Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/category/archive/2011/26-1-winter-2011/page/5/)
Unfortunately, the response of the progressive community to Obama’s politics is equally troubling. While appearing more willing to take on the Right, many progressive commentators come off as presumptuous. It’s too easy to tell someone else how to use their power rather than work to develop our own, which I suspect reflects mismanaged emotions.
It was the culminating act of tikkun olam, repairing the world, in my twenty-five years in the rabbinate. Not because our world changed forever; Camden remains the poorest city in the country. But we had moved a mountain. We had shown what was possible. We restored hope.
It isn’t enough to assert that dry goes with dry and wet goes with wet. What happens when life is more complex than our sorrow and our fear might suggest? What about when something that once worked becomes broken in the course of its use?
A progressive movement that is explicitly concerned with fostering an awe-based consciousness will be far more likely to be perceived as understanding one of the most basic needs of contemporary humanity than will a social change movement that appears blind to that concern.
Having long decried the violent means that some Palestinians have used to call attention to their plight, we in the American Jewish community cannot now turn our backs on a Palestinian movement that uses nonviolence to work for peace. We must do everything in our power to proclaim our solidarity with them.
Here I tell you what little I know. I have studied Jesus and preached Jesus and misunderstood Jesus and re-understood Jesus. I have demythologized Jesus and applied “critical theory” to his words.
You have to engage with people where they are — not where you want them to end up.
From the best of the world’s spiritual and social traditions and from contemporary creativity, we need to develop our tool kits and to organize curricula and training programs to support our ongoing learning and evolution, doing so even in the very midst of action.
My own work has been a long, long attempt to answer two questions: First, “If you don’t like corporate capitalism and you don’t like state socialism, what do you want?” Second, “And how can we get from here to there?”
First, they acknowledged that Christianity alone does not have the resources to resolve these problems and recognized that other religions, having deeply reflected on the question of greed over the centuries, have significant wisdom to offer. I want to push a bit further and suggest that religious communities cannot afford to do our work for peace in isolation from each other anymore.
2. Don’t let fear stop you. Name it, address it — take whatever physical and/or emotional steps are necessary — and keep going.
The Jewish people is both world-weary and world-loving, contains within it racists and humanists, Jews by birth and by choice, converted and unconverted, secularists and fundamentalists, first-language Jews and third-language Jews, Jews by marriage, by thought, by inclination, and even Jews by hate who valorize violence against demonic enemies (God help them), those who flee Jewish destiny, and those who embrace it as privilege, and so on and on.
The loftiest ideals, the most far-reaching agenda, the best rhetoric — all are for naught if pursued in a spirit of ego enhancement, judgment, and ideological zeal. Exhibit A: Communism. Exhibit B: the Catholic Church throughout its history, as well as current forms of fundamentalist Christianity and Islam.
The need to evolve human consciousness enough to inspire a fundamental shift in global priorities at this historic juncture is urgent. Thus, it is no longer adequate for spiritual progressives to simply write and talk about elevating consciousness or promoting healing and transformation; we must engage in such healing ourselves.
One of the major turning points in my political education was hearing Michael Harrington, the socialist organizer and author of The Other America (1962), the influential book about poverty in America, who spoke at my temple when I was in high school. I agreed with everything he said and thought to myself, “If he’s a radical, so am I.”