About Tikkun

Biographical Notes on Rabbi Lerner

By Tikkun | February 17, 2011

Rabbi Lerner, author of a national bestseller, The Left Hand of God: Taking Our Country Back from the Religious Right (Harper San Francisco, 2006) is not only rabbi of Beyt Tikkun but is also the editor of Tikkun. To contact Rabbi Lerner, send an email to RabbiLerner.tikkun@gmail.com

Tikkun is one of the most respected intellectual/cultural magazines in the Jewish world, but also one of the most controversial because of its stand in favor of the rights of Palestinians, which on the one hand locates Lerner in the minds of many as the leader and most prominent spokesperson in the U.S. of Jewish supporters of the Israeli peace movement, and on the other hand, because of his stand critiquing the anti-religious and anti-spiritual biases of the secular Left, insisting that they need to address the spiritual hunger of Americans as equally important to their material needs (he calls this a hunger for “meaning” and says that for many Americans the desire to transcend the individualism and selfishness of the competitive marketplace and connect their lives to higher meaning is as important as any interest in money or things, and that one reason why people who might on purely economic grounds be supporting the liberal and progressive social change movements actually end up supporting the Right is that the Left doesn’t have a “politics of meaning”). Rabbi Lerner’s book Jewish Renewal: A Path to Healing and Transformation (published by Putnam in 1994 in hardback, and by HarperCollins in paperback in 1995, was described by David Biale, the chair of Jewish Studies at University of California at Davis, as “A major contribution to modern Jewish thought, a contribution that is a challenge to intellectuals even as it is accessible to a broad general audience.” David Kraemer, professor of Talmud and Rabbinics at the Jewish Theological Seminary, said that this book is “a sophisticated and intellectually challenging reinterpretation of Jewish tradition. With a rigor that has rarely been equaled, Lerner shows what a liberal Jewish theology must be in the late 20th century. No one who cares about a committed ethical Judaism can afford to ignore this book.” Michael Paley, chaplain of Columbia University (at the time, and now director of Outreach for the UJA/Federation in New York) wrote that: “Michael Lerner is America’s preeminent liberal Jewish intellectual.