Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/author/mikikashtan/page/6/)
If you want to cut to the chase in this post, go straight to the section called Talking about Race with Love. That’s where you will find the concrete lessons I have derived, especially about how a group that’s engaged in conversations about privilege without signing on to having them, can do so with love.
In my position of privilege, I can write whatever I want about Ferguson, and I don’t risk losing a job, alienating people who can make my life miserable, or possibly even more imminent physical risks to my body. In this particular case I want to name, explicitly, that this piece is written for a white audience: I am offering one idea about what we, as white people, can do.
Many of us like to believe that individual transformation, if enough people engage in it, is enough. Others believe that if those in positions of power are reached, either through their own transformation or through mass nonviolent resistance, then change will take place. Despite the elegant appeal of these approaches, I don’t quite see how any of them will bring about structural change.
I want to start with marveling at how far we are, collectively, from taking our needs seriously and making them a priority. Instead, we have been trained to view our needs as a sign of weakness or dependence, and as something bottomless that cannot be controlled.
Before writing this piece, I read an article by Michael Lerner in Tikkun called “God and Goddess Emerging,” in which he explores, among many other topics that I found deeply inspiring, the Jewish notion that God needs humans as partners. I was struck by this sentence in particular: “For a Greek imperialist or a male chauvinist, a god with feelings and needs must be a lesser god.” These traditions, the Hellenistic as well as the patriarchal, are the foundations of our disdain for vulnerability…
Empty space is that which God had to make by withdrawing himself in order to create the world. How God can both exist and not exist in that space is, as the text tells us, a matter we will only understand in the future. Paradox, once more, that creative and generative tension, forces something new to emerge. Empty space, the text goes on, exists in the disagreements between the sages and allows for new understanding. That was the connection with NVC: dialogue, true and deep respect for different perspectives, a listening and an understanding that allows for learning. Dialogue and the creation of the world as parallels.
I totally and completely believe that it is only a myth that says only some of us can lead, and everyone else must only follow, not think for themselves, not participate in shaping a collective future, from the personal to the global.
In China, as well as anywhere else I have been, I hungrily look for and lean into any evidence that I can find to support my deep and abiding faith that the desire to be rich is far from the only or primary motive that propels us to action.
Is there anything we can do, either internally or with the other person, to shift a relationship into more ease and flow? I believe so, and I have identified a few elements that can help.
Essentially, any communication, especially about unmet needs, gets filtered through the lens of blame because this is our deep cultural habit: if someone is unhappy, someone is to blame…. Blame, and how we respond to it, is both a symptom of inability to step into power, and an impediment, once present, to movement in the direction of empowered relationships.