Roots
We trace our mission and worldview to the heritage of the Jewish people, who shared with previous religious traditions a sense of awe and wonder at the grandeur of the universe. Yet most of those spiritual traditions had been shaped by ruling elites who wanted ordinary people to embrace a world of unequal power and injustice, in part by claiming that the gods had shaped a fixed hierarchical social structure that could not be changed and was built into the structure of the universe.
Torah also taught us that one of our central obligations is to build a world based on love and justice. Importantly, the love is not only for our neighbors, but also for those who are “the other” or “the stranger.” We are enjoined not only to act justly toward and pursue justice for the stranger or other, but also to love her. The belief that it is actually possible to build a world based on these principles of love and justice was foundational for Tikkun magazine.
By the time Nan Fink Gefen and Rabbi Lerner started Tikkun in 1986, with the help of associate editor-at-large, Peter Gabel, the reverberations of the prophetic tradition in the past few hundred years provided another part of our foundation. It took secular form in the works of Marx, Freud, Wilhelm Reich, Herbert Marcuse, Sheldon Wolin, Richard Lichtman, Erich Fromm, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Einstein, Noam Chomsky, Rosa Luxemburg, Simone de Beauvoir, Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Nelson Mandela, Che Guevara, Betty Friedan, Shulamith Firestone, and so many others. And it took religious form in liberation theology and in the writings and life experience of Martin Luther King, Jr., Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Buber, Yeshayahu Leibowitz, Matthew Fox, Rachel Adler, Arthur Waskow, Judith Plaskow, Mordecai Kaplan, and Emmanuel Levinas, and through the years of interactions with my personal mentors Abraham Joshua Heschel and Zalman Schachter-Shalomi. We also drew inspiration from a wide variety of movements including the Civil Rights, anti-war, feminist, and LBGTQ movements, the Anti-Apartheid Movement, the Catholic Worker Movement, wisdom from all branches of Judaism, P’nai Or, which became Aleph: The Alliance for Jewish Renewal, the Jewish Peace Fellowship, Breira, the Israeli branch of Peace Now, Yesh Gvul, Greenpeace, and the American Friends Service Committee.
The Path to Tikkun
Tikkun is a project of the Institute for Labor and Mental Health that Rabbi Lerner helped create in 1977. The original group of founders included psychiatrists, psychologists, and several labor union activists and leaders of local unions. The original intention in bringing these people together was to try to develop a way to understand the psychodynamics of American society and the massive defections from the labor movement—an important source of support for progressive social welfare measures, and a central force in achieving some degree of wage increases and safety and health protections not only for its own members but for the working class as a whole. To help understand what was happening in working class consciousness, Rabbi Lerner wrote a grant and received funding from the National Institute of Mental Health. In the ensuing ten years of research, Rabbi Lerner and his colleagues discovered that there was a massive spiritual crisis in American society that was being addressed by the Right, albeit in distorted form, and that the Left didn’t understand at all.
Participants in the Institute’s workshops, trainings, individual and group research sessions, and at their mass events said that they had a part of themselves that Rabbi Lerner and others in the Institute subsequently began to call a “spiritual consciousness.” They yearned for a world in which people see others not through an instrumental or utilitarian framework, but rather as inherently deserving of our love and respect just by virtue of being a human being, or in religious language, as having been created in the image of God. To see every other human being as a subject, not an object, or as Martin Buber put it, as someone to relate to in an I-Thou rather than I-It way, is to recognize the Other as inherently valuable and as a manifestation of the sacred. Rather than see the obstacles to creating these kinds of friendships and marriages as reflecting the prevalence of the ethos of the capitalist marketplace, most people blamed themselves.
While the Right was – and remains to this day – a champion of the capitalist marketplace that plays a driving force in creating and celebrating selfishness and materialism, it also provides a voice to those suffering from the values of the capitalist marketplace. The clearest and most powerful voices in the Right come from the Evangelical churches. They frequently provide a comforting and caring location for people suffering from the economic, spiritual, and psychological hidden injuries of class society. Thus they have been able to simultaneously speak to the pain, suffering, and free-floating anger that people feel in their daily lives, help them reduce their self-blaming, and direct their anger against others who are often the most vulnerable and least able to protect themselves. For many on the Right, the loving and supportive atmosphere in their churches, synagogues, or mosques provide them with precisely the momentary sense of connection to others and to a higher meaning in life, yet does not lead them to challenge the institutions of capitalist society which generated their pain but instead to channel bitterness toward those outside their communities who are seen as the source of the bad values that are supposedly destroying families and making people feel lonely and disrespected.
The Left is missing the point when it asks, “Why do so many people vote against their economic interests by supporting right-wing candidates in elections — thereby voting against their own real needs?” During our research we often heard middle-income, working-class people tell us of how they found themselves belittled when they revealed these spiritual or religious interests to others in social change movements, especially on the Left. The implicit message they got from the “lefties” or activists was: “we need you in our unions, our demonstrations, our electoral campaigns, we need your activism, votes or donations, but we see you as a little less evolved psychologically or intellectually than we are because of your religious/spiritual leanings. We hope that as time goes on and you are involved with us secular people who are running the social change movements for peace, social and economic justice, a better environment, human rights, and/or anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-homophobia, that you’ll become more like us.”
This demeaning response, our research subjects told us, creates a deep sense of loneliness and “not really belonging.” Some reported a need to hide their religious or spiritual sides while interacting with the activists, others told of eventually leaving these movements and seeking solace in right-wing places of worship where they felt a fuller sense of being respected and cared for, even though they didn’t agree with some of the politics they were hearing in those places of worship. And the Right’s claim that liberals and lefties are “elitists” resonated for this reason — so many people have felt put down and disrespected by people who identify as liberal or progressive.
After years of this type of research, we tried to bring our findings to various liberal and progressive movements. We argued that our research should lead progressive groups to incorporate into their discourse a “politics of meaning” that helped people see that the pain in their lives derived from the ethos of selfishness and materialism endemic to the capitalist marketplace, and not from the striving to rectify past unfairness that characterized the demands of African Americans, feminists, gays and lesbians, immigrants, refugees or religious or ethnic minorities as they were being told by the Right. We tried to show these movements that they would be far more successful in their own goals if they could more explicitly articulate and integrate these “meaning” needs into their discourse and the experience of their activism.
We were disappointed by the resistance we received in the Left. While we are only now beginning to see some cracks in this facade, the overwhelming commitment then (and to a large part still today) to a materialist reductionist view of human beings continues to lead many in the Left to believe that people only want material benefits that can be easily quantified, and that talking about “meaning” or “spiritual needs” is a distraction. We were up against powerful resistance. We knew we needed a vehicle to challenge these dynamics in the liberal and progressive world. As social healers we knew that the results of our research, if fully understood and integrated into the way society was organized, would be the best possible way to improve mental health and decrease the stress people experienced, and overall improve their lives spiritually and materially. And as people interested in building a healthy society, we knew that our message was critical for the possibility of future success for social change movements.
We didn’t have the money to do most of the things the ruling elites on the Right could do, but when Nan Fink Gefen became involved in the work of the Institute, she and Rabbi Lerner decided to create a magazine in the liberal and progressive world that could disseminate what we had learned and simultaneously allow for an approach to the world of ideas that integrated psychological and spiritual sophistication and create safety both for spiritual progressives and for progressives who yearned for a magazine that was not about “exposing” the evils of contemporary America (the Left had plenty of that), but about developing a deeper understanding and long-term strategies to heal and transform our world. So they began to fantasize about, and then to actually build the infrastructure for, a magazine. They realized that while they sought an interfaith and secular humanist readership, they should also make the magazine one which reflected the particular issues that emerge for Jewish progressives.
Creating Tikkun
Part of our message was that the liberal and progressive world should be welcoming to the spiritual dimension. Our magazine would be rooted in Jewish identity and yet address and speak to a much broader universalist constituency including atheists, secular humanists, and people in all other religions.
They decided to call the magazine Tikkun, a powerful word and concept that is used in Jewish liturgy as “tikkun olam,” the healing, repair, and transformation of the world. Part of that repair is reclaiming the centrality of awe, wonder, and radical amazement at the grandeur and mystery of the universe (as articulated so beautifully by Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, Rabbi Lerner’s mentor), combined with the passionate struggle for a world of social and economic justice, kindness, love, and generosity.
While neither Rabbi Lerner, Nan Fink Gefen nor Tikkun ever identified as Zionists, Tikkun has throughout its history been champions of much that is good in Israel, even while being one of the most vocal voices fighting for Palestinian rights and ends to the Occupation of the West Bank and the blockade of Gaza. We knew this was a dangerous path, and indeed it has proved such, as Tikkun was boycotted in many of the synagogues and Jewish institutions and Rabbi Lerner was repeatedly described as one of the leading “self-hating Jews” by right-wingers and many Zionist extremists.
So, Tikkun became the prophetic voice on Israel for those who were both outraged at what Israel was doing to Palestinians, but unable to ignore all that was and remains good in Israeli society. We could be outspoken about the ways Israel was defaming the Jewish people and turning Judaism into an idolatrous worship of a nation-state, but we could not forget that Israel had been set up in part as an affirmative action refuge for a people whose tragic history of oppression had left so many Jews so badly wounded. If Israel and its Jewish supporters around the world are acting self-destructively, arrogantly, and in the process generating a global resurgence of hatred of Jews – this time based on the actual behavior of the Jewish people in giving Israel a blank check to continue to oppress Palestinians – we saw this as a tragic consequence of the post-traumatic stress disorder that was blurring their vision and weakening the capacity for empathy that had for so long been one of the great assets of the Jewish people. As a psychotherapist and as a follower of Torah, Rabbi Lerner could not suppress his own love for the Jewish people, empathy for their suffering, and compassion for their tragic mistakes, no matter how badly wounded or how distorted their actions in support of horrific Israeli policies. And as an inheritor of the Jewish prophetic tradition, he could not silence his outrage at how it was treating the Palestinian people and how it was distorting Judaism. Thankfully, in the last decade, J Street and Jewish Voices for Peace (and even more recently, If Not Now) have joined us and now play important roles in amplifying some of this message and providing important strategies to help bring a lasting peace with justice, and we will continue to work with them and with those many Palestinians who share our approach.
To put forth a vision for how to transform Israeli policy and practices, we held conferences and public gatherings in many parts of the U.S., Canada, the U.K. and Israel — some of which drew thousands of people. In 1991 we created a conference in Jerusalem to bring together the secular and religious branches of the peace movement, and the Ashkenazic-dominated parts of that movement along with many Sephardim/Mizrachim who had felt excluded. We brought U.S. Senator Paul Wellstone, a columnist for Tikkun, and added to the rough and tumble debates some wisdom from Yeshayahu Leibowitz, poets Yehuda Amichai and Dalia Ravikovitch, and presentations from A.B. Yehoshua and Amos Oz.
In addition to our efforts on Israel/Palestine, we continued to put forth a broader vision for a world based on love and justice and highlighted people we believed were worthy of honoring with a “Tikkun Award” for those who had made literary or political contributions to the healing and transformation of our world. Among those who accepted the Tikkun Award: Shulamit Aloni, U.S. Senator Paul Wellstone, Grace Paley, Marge Piercy, Francine Prose, Yossi Sarid, Howard Fast, Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, Marshall Meyer, Allen Ginsberg, Art Spiegelman, Tony Kushner, Letty Cottin Pogrebin, South African Justice Richard Goldstone, Sheikh Hamza Yusuf, Congressman Raul Grijalva, Cornel West, Naomi Newman, C.K. Williams, Yehuda Amichai, Susannah Heschel, Marian Wright Edelman, David Grossman, Sister Joan Chittister, Pete Seeger, James Hillman, Howard Zinn, and Rabbi Marcia Prager.
For a brief moment in the 1990s it looked like we might be getting some powerful supporters. Bill Clinton wrote Rabbi Lerner in 1988 to commend Tikkun, and when I heard him speak during the 1992 election he seemed to be quoting one of Rabbi Lerner’s Tikkun editorials almost word for word. In 1993, Hillary Clinton publicly endorsed the Politics of Meaning and invited Rabbi Lerner to the White House to discuss strategies for taking Tikkun’s ideas into the public sphere. She told Rabbi Lerner that she and Bill had read Tikkun and fully agreed with our approach to American politics and our stance on Israel and Palestine. Sadly, some media outlets declared Rabbi Lerner “Hillary’s guru” and then a full-scale sexist assault ensued in which Hillary was said to be having a teenage identity crisis and her mind taken over by her guru (Rabbi Lerner). This weakened her position inside internal White House politics. Moreover, the Jewish establishment, fearing Hillary would become an advocate for Tikkun’s Middle East pro-peace perspective, joined in ridiculing both of Hillary Clinton and Rabbi Lerner. To add insult to injury, Rush Limbaugh and many others on the Right, fearful that the Left might suddenly start appealing to their constituency through an embrace of religion and spirituality, ferociously insisted that our Politics of Meaning was nothing more than sheep’s clothing over old fashioned New Deal liberalism. Hillary then distanced herself from Rabbi Lerner and Tikkun, especially around Israel, our opposition to U.S.-initiated military interventions around the world, and our opposition to the neoliberal politics that her husband was introducing.
Eventually we decided to augment our role as a magazine with an activist organization for those who wanted to bring our ideas into social change movements and politics. In the early years, we called it the Tikkun Community, then in 2005 switched to call it the NSP — Network of Spiritual Progressives so that the name would make clear that we were not just for Jews, but welcoming to people from all faiths and none. The NSP has as its major focus advancing our core idea of a New Bottom Line so that productivity, efficiency, and rationality are no longer judged according to how much money or power gets generated (the Old Bottom Line) but by how much any institution, corporation, government policy, or even our own personal behavior tends to generate love and kindness, generosity and compassion, social and economic justice, and caring for each other and caring for the earth. You learn more about the Network of Spiritual Progressives here.
Tikkun has come so far and much remains to be done. In our Global Marshall Plan, we’ve put forward an approach to foreign policy based on replacing the current Strategy of Domination approach to achieving “homeland security” with a Strategy of Generosity that could eventually undermine the appeal of fundamentalist terrorists around the world. Our Environmental and Social Responsibility Amendment (ESRA) to the U.S. Constitution provides a detailed path to regain democratic control over our political and economic system.
To be “realistic” in this historical moment requires overcoming all the advice of “the realists” and instead embracing utopian thinking. As Rabbi Lerner says, “All my experience has led me to believe that one never knows what is possible until one puts one’s life energies, monies, and intellectual and emotional commitments behind the struggle for what is desirable.” So respond to the hate-mongers by becoming love-and-generosity-mongers — and do it with us, create a local study group to read articles in Tikkun once a month, bring people together into a chapter of our NSP, get people to endorse The New Bottom Line, our proposed Global Marshall Plan, and ESRA, then help us get endorsements of these programs from your local political party – whatever it is – your local social change organizations, nonprofits of every sort, religious communities, professional organizations, unions, and anyone who is asking for your vote in the 2016 elections and thereafter. We’ll help you if you contact us after joining the NSP.
So that’s where we have to go in Tikkun’s next thirty years. The problems we face will not be solved through economic or scientific strategies or approaches, though they will be a part of the solution. We at Tikkun will continue to help people understand the spiritual and cultural crises unfolding as the values of a narrow scientism and economism organized through a global system of selfishness and materialism lead people to embrace solutions and ways of life that are both psychologically and environmentally destructive (witness the 2016 rise of quasi-fascist movements in the U.S. and around the world). It is time for us to address the psycho-spiritual crisis facing our human community and eroding our environment with the same energy and activism that currently is given to narrowly framed single issue struggles or local activism. We value all those struggles, and we know that the people of this planet will continue to suffer economically, politically, culturally, and that our health and environment will be at great risk until we come together as a human race to transform the fundamentals of our global system toward a world of love, justice, generosity, empathy, environmental sanity, and with great awe and wonder at the marvels of this universe and the sanctity and beauty of human life. We will not fully achieve the world we want nor protect the earth without this sea change in our public consciousness.
We at Tikkun and through our Network of Spiritual Progressives are a vehicle for thinking about the ways to make the impossible become actual. We overcome fear with love and overcome the pain so many people experience with a generosity of spirit and action. We know that consciousness change is the central first step, and we also know that those changes cannot be sustained without changes in the economic and political system. We are the vehicle for trying out new and out-of-the-box solutions to the environmental crisis, ways to overcome the persistence of racism, sexism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, xenophobia, religiophobia, and the distorting impact of global capitalism. And we will be a place where you can also transcend that which is evil or distorted and also encounter the beauty and magnificence of human life, the awesome nature of the universe, and the joyful spontaneity of people bursting with creativity, humor, erotic energy, joy, and God-filled blessings for each other and for you. We will lead with empathy, compassion, psychological sophistication, and commitment to remain connected to awe, radical amazement, and celebration of the grandeur of the universe and life itself! Thank you for the financial support that will make it possible for us to be this particular voice that can transcend all the empty chatter that goes for public discourse in the contemporary world.