of the presidential election will be either a Democrat or a Republican and the Democrat will be the lesser evil, it doesn’t follow automatically that rational citizens ought to vote for her. From a logical point of view, “better,” “less bad,” and “less evil” are interchangeable, but there is a practical difference. Better choices are less bad or less evil only when the alternatives are, or are thought to be, bad. Theologians and secular thinkers who don’t admit that God is dead sometimes distinguish “bad” from “evil” implicitly, or sometimes explicitly, invoking the religious connotations of the latter concept.
As a nonprofit, we at Tikkun are barred from endorsing candidates and political parties (though you, our readers, are not, and we are not barred from printing your responses and letters on our website). But we can talk about the issues. Many of our readers have been delighted to witness and support Senator Bernie Sanders’s candidacy for the Democratic Party presidential nomination. Some have made the argument that even if Sanders could never defeat a corporate-financed Republican candidate who harped on the senator’s radical past, simply having Sanders’s ideas presented to the American public during presidential debates in the fall will do more good and make more progress toward changing the American political consciousness than would eight years of a Hillary Clinton presidency. Her administration, some progressive critics believe, would inevitably be run by the same people who controlled the economic, political, foreign, and military policies of the Clinton and Obama presidencies: people who effectively erased most progressive ideas from public consciousness.
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Arthur Green recently published a review of my recent book Hasidism Incarnate in Studies in Jewish-Christian Relations. The review raises some important issues in regards to the study of Hasidism and Hasidic literature more generally, and the nature of comparison in the study of religion. It also gestures toward the complex relationship between scholarship and theology that many of us, both in Jewish Studies more generally, and Jewish mysticism in particular, traverse in our work. I begin my discussion of the larger questions raised in the review with Green’s claim of omission. In his review Green notes that it is surprising that I chose not to invoke Psalm 90:1 A prayer to Moses, man of God (ish ha- Elohim) in my study as it would ostensibly support my basic contention about incarnational thinking.
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In ways that immediately brought to mind dangerous parallels with the yellow Star of David patch worn by Jews during the Third Reich, Donald Trump in November suggested that Syrian refugees, posing as allegedly dangerous Fifth Columnists, should wear badges on account of their Muslim faith so that they could not infiltrate American society and carry out plots against the nation. When asked by a reporter whether he thought the comparison with Nazi Germany was a fair one, Trump responded “you tell me.” So shocking have been these and similar statements that not just liberal voices and outlets, but even conservative ones, began to speculate whether Trump is, in fact, a capital-F fascist. This proposition had circulated on leftist websites and blogs for months, fed by outrage at Trump’s positions (usually stated unabashedly and flippantly) regarding immigration, foreign policy or torture. At the end of November, this proposition started to enter the mainstream, with CNN.com’s article openly considering the question, interviewing published scholars of historical fascism to ask for their expert opinions. Dozens of other mainstream outlets then began to run their own “Is Trump a Fascist?” pieces as well.
Note: This post originally appeared on All That’s Left on December 30, 2015. As an Israeli politician gets up to speak, a crowd of Jewish Americans leaps to its feet. But the speaker isn’t Jewish. His name is Ayman Odeh and he is a Palestinian citizen of Israel and the leader of the Joint List, the third largest party in the Knesset. MK Odeh has come to New York to address the HaaretzQ Conference with the New Israel Fund.
Love requires us to think of terrorists as people. We need to look beyond terrorist acts to the exploitation of powerless countries by the West. In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks in Paris last month, amid all the talk of war and destruction, some people could be heard calling for love. But what would a loving response to terrorism be? I understand love as a concern for all people, which has well-being as its first focus.
Editor’s Note: We at Tikkun have long advocated for the adoption of a Strategy of Generosity in US foreign policy, decisively shifting our perspective on how we relate to the rest of the world from the “power over” approach which has failed miserably for 7000 years and produced nothing but violence and counter violence to a deep spiritual approach that recognizes the humanity of others and demonstrates our care for the well-being of all who live on the planet. In the following piece published on Truthout yesterday, our Editor-at-Large Peter Gabel offer a philosophical foundation for that vision that shows the relationship between healing and repairing the wounds that separate us and ending the otherwise unending cycle of violence that causes so much human suffering. If you find this compelling, help us spread the message. Join our interfaith and secular-humanist-welcoming Network of Spiritual Progressives or donate to Tikkun. Read our proposed Global Marshall Plan which would be a massive step toward implementing what Gabel calls for in this article.
This site will be continually updated with new articles, so check it whenever you are wishing to hear what people in the spiritual progressive world are thinking. Tikkun does not necessarily agree with all the articles we select to publish below, any more than do we necessarily agree with articles we publish in the print magazine (which is available by subscription, or free to people who join the Network of Spiritual Progressives at the $50 level—and on line only to our subscribes or NSP members or donors). But what makes an article Tikkunish? It approaches this topic and any other social phenomenon with a supposition that people who are acting in ways that are hateful, hurtful, violent in speech or action, anti-Semitic, racist, sexist, homophobic, Islamophobic, religiophobic or otherwise acting in irrational or self-destructive ways are often responding to internal psychological or spiritual needs that are legitimate needs that have been systematically frustrated and which have much in common with needs of many others who do not respond to them in the same irrational or hurtful or violent ways. Those who respond by being attracted to extremist ideas–whether they take the form of “America is always right and we have the absolute right to impose our way of thinking or being on those who disagree with us because they are wrong,” or substitute here in place of “America” any other nationality, religious community, ethnic or racial group, gender, sexual preference, or other grouping—are often seeking a way to deal with inner pain or the absence of a loving environment that all human beings need to flourish, and have adopted a strategy for having their needs met that is destructive to themselves or others.
ISIS hardly seems to deserve empathy. But that depends on what’s meant by “empathy.” In the sophisticated realms of international relations, psychotherapy, and other social science disciplines, “empathy” doesn’t carry the ordinary meaning most people think of when they hear that word. To most people, “empathy” means sympathy, or feeling for. Whereas in the academic and professional worlds, empathize means something like “stand in the shoes of,” or crawl inside the other person’s position, their life experiences, their beliefs, attitudes and feelings. It’s a totally impersonal process at times, much like understanding how a machine works so as to become better able to fix it.
The rise of ISIS (also known as Daesh, ISIL, or the “Islamic State”) is a direct consequence of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. While there are a number of other contributing factors as well, that fateful decision is paramount. Had Congress not authorized President George W. Bush the authority to illegally invade a country on the far side of the world that was no threat to us, and to fund the occupation and bloody counter-insurgency war that followed, the reign of terror ISIS has imposed upon large swathes of Syria and Iraq and the recent terrorist attacks in Paris, Beirut, the Sinai, San Bernardino and elsewhere would never have happened. Among the many scholars, diplomats, and political figures who warned of such consequences was a then-Illinois state senator named Barack Obama, who noted that a U.S. invasion of Iraq would “only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of al-Qaeda” and other like-minded extremists. It is ironic, then, that most of those who went ahead and supported the invasion of Iraq anyway are now trying to blame him for the rise of ISIS.
Articles:
Introduction to Tikkun’s Approach, by Rabbi Michael Lerner
Humiliation is the Root of All Terrorism, by Peter Gabel
The U.S and the Rise of ISIS, by Stephen Zunes
Empathizing with ISIS: An Unthinkable Necessity Explained, by John McFadden
Fighting Terrorism with Love, Philip McKibbin
Introduction to Tikkun’s Approach
by Rabbi Michael Lerner
This site will be continually updated with new articles, so check it whenever you are wishing to hear what people in the spiritual progressive world are thinking. Tikkun does not necessarily agree with all the articles we select to publish below, any more than do we necessarily agree with articles we publish in the print magazine (which is available by subscription, or free to people who join the Network of Spiritual Progressives at the $50 level—and on line only to our subscribes or NSP members or donors). But what makes an article Tikkunish? It approaches this topic and any other social phenomenon with a supposition that people who are acting in ways that are hateful, hurtful, violent in speech or action, anti-Semitic, racist, sexist, homophobic, Islamophobic, religiophobic or otherwise acting in irrational or self-destructive ways are often responding to internal psychological or spiritual needs that are legitimate needs that have been systematically frustrated and which have much in common with needs of many others who do not respond to them in the same irrational or hurtful or violent ways. Those who respond by being attracted to extremist ideas–whether they take the form of “America is always right and we have the absolute right to impose our way of thinking or being on those who disagree with us because they are wrong,” or substitute here in place of “America” any other nationality, religious community, ethnic or racial group, gender, sexual preference, or other grouping—are often seeking a way to deal with inner pain or the absence of a loving environment that all human beings need to flourish, and have adopted a strategy for having their needs met that is destructive to themselves or others.