Michael Lerner: April 2009 Archives

When representatives of many Arab and Muslim nations publicly applaud Ahmadinejad's racist rant, the real losers are the Palestinians.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's speech at the Durban II conference on racism turned into a racist rant against Israel and the Jewish people. The conference, intended to give the people of the world an opportunity to challenge racism, lost all credibility when many in attendance applauded Ahmadinejad's claim that the Jewish people used the Holocaust as a pretext to take over and dominate the people of Palestine. Ahmadinejad, you'll recall, won global attention when he became the first leader of a UN country to call for the wiping out of another UN country (though he later claimed he was only calling for regime change), and for denying the very existence of the Holocaust.

Ahmadinejad's tirade makes quite a bit more sense in the context of domestic Iranian politics. Playing to anti-Semitism and anti-Western attitudes may be his only hope as he runs for re-election, given his failure to deliver on the promise to end poverty and powerlessness that he made during the last campaign. What makes less sense is why some of his fellow Muslims have not denounced this anti-Semitism more vigorously. The media accounts really don't give you the full sense of it. Ahmadinejad describes the history of the past century as though the Zionists were running the world and the imperialist countries were merely extensions of the Zionist project. Thus he ascribes to the Jewish people a power that exceeds that of all other forces on the planet. This reading, of course, has no way to explain how such a powerful group could end up getting murdered in their millions and why they were unable to get the Allied countries to intervene sooner against Hitler, or to bomb the concentration camps, or to impose an entirely Jewish state in Palestine. It is a reading of history that only sounds plausible to those who have no knowledge of the history of the twentieth century, but that, as it turns out, is the majority of the people of the world. So the story he tells, while seeming nothing less than paranoid insanity to those who are familiar with the facts, is precisely the kind of distorted reading that made it possible for Hitler to gain a following by claiming that all of Germany's problems came from the Jews, the communists, the gypsies and the homosexuals. Needless to say, communist, gypsies, and homosexuals are also in grave danger in Iran, though the primary public target of hatred is "the Zionist state." Today, Holocaust Memorial Day, we at Tikkun want to acknowledge that this kind of thinking is worthy of public challenge by all reasonable people on the planet, just as we at Tikkun challenge every other form of hate-mongering, including those forms that appear at times in sectors of the Jewish world. And we invite our Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, humanist, atheist, and all other brothers and sisters to join us in challenging this poison.

The creation of the State of Israel was a product of a Jewish nationalist movement that arose at the end of the nineteenth century and sought to provide protection for Jews who were treated as second-class citizens in both Christian Europe and Muslim countries for many hundreds of years. The desire for a safe haven made perfect sense, though the antagonism that they encountered from many Palestinians made perfect sense as well given the previous history of Western colonialism and Christian crusades.

Palestinians saw the Jews as an invading force that would uproot their own Arab society. Yet most Jews coming to Palestine were fleeing oppression, and simply could not understand how Palestinians would view them as agents of a Christian West that had been murdering Jews as "Christ killers" for at least 1,500 years. The mutual misunderstandings were predictable, though not inevitable, and both sides bear considerable responsibility for not reaching out in a more generous way toward the other. In the end, each party's insensitivity strengthened those elements on the other side that were most fearful for their existence (I've told this story in more detail in my book Healing Israel/Palestine, North Atlantic Books, 2003).

The failure of most countries of the world to open their doors to Jews seeking to escape Nazi persecution -- and then the resolute opposition of the Palestinian movement to allowing Jewish refugees from coming to Palestine during and after the Holocaust -- set the stage for the first act of global affirmative action: the vote by the United Nations to create the State of Israel. Had the Palestinian people accepted the UN division of Palestine, the two states that Palestinians seek today would have already been in existence.

Without trying to tell the whole story, I do believe that Israel's current policies toward the Palestinian people in the West Bank and Gaza are cruel, repressive, and de facto racist. Many of us who support Israel's right to exist are strong critics of its current policies.

Yet one reason why the peace forces are unable to win majority support in Israel or among the Jewish people as a whole is that too many Arabs and Palestinians seek not a two-state solution but the total elimination of the State of Israel as a Jewish homeland.

Ahmadinejad, like Hamas, and like many other voices in the Arab and Islamic world, conflate legitimate criticism of Israel's policies with an assault on Israel's existence; an error which becomes even more outrageous when linked to a denial of the Holocaust or the anti-Semitism that led to the flight of some one million Jews from Arab countries between 1947 and 1967. When Prime Minister Netanyahu, Avigdor Lieberman, and other right-wing extremists are able to point to this irrational hatred of the Jewish people as the "real" underlying message of the critics of the Occupation, they stir up fears among Israelis that seem to be rationally founded, given the hatred being expressed.

All the more so when one witnesses the striking silence about the racism that led to the Hutu-Tutsi massacres, the destruction of Buddhism in Tibet by Chinese racism, the oppression of women and gays in many Muslim countries, and so on. By singling out Israel, Ahmadinejad proves the case for many Israelis that the critique is not simply a matter of rational opposition to oppressive policies, but rather a manifestation of the very hatred that makes it imperative for Jews to protect themselves by any means necessary.

For Ethically Sensitive Jews and our non-Jewish allies.

This text is not meant to be a replacement for but a supplement to the traditional Haggadah. Feel free to make copies of this to use at any seder you attend, or to transform this in ways that work best for you!

AS WE SIT AT THE SEDER TABLE:
    Seventy-eight percent of American Jews voted for Barack Obama in 2008, and a majority of non-Jewish Americans joined them. The message was clear: • end the war in Iraq and let our troops come home • end the war on the poor and the environment • stop favoring the rich and corporate interests.
    Our Seder celebrates the first liberation struggle of our people, overcoming slavery and proclaiming to the world that the "way things are" is not the only way things can be. In the face of oppression, we proclaimed to the Pharoah's empire that there is a God (YHVH) who is the Force of Healing and Transformation in the world--the force that  makes possible the transformation from "what is" to "what ought to be."
    At our Seder tonight we celebrate the steps we've taken toward liberation. We look at where we are as a people and as human beings in our struggle to build a world of freedom and peace for all.
    We rejoice together at the election of an African American as President!
    But we are concerned about the outcome of the global meltdown of our economic and political system. We are now experiencing the results of decades of materialism and selfishness. Too many Americans closed their eyes to the suffering of those who have been living in poverty, even in the midst of American affluence. Now the suffering is spreading to the rest of us.
    The American economic system can create prosperity, but also cultivates greed, fraud, and a selfish "looking-out- for-number-one" mentality. This offends Jewish values, and has hurt our souls--even if we ignored these spiritual and psychic costs while the system was providing material goodies for many of us.
    The media, corporations, and their friends in government urged us to translate our spiritual and intimacy needs into consumption. This worked for some but produced alienation, loneliness, widespread emotional depression and a huge global anger at our society from others around the world. With individualism tearing down communities and teaching the ethos of "looking out for number one," some people even turned to various religious fundamentalisms as a way to resist the global ethos of capitalism. These fundamentalisms cannot be defeated by our insistence on the value of democracy and human rights--not unless we simultaneously recognize and address what has been appealing in these old-time religions: their insistence that there is a hunger for meaning and purpose in life that cannot be achieved by material accumulation or endless new technologies, and that people hunger for loving community and
connection to the mystery and majesty of the universe as much as for money or power or sexual conquests.
    We do not want a return to the economic arrangements of the past few decades. The false equation of "progress" with the accumulation of material goods and endless new technologies produced a global environmental crisis as an orgy of consumption destroyed much of the life support system of the planet. Only a fundamental transformation of the ethical and spiritual foundation of our economic and political order can save humanity and the planet in the 21st century. Developing this new vision is the task for spiritual progressives from every religious background.
    Many progressive Jews are finding the ethical and spiritual foundation for this transformation in the Jewish tradition. Jewish values support generosity, caring for others, and loving the stranger, while rejecting the extreme individualism, alienation and loneliness that accompanies the dominant ethos of American society.
    At our Seder tonight we challenge Western societies to adopt specific economic programs that flow from these Jewish values: • A National Bank that gives loans without charging interest • A legal system based on the "obligation to care" for each other, not just look out for "number one" • An economy that prescribes a sabbatical year for everyone (the same year--the whole society taking off one year to not produce, but instead to focus on what we as a human race want to accomplish in the next six years) • A Global Marshall Plan as an extension of the Torah's notion of a tithe • Single payer universal health care • Unrestricted immigration • Protection of workers' rights.
    Unfortunately, we as Jews also have to face a rather troubling reality. Within our own community these wonderful Jewish ethical values have too often been ignored. Too many prominent Jews have followed the narrow path of self interest.
    Similarly, Israel, which describes itself as "the State of the Jewish people," has failed to embody the highest values of the Jewish tradition in the way that it treats our brothers and sisters the Palestinians. The human rights violations and the slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza, the seizing of Arab lands, the imprisonment of thousands of Palestinians without trial and the revelations by Israeli soldiers themselves of acts of brutality in Gaza and the West Bank are not
isolated incidents. They are not the product of evil soldiers. They are the inevitable consequence of imposing and enforcing occupation.
    We are not Jews who reject Israel or think it is the worst human rights violator on the planet! The U.S. role in Iraq, the genocide in Darfur, the repression of Buddhism in Tibet, and the extremes of repression in Iran and several Arab states are moral outrages of equal or greater proportion. Nor do we excuse the human rights violations and terrorism perpetrated by Hamas. Every act of violence against civilians must be vehemently opposed.
    Tonight at our Seder table, and again on the High Holidays, we affirm that our special responsibility as Jews is to look critically at our own individual and communal behavior. It would be hypocritical to celebrate the freedom achieved from slavery while ignoring the ways that we as Americans and/or as Jews and/or as supporters of the state of Israel have been acting as Pharaoh to the Palestinian people.
    We must not let our long history as victims of oppression or our anger at God for not having saved us from the Holocaust become the foundation for adopting the religion of our enemies: the religion that says that we can only trust in our power, our army, our ability to wipe out our enemies. This false God, parading under the title of "being realistic," stands in stark contrast to the traditional voice of Jewish compassion, generosity, and caring for others. The whole point of surviving as Jews is to challenge that religion of violence and domination and affirm instead the possibility of a world ruled by the logic of love and generosity. When we were utterly degraded as slaves, we experienced God as the power that was there redeeming us into freedom and sacred service. Now it is we who are powerful, and when our Jewish community aligns with the use of power in heartless and cruel ways against another people we feel deep grief. Our Torah says: "When you come into your land, do not oppress the stranger. Remember that you were strangers in the land of Egypt." The Torah commands us positively: "Thou shalt love the stranger."
    We must use our Seder to begin a conversation about how to create a broad social movement for peace, justice, and ecological sanity. President Obama needs to hear from those who are not trapped in the "inside-the-beltway" logic that dominates the national media and our national political leadership. If we do not make fundamental changes in our economic system and in our approach to foreign policy, we may find ourselves in deeper despair this time
next year.
    Tonight at our Seder we will tell heroic stories of the past, but we must never imagine our past suffering gives us a moral pass to ignore the ethical distortions of the present moment. Our Seder must help us plan a way to transform the present. But we must do so with a strong dose of compassion, both for our own people and for the Palestinian people. We have co-created the current mess. We have both suffered from so much post-traumatic stress that sometimes people on both sides of this struggle fail to recognize the humanity of the other.
    As Jews, we must challenge our own people's distorted vision and blend that challenge with deep love and caring, not just chastisements.
    Americans of every faith can make a huge contribution to this process by challenging the dominant vision in the West about how to achieve "homeland security"--namely through domination and power over others. Our Torah, and almost every other major religious and spiritual tradition, teaches a different message: that security can best be achieved through generosity, caring for others, and love. This revolutionary message must be given teeth, which is why we at Tikkun Magazine and Beyt Tikkun Synagogue in the Bay Area have formed the interfaith Network of Spiritual Progressives and launched a campaign for a Global Marshall Plan that would have the U.S. and other advanced industrial societies dedicate between 2-5% of our Gross Domestic Product each year for the next twenty to once and for all end global poverty, homelessness, hunger, inadequate education, and inadequate health care, and to repair the global environment (details on this plan and on how to join us are at www.spiritualprogressives.org). Rather than attempt to rebuild an economic system that has been destroying the environment and encouraging an ethos of selfishness, our goal as spiritual progressives is to build a new global economy based on ancient spiritual values of love, kindness, generosity and caring equally for the well-being of everyone on the planet. That this kind of miracle can happen, that what everybody thought was impossible can suddenly become possible, because there is a power in the universe that is the power of love and transformation, this is what we experienced in Egypt and what we are seeking to enliven within ourselves by creating this Seder. We see that beyond the self, beyond family and country, we are part of the unfolding and evolution of consciousness in the universe, and we celebrate and recommit ourselves to that Force of Healing and Transformation.
    So let's now close our eyes. Can you see the universe and your place in it? Affirm now your role as partner with God in the healing and transformation of all that is. The Seder can also be a time to do "tikkun" (to heal and transform
parts of ourselves and our society).