By
Rabbi Michael Lerner
Editor, TIKKUN Magazine
There
is never any justification for
acts of terror against innocent civilians--not
in Israel and not in the U.S.--it is the quintessential act of dehumanization
and not recognizing the sanctity of others, and a visible symbol of a world
increasingly irrational
and out of control.
It's understandable why many of us, after grieving and consoling the mourners,
feel anger. Unfortunately, demagogues in the White House and Congress have manipulated
our legitimate outrage and channeled it into a new militarism and a revival of
the deepest held belief of the conservative world-view: that the world is mostly
a dangerous place and our lives must be based around protecting ourselves from
the threatening others. In this case, terrorism provides a perfect base for this
worldview--it can come from anywhere, we don't really know who is the enemy, and
so everyone can be suspect and everyone can be a target of our fear-induced
rage. With this as a foundation, the Bush team has been able to turn this
terrible and outrageous attack into a justification for massive military
spending, a new war and the inevitable trappings: repression of civil liberties,
denigration of "evil others," and a new climate of fear and
intimidation against anyone who doesn't join this misuse of patriotism toward
distorted ends.
Of course, the people who did
this attack are evil and they are a real threat to the human race.
If they could, they would use nuclear weapons or chemical/biological weapons.
The perpetrators deserve to be punished, and I personally would be happy if all
the people involved in this act were to be imprisoned for the rest of their
lives. But that is quite different from talk about "eliminating
countries" which we heard from Colin Powell in the days after the attack.
Punishing the perpetrators is different from making war against whole
populations.
The narrow focus on the perpetrators allows us to avoid dealing with the
underlying issues. When violence becomes so prevalent throughout the planet,
it's too easy to simply talk of
"Deranged
minds." We need to ask ourselves, "What is it in the way that we are
living, organizing our societies, and treating each other that makes violence
seem plausible to so many people?" And why is it that our immediate
response to violence is to use violence ourselves--thus reinforcing the cycle of
violence in the world?
We in the spiritual world will see the root problem here as a growing
global incapacity to
recognize
the spirit of God in each other--what we call the sanctity of each human being.
But
even if you reject religious language, you can see that the willingness of
people to hurt each other
to
advance their own interests has become a global problem, and it’s only the
dramatic level of this particular attack, which distinguishes it from the
violence and insensitivity to each other that is part of our daily lives.
We may tell ourselves that the current violence has "nothing to do"
with the way that we've learned to close our ears when told that one out
of every three people on this
planet does not have enough food, and
that one billion are literally
starving. We may reassure ourselves that the hoarding of the world's resources
by the richest society in
world history, and our frantic attempts to accelerate globalization with its
attendant inequalities of wealth, has nothing to do with the
resentment that others feel
toward us. We may tell ourselves that the
suffering of refugees and the
oppressed have nothing to do with us--that that's a different story that is
going on somewhere else. But we
live in one world, increasingly interconnected with everyone,
and the forces that lead people
to feel outrage; anger and desperation
eventually impact on our own daily lives.
The same inability to feel the pain of others
is the pathology that shapes the
minds of these terrorists. Raise children in
circumstances where no one is
there to take care of them, or where
they must live by begging or
selling their bodies in prostitution,
put them in refugee camps and
tell them that that they have "no right of return" to their homes,
treat them as though they are less valuable and deserving of respect because
they are part of some despised national or ethnic group, surround them with a
media that extols the rich and makes everyone who is not economically successful
and physically trim and
conventionally "beautiful" feel bad about
themselves, offer them jobs whose sole goal is to enrich the "bottom
line" of someone else, and
teach them that "looking out for number
one" is the only thing
anyone "really" cares about and that anyone
who believes in love and social
justice are merely naive idealists
who are destined to always
remain powerless, and you will produce a
world-wide population of people
feeling depressed, angry, unable to care about others, and in
various ways dysfunctional.
I see this in Israel, where Israelis have taken to dismissing the entire
Palestinian people as "terrorists" but never ask themselves:
"What have we done to make this seem to Palestinians to be a reasonable
path of action today." Of course there were always some hateful people and
some religious fundamentalists who want to act in hurtful ways against Israel,
no matter what the circumstances. Yet, in the situation of 1993-96 when Israel
under Yitzhak Rabin was pursuing a path of negotiations and peace, the
fundamentalists had little following and there were few acts of violence. On the
other hand, when Israel failed to withdraw from the West Bank, and instead
expanded the number of its settlers, the fundamentalists and haters had a far
easier time convincing many decent Palestinians that there might be no other
alternative.
Similarly, if the U.S. turns its back on global agreements to preserve the
environment, unilaterally cancels its treaties to not build a missile defense,
accelerates the processes by which a global economy has made some people in the
third world richer but many poorer, shows that it cares nothing for the fate of
refugees who have been homeless for decades, and otherwise turns its back on
ethical norms, it becomes far easier for the haters and the fundamentalists to
recruit people who are willing to kill themselves in strikes against what they
perceive to be an evil American empire represented by the Pentagon and the World
Trade Center.
Most Americans will feel puzzled by
any reference to this
"larger picture." It seems baffling to imagine that somehow we are
part of a world system, which is
slowly destroying the life support system of the planet, and quickly
transferring the wealth of the world into our own pockets.
We don't feel personally responsible
when an American corporation
runs a sweatshop in the Philippines or crushes efforts of workers to organize in
Singapore. We don't see ourselves
implicated when the U.S. refuses to consider the plight of Palestinian refugees
or uses the excuse of fighting drugs to support repression in Colombia or other
parts of Central America. We don't
even see the symbolism when
terrorists attack America's military center and our trade center--we talk of
them as buildings, though others
see them as centers of the forces that are causing the world
so much pain.
We have narrowed our own attention to "getting through" or "doing
well" in our own personal lives, and who has time to focus on all the rest
of this? Most of us are leading perfectly reasonable lives within the options
that we have available to us--so why should
others be angry with us, much
less strike out against us? And the truth
is, our anger is also
understandable: the striking out by others in acts of terror against us is just
as irrational as the world-system that it seeks to confront. Yet our acts of
counter-terror will also be counter-productive. We
should have learned from the
current phase of the Israel-Palestinian struggle, responding
to terror with more violence,
rather than asking ourselves what we could do to change the conditions that
generated it in the first place,
will only ensure more violence against us in the future.
Luckily, most people don't act out in violent ways--they tend to act out more
against themselves, drowning themselves
in alcohol or drugs or personal despair. Others turn toward fundamentalist
religions or ultra-nationalist extremism. Still others find themselves acting
out against people that they love,
acting angry or hurtful toward
children or relationship partners.
This is a world out of touch with itself, filled with people who have forgotten
how to recognize and respond to the sacred in each other because we are so used
to looking at others from the standpoint of what they can do for
us, how we can use them toward
our own ends. The alternatives are stark: either start caring about the
fate of everyone on this planet
or be prepared for a slippery slope toward violence that will eventually
dominate our
daily lives.
None of this should be read as somehow mitigating our anger at the terrorists.
Let's not be naïve about the perpetrators of this terror. The brains and money
behind this operation isn't a group of refugees living penniless in Palestinian
refugee camps. Many of the core terrorists are evil people, as are some of the
fundamentalists and ultra-nationalists who demean and are willing to destroy
others. But these evil people are often marginalized when societal dynamics are
moving toward peace and hope (e.g. in Israel while Yitzhak Rabin was Prime
Minister) and they become much more influential and able to recruit people to
give their lives to their cause when ordinary and otherwise decent people
despair of peace and justice (as when Israel from `1996 to 2000 dramatically
increased the number of settlers).
So
here is what would marginalize those who hate the United States. Imagine if the
Bin Ladins and other haters of the world had to recruit people against America
at a time when:
1. America was using its economic resources to end world hunger and redistribute
the wealth of the planet so that everyone had enough.
2. America was the leading voice championing an ethos of generosity and caring
for others-leading the world in ecological responsibility, social justice,
open-hearted treatment of minorities, and rewarding people and corporations for
social responsibility.
3. America was restructuring its own internal life so that all social practices
and institutions were being judged "productive or efficient or
rational" not only because they maximized profit, but also to the extent
that they maximized love and caring, ethical/spiritual/ecological sensitivity,
and an approach to the universe based on awe and wonder at the grandeur of
creation (what I call an Emancipatory Spirituality).
We
are trying to develop this kind of "New Bottom Line" in Tikkun.
To build support for this approach we are now starting what we call "The
TIKKUN COMMUNITY"--both as a vehicle to raise money for the magazine, and
as a way of taking some steps to acknowledge the reality that we have been
functioning not only as a magazine, but as a kind of movement. The TIKKUN
COMMUNITY will be a cadre of people who agree with certain basic principles. The
founding statement can be found in this very issue of TIKKUN magazine (Nov.-Dec,
2001) and on our website. We hope you'll join us. If you want to, contact me at
RabbiLerner@tikkun.org.
Think
it's naive and impossible to move American in that direction? Well, here are two
reasons why, even if it's a long shot, it's an approach that deserves your
support:
a. It's even more naïve to imagine that bombings, missile defense systems,
more spies or baggage searches can stop people willing to lose their lives to
wreak havoc and capable of airplane hijacking, chemical assaults (like anthrax),
etc.
b. The response of people to the World Trade Building collapse was an
outpouring of loving energy and generosity, sometimes even risking their own
lives, and showing the capacity and desire we all have to care about each other.
If we could legitimate people allowing that part of themselves to come out,
without having to wait for a disaster, we could empower a part of every human
being, which our social order marginalizes. Americans have a deep goodness-and
that needs to be affirmed.
Indeed,
the goodness that poured forth from so many Americans should not be allowed to
be overshadowed by the subsequent
shift toward militarism and anger. That same caring energy could have been given
a more positive outlet--if we didn't live in a society which normally teaches us
that our "natural" instinct is toward aggression and that the best we
can hope for is a world which gives us protection.
The central struggle going on in the world today is this one: between hope and
fear, love or paranoia, generosity or trying to shore up one's own portion. In
my book Spirit Matters I show why there is no possibility in sustaining a world
built on fear. Our only hope is to revert to a consciousness of generosity and
love. That's not to go to a lalla-land where there are no forces like those who
destroyed the Word Trade Center. But it is to refuse to allow that to become the
shaping paradigm of the 21st century. Much better to make the shaping paradigm
the story of the police and firemen who risked (and in many cases lost) their
lives in order to save other human beings who they didn't even know. Let the
paradigm be the generosity and kindness of people when they are given a social
sanction to be caring instead of self-protective. We cannot let war; hatred and
fear become the power in this new century that it was in the last century.
And it's up to us. We can't expect the Left to be able to organize a successful
movement, because they will define it in the most narrow terms. They will talk
about the rights of the oppressed and make everyone believe that they don't
really care about the terrible loss of life and the terrible fear that everyone
now how to endure about our own safety. Their justified anger at the way
capitalist globalization has hurt people around the world will make them play
down the outrageousness of this particular attack--and hence be disconnected to
the righteous indignation that most the rest of us feel. Rather, we need a
movement that puts forward a positive vision of a world based on caring--and a
commitment to rectify the injustices that the globalization of selfishness has
wreaked on the world--while simultaneously making it clear that we have no
tolerance for reckless acts of violence and terror such as those which Israel
has had to experience this past year or those which the U.S. faced in September.
It's only with that balanced view that we can say that it is a huge mistake to
make war or violence the primary way we respond to this situation. It's about
time we began to say unequivocally that violence doesn't work--not as an end and
not as a means. The best defense is a world drenched in love, not a world
drenched in armaments.
We should pray for the victims and the families of those who
have been hurt or murdered in
these crazy acts. We should also
pray that America does not
return to "business as usual," but rather turns to a period of reflection,
coming back into touch with our common humanity, asking ourselves how our
institutions can best embody our highest values. We may need a global day of
atonement and repentance dedicated to finding a way to turn the direction of our
society at every level, a return
to the notion that
every human life is sacred, that "the bottom line" should be the
creation of a world of love and caring, and that the best way to prevent these
kinds of acts is not to turn ourselves into a police
state, but turn ourselves into a
society in which social justice, love, and compassion are so prevalent that
violence becomes only a
distant memory.
--Rabbi Michael Lerner is editor of TIKKUN Magazine
and rabbi of Beyt Tikkun
Synagogue in San Francisco. He is the author
of Spirit Matters: Global
Healing and the Wisdom of the Soul
and most recently (Sept 2001)
editor: Best Contemporary Jewish Writing
RabbiLerner@tikkun.org
P.S. Because TIKKUN Magazine has taken the stance that Palestinians
are equally precious to God as Jews; we've lost much financial backing and
support. We very much need your help. Would you please please please subscribe
to TIKKUN ($29) or make a tax-deductible contribution? TIKKUN, 2107 Van
Ness ave, Suite 302, S.F., Ca. 94109.
You
can do it by credit card at www.tikkun.org or subscribe@tikkun.org. If you
wish to receive more email analyses from me, write "Yes, Keep Sending” in
the "subject" box, and send it to my email address RabbiLerner@tikkun.org