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Religion See other Religion Articles Title: Rosner's Guest [ Michael Lerner ] Rabbi Michael Lerner This week's guest is Rabbi Michael Lerner, a social theorist, theologian, psychotherapist and the editor of the magazine Tikkun. Rabbi Lerner's new book, "The left hand of God" is an analysis of American policy and an outline to show the left wing in America how to regain its effectiveness and power in society. (Read Lerner's bio on Wikipedia here). Those of you who would like to ask questions can send them to rosnersdomain@haaretz.co.il. Rabbi Lerner In your book you write that "the left consistently attacked religion and spirituality," and call upon the people of the left not to be afraid of some "spiritual vision." How do you think this shift will be possible, in a world in which the right had all but monopolized religion - and at least when it comes to politics in America (and Israel too), a world in which the more a person practice religious rituals, the more inclined he is to vote for the right. Best, Rosner The Right has monopolized religion because the Left has had an elitist view that permeates the Left culture and academia: namely, that anyone who really believes in God or spiritual reality is either stunted in their intellectual development (perhaps having unresolved issues with their father or perhaps a fear of autonomy that leads them to desire the security of escape from rationality or autonomy into the security that belief in an imaginary realm provides them) or else they are just nasty people who want to dominate others and have divine sanction for so doing. Given this religio-phobia and contempt for spirituality that is pervasive on the Left, many people in America and Israel who would have agreed with many parts of the Left's actual political or economic program end up identifying more with Right wing parties, churches or synagogues, and eventually may even be seduced into the Right wing's worldview on substantive matters. As I demonstrate in my book The Left Hand of God on the basis of having interviewed over ten thousand Americans (and I did similar research with similar results when I was a visiting scholar at Limudey Avoda at Tel Aviv University), many people who move to the Right do so because they cannot stand the elitism and disdain for religion and spirituality that they feel on the Left. So they vote for the right not because religion leads them to the right, but because the Left's disrespect makes them feel culturally more comfortable on the Right even when they don't really agree with the Right?s political or economic programs. Thus we get the anomaly of people whose economic interests are being undermined by the political right in both Israel and the US who nevertheless vote for the right?not because they are stupid but because they feel more respect in the Right than on the Left. The shift on the Left on this issue will require the same kind of campaign that women and homosexuals waged in the past thirty years?confronting the Left's sexism and homophobia, raising it to the level of consciousness, demanding that it change, and eventually winning adherence by many who had previously held sexist of homophobic views quite unconsciously. This was not an easy struggle to win (ask women who tried to raise these issues in the 1960s and early 1970s and you will hear many horror stories of sexist abuse in the Left before the Left became a champion of the struggle against sexism). It will similarly not be easy for the Left to recognize its own religio-phobia. Nevertheless, there are many people on the Left who will eventually come to recognize that they have to choose between maintaining their cynicism about religious and spiritual interests, on the one hand, and their desire to win peace, social justice and ecological sanity on the other hand. They can't have both, because the majority of people continue to feel connected to religious traditions, to be mesorti (not dati), that is, to want to be part of a traditional religious community in some way, and will continue to vote for right-wing parties until the culture of the Left has changed. And the organization that I and others have been creating, The Network of Spiritual Progressives at http://www.spiritualprogressives.org will provide the leadership in this struggle, using the book The Left Hand of God as a guide to the possibilities of a new kind of progressive movement. But, this book and this movement will not have the Left as its central issue, because our central issue will be the struggle for a New Bottom Line in American society and Israel so that institutions are judged efficient, rational and productive not only to the extent that they maximize money and power, but also to the extent that they maximize love and generosity, ethical and ecological behavior, and enhance our capacities to respond to the universe with awe and wonder at the grandeur of creation. With that approach we will challenge the religious right not for being religious, but for not being really religious, for accommodating themselves to the capitalist world with its ethos of selfishness and materialism, and for abandoning the vision of a would that the Bible presents, a vision of the religious person as one who pursues peace and social justice and rejects the militarism and preference-for-the-well-being-of-the-rich that is the current perversion of religion espoused by many on the religious right. -- Rabbi Michael Lerner, author of Jewish Renewal: A Path to Healing and Transformation and 10 other books including The Socialism of Fools: Anti-Semitism on the Left, Healing Israel/Palestine, and most recently The Left Hand of God: Taking Back our Country from the Religious Right welcomes emails: RabbiLerner@tikkun.org Saturday Dear Rabbi Lerner, You mention that the America needs a spiritual left - what you think about the support to Israel from the spiritual right? Also, as a supporter of inter-faith dialogue, what do you think we can learn from the cartoon controversy that is spreading across the world, and you think the clash of civilization is taking place? Best, Jonathan The religious right is an unreliable ally for Israel. Their support has two foundations, each of which is weak. The first is their view that in supporting Israel, they will be quickening the process of the return of Jesus to the earth which, according to their reading of the Bible, will happen when there is a devastating war between Israel and other nations, after which the earth will face Jesus' second coming and the conversion of all Jews except those who instead are condemned to eternal damnation and suffering in Hell. In order to accomplish this, they support the most provocative and war-oriented governments in Israel in the hopes that these will stimulate a nuclear war in the Middle East that will be the Biblical fulfillment of the war of Gog and Magog. Of course, many Jews reason that Jesus is unlikely to come very soon, so we can have the religious right as an ally till then, but they underestimate the impact of the religious right in pushing for policies that will lead to the destruction of the Jewish people. By supporting Israel's most aggressive and provocative forces, and by supporting forces in the U.S. that will encourage Israel to believe it has a strong ally in the U.S., the religious right is making it more likely that Israel will in fact face a nuclear catastrophe, which will be perfect from the religious right's standpoint (even if, to their dismay, that is not followed by a messianic era). Only the most self-destructive Jews would choose to have such people as their allies. Moreover, the alliance with the religious right in the U.S. confirms for most other Americans that Israel is allied with the most extremist elements in Christendom. In the short run, Israel can get away with that. But in the longer run, this unholy alliance will backfire: people who might buy a "security argument" for Israel's oppression of the Palestinian people will also remember that Israel went way beyond the call of survival by giving credence and alliance to the most reactionary voices in the United States, with Israelis attending their conferences, reading their magazines and newspapers, giving public visibility and credibility to the most hateful elements in American politics. There will come a day when Israelis will pay a heavy price for forging this imagery into the consciousness of the American public. That cartoons incite people is no news to me. When I published an ad in the New York Times critiquing Ariel Sharon's visit to the Temple Mount, and accompanied it with a cartoon of Ariel Sharon looking ugly, all hell broke out in the Jewish world in the U.S. and many people thought I had no right to publish such a cartoon. I imagine that many Jews would be equally upset if there were ads being published (as some Iranians threaten to do) making fun of the Holocaust. As a civil libertarian, I strongly support the right of people to use their free speech and freedom of the press in ways that I might find personally distasteful or offensive or outrageous. That's what free speech is about. But I'd also support the right of others (the Jews who organized to prevent me from speaking in the Jewish world, so that today I can only rarely get an invitation to speak at a Jewish community center or synagogue, for example, or the right of Muslims to non-violently demonstrate against those who showed such poor taste as to print the vile depictions of Mohammed) to express public outrage and demonstrate against those who printed those cartoons. While I hate violence of all sorts (it wasn't so long ago that I was writing about the Haredim in Israel who were burning down bus stops that had ads with women in sexually provocative poses wearing skimpy and sexually stimulating outfits), I am not surprised when some people get overheated about having their leading prophets made to look ridiculous. There is a clash of civilizations going on in the world today, but it is not the clash between Muslim and the West, but a much more complicated clash that does not break down on geographical or strictly religious grounds. In my book Spirit Matters, and in my latest book The Left Hand of God: Taking Back our Country from the Religious Right (HarperSanFrancisco, 2006) I show that the major struggle in the world today is between a world view based on the notion that the highest good is to maximize money and profits, that "progress" gets defined in terms of endless innovation and production of more and more material things, and that the world is about looking out for number one and protecting oneself from evil others, and on the other hand a contending worldview that believes that the highest good is to maximize loving connections, friendships and families, that progress is defined in terms of enhancing our capacities to love and care for others and to live in harmony with nature and with God, and that the greatest safety and security comes from maximizing our cooperation and generosity with each other. The former view I call The Right Hand of God, the latter I call The Left Hand of God, and what I show in my book is that in the contemporary world we?ve gotten out of balance so that too much of the world is being indoctrinated into a Right Hand of God consciousness, and that in order to rebalance our planet we are going to have to give much more energy to our Left Hand of God consciousness. As I show in my book, most people have both voices in their heads, and so all our religious holy texts (from every religion) but also our secular humanist texts, our Marxist, psychoanalytic, literary and feminist texts, also have moments which reflect each of these two voices. It's no surprise, because the revelation from God comes through human beings who hear God's voice (or Marx's, or Freud's, or Darwin's, or Friedan's or Simone de Beauvoir's) through the intellectual, psychological and spiritual framework that they already have going in their minds before these revelations. And whether we get attracted to seeing the world through the left or right hand of God depends in large part in the baggage we bring to our own experience, plus our assessment of whether the social and intellectual energy around us in the society in which we live is moving more toward the voice of hope (left hand of God) or the voice of fear (right hand of God). But don't misunderstand - the left and right hand of God don't always correspond with the left and right in politics - I have been at anti-war rallies where the speakers have tried to use fear to motivate people, or have cheered on the military victory of our enemies (both are right-hand of God moves). The real clash of civilization is generated by the resistance of people to the ethos of selfishness and materialism that is an outcome of society?s whose bottom line and definition of progress is the accumulation of money and things. Unfortunately, that resistance is often manipulated by right wing religious communities in ways that eventually lead to violence or Right Hand of God domination over the "other" who is seen as the source of the selfishness and materialism. In Europe, that "other" was the Jews. In the U.S. that "other" was traditionally Native Americans and African Americans, but today increasingly it is feminists, gays and lesbians, all secular people, all liberals, even "activist judges." But the point I try to make is that the reason that the religious right gets so much credibility is that it correctly identifies the problem of selfishness and materialism, whereas unfortunately most people on the left don?t get that there is such a spiritual problem at all, and hence allow the religious right to become the champion of the struggle against materialism and selfishness. It is this which gives right-wingers, particularly the religious right, and, yes, even the fundamentalist right (be they Jews, Christians or Muslims) so much appeal. It is a deep mistake to think that most people get attracted to these communities because they are haters or because they seek to get support for anti-democratic and anti-liberal desires to dominate others. The attraction, as I show in my book The Left Hand of God, is based on the quite legitimate desire to be part of a community that takes love and communal solidarity seriously. The irony, as I also note, is that these communities then end up acting on principles that are directly the opposite of what brought people into those communities in the first place, and thus becoming violence-prone and hateful. But this contradiction, which could be the basis for a powerful counter-move to the religious right, is never really effectively challenged as long as those who are doing the challenge can not understand what is legitimate in the appeal of a right-wing spirituality. That is why, despite the somewhat combative subtitle of my book ("Taking back our country from the religious right"), the actual content of the book starts by trying to understand the rational parts of what attracts people to the right, and insists that we not demean people on the religious right, not assume that they are evil or demented or seeking some evil outcome, even though we strongly challenge their ideas. Of course, that has never been reciprocal?my own experience is that when I challenge ideas in the Jewish right or in any other part of right-wings of the world, the response is rarely to my arguments but always to my personal being, trying to show that I'm not "really" a rabbi ·(despite having received ordination from a beyt din - Jewish court - of three orthodox rabbis) or that I'm "really a self-hating Jew" or some other disgusting and untrue charges. They get this upset because they understand that on the level of rational discourse their positions are very vulnerable. But the challenge on the rational level is only effective when we ourselves can recognize what is legitimate in the appeal of religious and spiritual concerns and how they can provide a language that runs counter to the selfishness and materialism of the competitive marketplace. And that's why, ultimately, a spiritual/religious left is going to be the most effective force for progressive social change both in the U.S. and in Israel. But such a religious left cannot emerge as long as the secular left continues its religio-phobia and refuses to do anything more than sneer contemptuously at the majority of citizens in both countries who take their religious traditions seriously and feel pushed away by the elitism of the anti-religious Left and its implicit message that anyone who believes in God or is spiritual must be on a lower level of intellectual or psychological development. We are creating a network of spiritual progressives, and holding a national conference on spiritual activism in Washington, D.C. May 17-20, 2006. It's an interfaith gathering and it's not just for people who believe in God or a supreme being, but for anyone including atheists or secular people who have a spiritual dimension and an understanding of the necessity of creating a Left that incorporates that sensitivity. For more info click here. The conference in D.C. will include presentations from people as diverse as progressive Evangelical Jim Wallis, Arun Gandhi (grandson of Mahatma Gandhi), Robert Edgar (Gen. Sec. of the National Council of Churches), Rabbi Michael Lerner, Cornel West, Sister Joan Chittister, Evangelical preacher and authors Tony Campolo and Glenn Harold Stassen, Jim Winkler (General Secretary of the Board of Church and Society of the United Methodists), Rev. Osagyefu Sekour (chair, Çlergy and Laity Concerned about Iraq), Rabbi Arthur Waskow, Rev. Joan Brown Campbell, Rev. Paul Sherry (former national chair, United Church of Christ), Janet Chisholm (Episcopal Peace Fellowship), Marie Denis (head of Maryknoll Office of Public Concerns and Vice President, Pax Christi), Abudl Aziz Said, Christopher Hedges (author of War is a Force that Gives us Meaning), David Beckmann (chair, Bread for the World), William Sinkford (national president of the Unitarian Universalist Association), Harry Knox (Human Rights Campaign), Robert Thurman (chair, dept. of religion, Columbia U and chair, Tibet House), Rev. Penny Nixon (senior pastor of Metropolitan Church, S.F.), Bernie Glassman (Zen Peacemakers), Sheikh Kabir Helminski (Sufi mystic), Rabbi Debora Kohn, Rabbi Brian Walt (chair, Rabbis for Human Rights), Cindy Sheehan (mother of US soldier killed in Iraq), and Congresswoman Lynne Woolsey (chair, Progressive Caucus of the U.S. House of Representatives). Wednesday Here's a question from one of our readers: Iran's president has called to wipe Israel off the map while his country tries to obtain nuclear weapons. Hamas, a brutal terrorist organization that refuses to recognize Israel, will soon come to power in "Palestine" and international bodies like the UN and the Red Cross continue to systematically discriminate against the Jewish State of Israel. At a time when there is so much hatred for Israel in the world, and so many people working to destroy Israel, why does a Jew like yourself continue to vehemently criticize Israel and insist that the "occupation" is the main problem? What value does this criticism have coming from the Diaspora? Don't we desperately need defenders and not accusers? Eric Danis There is only one path to security for the United States and one path for Israel: to build a reputation as the most generous and caring force which shares its well-being with others. The path of "power over" as a path to security has been tested over and over again for the past 5000 years, and it has failed to create peace or security. The idea that Israel could get security by occupying the people of Palestine is as whacky as the idea that the U.S. could achieve security by occupying the people of Vietnam or Iraq. It never works. It's only a matter of time before a new generation of Israelis will grow up and recognize the craziness of this path, but because I am emotionally, morally and spiritually attached to the well-being of the Jewish people, I can't wait for that to happen and meanwhile allow those traumatized by fear to risk the lives of so many Jews. Of course, just as we who opposed U.S. policy in Vietnam were accused of being against the U.S. (when we actually were the force that finally saved thousands of Americans from getting killed in what would in any event have eventually been a withdrawal), so those of us who are doing everything we can to get Israel to change its policies are accused of various forms of disloyalty. In my own case, it would have been far more opportunistic to make some weak pro-peace statements, and then to have stayed out of the battle of ideas. Tikkun magazine would have retained its funding and I would have positioned myself as a moderate pro-peace liberal. But I love my people too much to have taken that more respectable path, and instead have been shouting about the suffering of my people that has been engendered by the crazy policies of the Israeli and American Jewish leadership. Poster Comment: The latest in globalist trangulation. IMO. "New Bottom Line" indeed... which leaves the principle of intervention untouched.
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