The Order of Bards Ovates and Druids

HEALING AFTER TERROR
by Rabbi Michael Lerner, Editor,

Our mourning for the victims of September 11 will go on for a long time. The shock, the horror, the grief, the anger, the sadness have not abated. We're all somewhat scared, and we should be. We are not used to being this vulnerable.

So it was with great upset that we realized that, while we were still grieving and consoling the mourners, the Bush administration and a host of right-wing ideologues had managed to manipulate Americans' legitimate outrage and channeled it into a revival of the deepest held belief of the conservative worldview: that the world is mostly a dangerous place and that our lives must be based around protecting ourselves from threatening "others." In this case, terrorism provides a perfect base for this worldviewit can come from anywhere, we don't really know who the enemy is, and so everyone can be suspect and everyone can be a target of our fear-induced rage. With this as a guiding principle, television network news has obediently complied with requests to censor the statements that might reveal the thinking of the enemy, and liberal Democrats have jumped to show their patriotism by voting for wild escalations in defense spending and for laws that limit Constitutional freedoms.

The central struggle of the post September 11th period is this: Will we see the world through the prism of the terrorists? Or will we see it through the prism of goodness and generosity demonstrated by the firemen, police, and citizens who risked (and in many cases lost) their lives to save others? It is a battle of fear versus hope. If fear wins, the world will revert to an endless battleground of all against all. We will find ourselves surrounded by people who feel that we must constantly defend ourselves from the dangers lurking at every turnand this will become self-fulfilling true. Or we can acknowledge the shadow elements in the world and in ourselves, guard ourselves from danger to the degree that we are able by taking sensible precautions and police actions, but consciously choose to focus our energies on building trust, love, and goodness in the world. And that path will itself be self-fulfilling: the more generosity and open-heartedness we show to the rest of the world, the more it will be reciprocated by others and the safer we will be. The greatest security will not come through armies or counter violence, not through revenge or hatred, but through building a world of love and open-heartedness, a world in which the recognition of the sanctity of everyone on the planet shapes every economic, political, and social institution. We choose hope over fear not only because it is more consistent with who we really are as embodiments of the sacred, but also because it is the path that will lead to greatest security. .

We don't hide from ourselves that the people who perpetrated the evil deeds of September 11 are a real threat to the human race. The perpetrators deserve to be punished, and I personally would be happy if all the people involved in planning and providing logistical support for this atrocity were to be imprisoned for the rest of their lives. It's also true that the Taliban have been oppressing their own people and conducting a campaign of abuse against women that justifies international intervention.

But intervention could have happened in a very different way: the United States could have given its evidence against Bin Laden to the UN Security Council and announced a willingness to wait six weeks to allow that world body. to issue an indictment and to assemble an international police force to arrest these criminals and bring them before an international tribunal. In so doing, we would at least have validated a notion that was supposed to have been established 2,500 years ago: That the family of the victim of violence doesn't act on its own as avengers of the violence, but instead goes to a larger community, presents its evidence, allows the other side to defend itself, and then accepts the judgment of the larger community.

If the UN became paralyzed by internal politics and did not act, we could have used that time to assemble our own military force and then acted on our own. (We might note that the reason this process doesn't exist is because the United States has opposed the creation of an international court).

What we don't need are new cycles of violence. We should learn from Israel's mistakes and not follow its disastrous path. When faced with a handful of Islamic terrorists, Israel has retaliated by sieges, border closings, and other punishments of the entire Palestinian peoplethereby succeeding in generating greater support for the terrorists and giving Palestinians little grounds to hope that their legitimate desires might be acknowledged and addressed. President Bush deserves our praise for having avoided the path of singling out an entire people for punishment; as of this writing in late October, 2001 he has attempted to show that the United States is not condemning all Muslims or targeting all Afghanis. In fact, spurred by the need to keep Islamic forces supporting our war, Bush shows some signs of being willing to give Israel the "tough love" it needs (namely, forcing it to recognize a Palestinian state and end the Occupation), though probably in a form far too weak to actually work and resolve the conflict. Still, the bombing of Afghanistan threatens to provoke a new cycle of violence.

Since September 11 we've been facing a genuine emergency. And it is always in emergency situations that we discover what we really believe in and what our ideals amount to in practice.

So let us reaffirm some basics:

€ We are the inheritors of the love of the universe which has provided us with a magnificent habitat as part of the living system of planet earth. We are inheritors of the goodness of the human race which has passed on its intelligence, wisdom, languages, technologies, science, literature, poetry, and music from generation to generation for thousands of years. We recognize ourselves as mutually interdependent with all the generations that have gone before and with the six billion human beings currently alive, and as stewards of our planet and our culture which we hope to pass along to future generations. We see in other human beings the reflection of the Sacred, and we recognize that our own personal fulfillment as humans is inextricably bound up with the fulfillment of the needs and aspirations of all other human beings

€ We recognize that human beings have also been distorted by a history of pain and cruelty embedded in patriarchy and in class societies, manifesting in wars, violence, abuse, and oppression. But that history need not determine our future. We live at a moment when we can clearly envision and begin to build a world based on love and respect for others.

€ We know that building a different future requires us to live a different way in the present. The way to peace is a way of peace. The way to a world of love is a life in which we become more loving. A central step in this process is to recognize ourselves as part of the Unity of All Being, abandon our ego-driven fantasies of control and permanency, and acknowledge ourselves as a momentary manifestation of the evolving consciousness of the universe.

€ In every act that we do, we either affirm and strengthen the sanctity of human beings and bring God's presence in our lives more fully into focus, or we contribute to the de-sanctification of human life and the distancing from God/Spirit/Ultimate Being/Universal Love (or however you want to refer to the spiritual dimension of reality). We can't simply say, "Time out now for a war, but later we will build a society of love." What we do now inevitably shapes the world we will face later.

So, yes, we want to stop the Bin Ladens of the world. We reject the implications of some on the Left that somehow America deserved all this. The people in the World Trade Tower were innocent American civilians doing nothing wrong. We have to recognize terror as the quintessential act of de-sanctification and dehumanizationa violation of God's presence on this planet and an act that hurts each and every one of us. But the notion that once we wipe out Bin Laden and his Al Qaeda organization we will be "safe" or free from violence is a fantasy. It is always in emergency situations that we discover what we really believe in.

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 ourselvesthus reinforcing the cycle of violence in the world.

We in the spiritual world see the root problem as a growing global incapacity to recognize the spirit of God in each otherwhat 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 is 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 face malnutrition, homelessness, or other intense forms of material deprivation. 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 child prostitution and sweatshop conditions have nothing to do with us that these are different stories going on somewhere else.

Most Americans, like most people on the planet, are very decent and good hearted people. That's what makes it so difficult to open the conversation about the role of America in the world. Most Americans are genuinely befuddled when they hear that others around the world are angry at us. After all, we think, we've been generous to a fault, we've given foreign aid and charity, we've sent our troops to fight oppressive regimes, and we've paid high taxes to provide police services for a world that might otherwise be even more filled with violence. Why doesn't everyone appreciate us more?

Even when I personally got a few seconds on national TV in September to remind people that we are 5 percent of the world's population consuming 25 percent of the world's resources, the response was often something like this: "Well, others resent us because we are so successfuland that's their problem. It's not our fault that we are just better at being more productive than they are. And certainly no one has a right to take their resentment out on us for not being more charitable than we already are."

A central problem here is that most Americans have never been exposed to the notion that we live in one world system that is inextricably interconnected. Don't blame Americans that every inch of education we've received has encouraged us to think of ourselves as different, better, unique, special, and "not like them." It never occurs to many Americans that when we kidnapped tens of millions of Africans and used them to provide unpaid labor to create the infrastructure of American wealth that the ripping apart of African societies would have devastating consequences on the ability of those societies to function. Nothing in our schooling helps us understand that several hundred years of colonialism and imperialism were not done so that Western societies could educate the natives, but so that the West could enrich itself at the expense of the rest of the worldleaving behind poverty and local elites who would remain in power by virtue of continuing Western military assistance (for example, to the Saudi elites). Our college professors, newspaper editorialists, and television commentators have never sought to teach us about the way the United States sets conditions of trade so that Third World countries end up being further impoverished. Most Americans believe the lies drummed into their heads that corporate globalization is both unstoppable and good for everyone around the world. Liberal Democrats, dependent on electoral funding from large corporations and the wealthy, have cheered on globalization and never acknowledged that this process has accelerated the gap between the wealthy countries and the poor (for more on this read Antonio Juhasz in this issue of Tikkunor check out Jerry Mander's article in the September/October 2001 issue).

It's not that Americans are willfully deceiving themselves. Most Americans have never ever heard a serious presentation of our history and our current role in the world. Our media has induced a societal amnesia so that no one remembers the way our power was used to murder three million Vietnamese in the name of democratic values. No one remembers that our CIA participated in the violent overthrow of the democratically elected regimes in Iran and Chile, or that our military trained and supplied military elites who tortured their own populations in Argentina, Guatemala, El Salvador, Haiti, and dozens of other countries. Most Americans have no idea about any of this, and that's why they are so perplexed.

It's also why the angry tones of the Left make no sense and only alienate Americans. No oppression can ever justify killing 6,000 innocent civilians. The fact is that Americans have created a very decent society that deserves to be celebrated, not denigrated. For 220 years Americans have struggled against our own domestic elites, and have won major battles to limit the elements of oppression in this society. We've made major advances against the racism, sexism, and homophobia that have been used to divide us. We've managed to put some constraints on corporate arrogance enough so that the ruling elites of our society have to wait for moments like the Bin Laden attack to push back some of the civil liberties and respect for human rights that we've won. We haven't yet fully created a democratic society or offset the immense power of the wealthy, but we've taken significant steps to protect minimal rights of working people and the poor. There's a lot to be proud of in America and in the victories of ordinary Americans against arrogant elites. So when those elites call upon us to rally around their worldview (that no one could possibly have a legitimate reason to be angry at us) and call that "patriotism," it's our complicated task to support a different version of patriotismone which is proud of America's democratic values while simultaneously critical that we have not allowed those values to shape the way we run our corporations or our foreign policy. A similar complexity is needed in dealing with the rise of fundamentalism. As we've argued in Tikkun (and as I've stated in my book Spirit Matters: Global Healing and the Wisdom of the Soul), fundamentalism is in part a distorted response to a distorted world reality. Global capital is not only an economic system, it is a crusading worldview, a militant religion of its own engaged in a worldwide jihad which seeks to remake every social institution in its image. It frequently employs local elites to use violence to impose this new religion on their own people. The religion of world capitalism, like the religion of world communism, has its own "politically correct" ways of thinking and acting. The notion that individuals should always look out for themselves before anyone else, that its ok to hurt others to advance one's own interests because if we don't someone will do that to us, the notion that sexuality should be another legitimate article for consumption in the public marketplace and that corporations have a right to display near-naked sexily-posed skinny bodies on billboards to arouse us and sell their products, the notion that people who cannot find jobs and hence face malnutrition are "acceptable costs" for the glories of "modernization," the notion that every enterprise should be judged productive by how much profit it makesthese are elements of the "modernity" that we impose on others as part of their "playing ball" with the global economy.

In response, and using variously different religious vocabularies, Christian, Jewish, Hindu, and Islamic fundamentalists have declared various forms of jihad. If the warm and fuzzy communities to which many fundamentalists aspire to return had their own (sexist, homophobic, racist, anti-Semitic) distortions, they also had some valuable elements of human solidarity that really are being undermined by the dominant religion of materialism and selfishness. Much of the criticism of the one-dimensionality of Western secular society is in fact quite legitimate. Western culture is increasingly successful in shaping a world in its image, and its image is that of materialism, selfishness, reduction of human relations to a narrow utilitarian framework, transformation of nature into commodities, destruction of all that was good in small traditional communities, and a totally militant religion of secularism which aggressively promotes a mechanistic worldview and denies the validity of spiritual truth. Similarly, the critique of Israel and its policies toward the Palestinian people, cynically manipulated by Bin Laden and his cronies, is nevertheless basically legitimate. What is amazing is that even at this moment when the Middle East is exploding, there is no serious analysis of Israel's role. A unique combination of Jewish establishment power and Christian guilt (deserved) for the Holocaust has led to an amazing reality in America: there is no public discussion of the role Israel has played in generating the wild level of anger at the West from which the terrorists are able to recruit. Such a discussion would be totally proper, providing it were done in a way that made it perfectly apparent that anti-Semitism of any form is never, never, never appropriate or justified, and did not allow double standards (such as saying that Zionism is illegitimate because it is based on conquest without similarly noticing that virtually every Islamic country and most other countries also had their origins in conquest).

I am not saying we should attribute the responsibility of this attack to Israel. Truth is that much of the hatred of Israel is generated by its identification as an outpost of the ethos of global capitalism and Western secularism, the resistance to which is legitimate but unfairly directed against Israel and the Jews. The reason why many Jews are afraid of this discussion is that they assume it will devolve quickly into anti-Semitism, whereas we at Tikkun have much greater faith in the American public and believe that the real threat of anti-Semitism will come from Jews playing a role in suppressing rather than encouraging free speech and open debate about these kinds of issues.

So, yes, the world system which disproportionately benefits the United States is morally unacceptable. Yet the fundamentalist alternative is even more distorted. It creates a community of value but it simultaneously demeans some "other," identifying them as the embodiment of evil and worthy of destruction. Ego-driven and power-hungry clerics and self-deceiving holy men see their opportunity to shape the world by positioning themselves as the only alternative to the (quite real) degradation generated by capitalist globalization. The outrageous assaults by the Taliban against the freedoms of women are indicative of the hatefulness and repression that would become global realities were the fundamentalist forces allowed to triumph. Capitalist society proclaims itself the only possible antidote to fundamentalist distortions. It is tolerant of differences, willing to accept all different religions, an "open society" that has now been "forced" by the intolerance of the fundamentalists to engage in a war of self-defense. Yet we should not be surprised that those who witnessed the U.S. murder millions of Vietnamese, overthrow governments around the world, arm elites and train their soldiers so that they could suppress democratic movements, should question this "tolerance" and point out that it extends to people in the center of our world system (who live in the U.S.) but not to anyone else.

Most of the peoples of the world (including most people in Islamic countries) are caught between two powerfully distorted forcesthe corporate capitalist version of modernity and the reactionary religious fundamentalist version of community. Both alternatives are lousy. We urgently need a third pathwhat we call Emancipatory Spirituality or a Politics of Meaning. We need a path in politics that validates the deepest truths of the spiritual world, a path that affirms open-heartedness, insists we love not only our neighbor but also the stranger, and builds economic, social, and political institutions on that basis. The Emancipatory Spirituality Tikkun champions is based on a commitment both to social justice and spiritual truth, to a recognition that economic equality is necessary, and to a recognition that true healing of this planet requires us to see ourselves as part of the Unity of All Being and to be able to respond to each other and the universe with awe and wonder at the grandeur of creation. It is both about social change and about deep inner change.

This is the task of the Tikkun Communityto insist on a new kind of discourse that is neither waving the flag of "America can do no wrong" nor the flag of "our enemies are justified in attacking us." They are not!!! And yes, this is the most practical path for protecting ourselves. As the frenzy around anthrax-by-mail is demonstrating, no amount of bombing, no stationing of police on every corner, no suspension of civil liberties, nor any other strategy of repression can work in a world in which our biological, chemical, and technological sophistication allows people to act out in powerful new ways.

There will always be lone crazies and distorted people who will act outand that's why we still need a police force. But if we really want to protect ourselves we need to start now creating a world which no longer dehumanizes others, no longer tolerates oppression, no longer imagines that we can live our own private lives and find our own private solutions while closing our ears to the sufferings of others. There is only one unified world system today; in that sense, globalization has already ended the possibility of American security unless everyone on the planet is equally secure. Though there will still be Bin Ladens no matter what we do, they will have much greater trouble recruiting people willing to sacrifice their lives in anger against the world system sponsored by the United States if this country becomes widely known as:

a. The major power using its vast resources to eliminate global poverty, hunger, homelessness, and all forms of economic inequalities in the world (let's start by using the entire 1.4 trillion tax cut monies for the purpose of building an economic infrastructure for the poor of the world).

b. The major power using its resources to combat global warming and to make all global investments and finances in accord with the best interests of preserving the ecological sustainability of the planet.

c. The society that has required its own corporations to abide by a Social Responsibility Amendment (SRA) to the U.S. Constitution which mandates and rewards a new bottom line, so that institutions only have a right to operate if they can prove a history of social responsibility as measured by an Ethical Impact report

d. The society that is in its actual practices embodying an ethos of mutual caring and open-hearted generosity to the peoples of the world.

These are the kinds of changes that we need in America to provide lasting safety and security. This is a moment in which fundamental changes in the way we have organized our world are at least as practical and realistic as attempts to track down every potential terrorist. If we don't change the basic way we've structured our world it is naive and self-delusional to believe that we can protect ourselves from people driven crazy by a world so deeply out of touch with itself. A political leadership that is minimally responsible would be giving equal energy to these proposals at the very moment that it was attempting to extinguish this particular network of terrorists. Instead, our worst fantasies of the indistinguishability of Democrats and Republicans have been played out in front of our eyes. Except for a handful of courageous Congressional Democrats, members of both political parties are unwilling to move beyond the very language of dehumanization and violence which got us into this mess in the first place.

That's why we at Tikkun have decided that we need to begin the process of creating a third alternative based on spiritual insight and an ethos of love. We are starting what we call "The Tikkun Community" not only as a vehicle to support the magazine (though that is part of what is needed in order for this worldview to be heard) but to constitute a spiritual community of people who agree with our worldview and are willing to champion it in the public arena. The founding statement can be found in this very issue of Tikkun magazine http://www.tikkun.org (November/December 2001) and on our web site at www.tikkun.org . We hope you'll join us in trying to build a new kind of social change movement.

We act to honor the memory of the dead and wounded and to keep in public view the outpouring of loving energy and generosity that was shown by so many human beings who risked (and sometimes lost) their lives for others. That day they demonstrated to the world a deeply held secret: the desire we all have to care about each other. If we could legitimate that part of ourselves without having to wait for a disaster, we could empower a part of every human being which our social order marginalizes. The most immediate task of a healing movement in our society is to struggle against the tendency to see the world through the prism of the terrorists and to ignore the incredible goodness and generosity that were shown by the rescuers. The central struggle is an ideological struggle. Those who are itching to "do something" should understand that the most important form of "doing" is to help people regain their confidence in the possibility of a world based on love and kindnessin short, to see the world through the prism of the rescuers and not through that of the terrorists. We need a global period of atonement and repentance dedicated to finding a way to turn the direction of our world 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 to turn ourselves into a society in which social justice, love, and compassion are so prevalent that violence becomes only a distant memory. Sharing these ideas with your friends and neighbors can be an important part of the process of healing after terror.

—Rabbi Michael Lerner is editor of 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