Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/category/politics__society/page/71/)
History shows that those who gain power tend to recreate structures that work for some and not for others. If, by some miracle, those who resonate with the Tikkun worldview gain sufficient power to have influence on a large scale, I want us to be able to address the pressing issues we are decrying without forcing others, including those who are now in positions of power, to accept our solutions.
Reliance on science and technology to solve human dilemmas does not lead to peace. And the threats of nuclear annihilation and war certainly give anyone adequate reasons for fear. The modern world does little to remind us of our humanity.
How much are we motivated by a natural partiality for our own suffering? And how much by willful blindness and moral laziness? And finally, where do we draw the hard lines of rejecting injustice, no matter how traumatic the source?
Students in my classes, ever more discouraged during the 1990s and then again after 9/11, took heart at the antiwar sentiment in 2003 (Tony Kushner, Woody Harrelson, and Howard Zinn were among our speakers in that extended moment prior to Shock, Awe and calculated devastation) and then lost it again, regained it during the Immigrant Rights march of 2006 and once more at the Obama presidential campaign, and have been struggling to regain their ground ever since. Jewish students were naturally active in all these movements, while Jewish organizations as such were most frequently on the wrong sides of the issues.
Many opponents of “Obamacare” (the recent health insurance policy reform legislation) value providing health care to all who need it and want a future in which such care is unproblematic. But they have been misled into believing that their freedom and empowerment resides in free markets and that the government is Big Brother and something to fear.
As I wrote here long ago in a piece called “What Moves in a Movement” — and as we’ve in different ways emphasized throughout the twenty-five years of existence that we are commemorating in this issue — a social movement can only emerge and gather steam as a social force if it acquires the density of authentic mutual recognition, if through our participation in it we gain a new sense of our social worth, power, and authority in our very collective being.
Since 1972, the Right has set out to build a well-financed, interlocking, loosely coordinated set of institutions that promote their message, train their cadres, and support their public representatives with money and ideas. Similarly, the Left needs interpretive institutions that can creatively link people’s real interests — their needs for economic security, meaning, recognition, agency, and connectedness — with a broader political program.
While barriers to understanding and implementing human rights are the biggest challenge facing the community from within, particularly in the international context, from without, Islamophobia is a huge problem. The Danish cartoon controversy is a prominent case in which there was a marked failure of communication.
For someone who interprets the course of events from a Christian realist perspective, the prospects for healing and repairing the world appear less than promising. That defines the position I happen to occupy. Although my admiration for those who insist otherwise knows no bounds, I find myself unable to enlist under their banner: over the course of many centuries, evil has proven to be too persistent; humankind’s penchant for folly too great; the allure of mammon too insidious; and power in all its variegated forms too corrupting.
Genital mutilations of girls and women are still condoned by custom and religion in parts of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, as are so-called honor killings. The World Health Organization reports that a huge proportion of women worldwide have been physically abused by an intimate partner and that rape is still endemic.
For those of us who have, for many years, understood and struggled for tikkun olam, this question of meaning is the real and defining focus of the crisis of education. It calls into question the misguided concern for standardized testing, with its emphasis on uniformity, competition, and invidious comparison as the criteria of “effective learning.”
What are some of the other attributes of a superpower? Once again, they might very well mirror those of a person. These would include a demonstrable commitment to truth, justice, peace, freedom, humility, human rights, generosity, and the upholding of other moral values.
In 1957, my parents and several other families helped the first African American family move into Levittown, Pennsylvania. That post-war suburb had been previously all white because the developer, William Levitt, a rabbi’s grandson, refused to sell houses to blacks.
Utopian as it may sound, I believe that the hope for significant reform in the United States as a whole must also create a strong civil society in which the competing demands of faith and reason have somehow been reconciled.
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.