Rabbi Michael Lerner: Revolutionary Love

Rabbi Michael Lerner is an American political activist and the editor of Tikkun, a progressive Jewish interfaith magazine based in California.

Rabbi Michael Lerner: Revolutionary Love – The Manifesto to Heal and Transform the World

Interview by Victor Fuhrman

In the spring of 2020, with the spread of the pandemic, the challenges it presented, the egregious acts of racism and racial violence, and the failure of leadership to address these challenges, I shared on this program and in my community that it was time for acts of radical kindness, radical compassion, and radical love.

We continue in 2021 with the recognition that these acts continue to call to us and that our very survival is contingent on caring for one another, our environment, and our world. How may we find a path to this and, in doing so, open the hearts and minds of all peoples to this reality? Rabbi Michael Lerner has made this path much of his life’s work.

Rabbi Michael Lerner is an American political activist, the editor of Tikkun, a progressive Jewish interfaith magazine based in Berkeley, California, and the Rabbi of Beyt Tikkun synagogue in Berkeley. The Hebrew word Tikkun means to heal, repair, and transform the world. That requires a Tikkun of self and a Tikkun of the world.

Rabbi Learner’s legacy of political activism was launched in 1964 when he attended UC Berkeley. He walked past students sitting in protest, listened to their speeches, and joined their efforts quickly, becoming a leader in the student movement. The failures of the social change movements of the sixties and seventies inspired him to study psychology to gain a deeper understanding of the psychodynamics of American society.

Intellectual wisdom and curiosity, and spiritual depth have always been the foundation of his work and efforts giving rise to many articles, books, and ultimately to Tikkun magazine. His bestselling books include The Left Hand of God, Spirit Matters, and Jewish Renewal. You can find out more about him at the website tikkun.org. This week, he joins me to share his path, work, and book, Revolutionary Love: A Political Manifesto to Heal and Transform the World.

Interview with Rabbi Michael Lerner by Victor Fuhrman

To listen to the full interview of Rabbi Michael Lerner by Victor Fuhrman, host of Destination Unlimited on OMTimes Radio, click the player below. OMTimes

Victor Fuhrman: Let us start by sharing your wisdom and your experience. Tell them about your path and how it led to your many callings.

Rabbi Michael Lerner: Well, my past started as a rebellion against my secular parents, primarily secular in their lives and very much involved in American politics. I got to have a sort of a second-row seat in American politics through my parents. My father was a judge, and my mother was a political advisor and official of our state, a US Senator from New Jersey at the time. So I got to see how screwed up this political world was.

So that led me to look for some other way of connecting with the reality I was living in. That happened when I encountered a leading Jewish theologian of the 20th century, Abraham Joshua Heschel. I met him first when I was 12 years old. I started to read his book, God in Search of Man, and eventually, I got to know him personally. That personal connection then led me to a situation where I was an undergraduate at Columbia College in New York, part of Columbia University.

I would meet with Heschel once a month, and he would be my mentor and. I understood what was screwed up in American politics and what was screwed up in the Jewish world in that process. Heschel was not universally loved—particularly by people of power in the Jewish world and more so when he became one of the co-founders of clergy and laity against the war in Vietnam.

Well, I had already, by that point, become an activist against the war in Vietnam. And although only an activist first at the University of California, Berkeley, where I was Chair of the Students for Democratic Society, also then as an Assistant Professor at the University of Washington where I helped organize a major demonstration against the war, which in turn to me being indicted by the federal government and ultimately sent to the federal penitentiary with J Edgar Hoover saying, Michael Lerner is one of the most dangerous criminals in America. However, I had never done any act of violence or anything of that sort, but I had been able to speak to people in a way that made them understand the extreme immorality of that war and really of almost all wars.

The appeals courts overturned the convictions, and I eventually decided to become a psychologist to understand American society’s psychodynamics. What I learned was very important to shaping what eventually became Tikkun magazine.

The magazine was primarily a Jewish magazine but then evolved into an interfaith magazine and even opened really to secular people who did not believe in any God but had a robust and ethical calling. And what I learned was this—that the liberal and progressive forces were sorely absent in the ethical domain, particularly with articulating ethical and spiritual values.

So many people believe that that’s their only alternative, and yet they hunger for something different. Unfortunately, that hunger for something different led many people to reactionary politics through politics that officially articulated a spiritual or religious commitment but then directed that in a very destructive way.

And so, people feel that the Democratic party has little to deliver, and Republicans and right-wing forces open their churches and say, you’re welcome here, come here.

So that’s some of the evolution that led me to create Tikkun magazine and create Tikkun as a voice for those who want a different kind of world, who seek the word healing, the word Tikkun means healing, repair, and transformation.

That’s why so many people yearn for natural healing, a fundamental transformation of society, yet most people who yearn for it simultaneously tell you that they’re not going to be part of any movement because it’s unrealistic. After all, they believe that everyone else has already absorbed so much of a capitalist ethos that all they will care about is themselves. So what I can do is deal with just myself: “I’ll try to make myself a better person.” I love that. I think it’s essential for people to do that, and hence, I very much want people to be involved in their spiritual life and their psychological development, and so forth. But that this motto, I can’t change the world I change myself, or we’re going to change the world one person at a time has been with us for 40 years, and the society has gotten worse.

The destruction of the planet has gotten much more intense. But, unfortunately, that strategy is only valuable when it’s part of a larger strategy to change the structures, the economic and political systems of this society from one based on selfishness and materialism. That’s why I’ve launched through this book, my newest book, Revolutionary Love, an attempt at a movement that we call the love and justice movement. But the love part is what has been so profoundly missing from liberal and progressive politics.

Scarlett Lewis: Nurturing Healing Love

So you can’t just talk about love; you have to create movements that embody love, and this is what people in the liberal and progressive world don’t understand. So, I have to say about how I got here.

Victor Fuhrman: Those bring up two questions for me. Number one, you had talked about what J Edgar Hoover had said about you when you were speaking the truth, and it seems that we have that same thing happening today that people who talk about the truth are being called criminals.

Rabbi Michael Lerner: Yes, you’re so right, and it’s disgusting and awful, but there are no controlling people who want to dominate and control others by putting them down and demeaning them and speaking lies. The only thing we have in our society that makes it possible to challenge them is to have a different movement that speaks truth and embodies love.

And we don’t have that yet. So it’s easy to distort what people in the liberal and progressive world are about since they don’t recognize the hunger for meaning and purpose in life. They don’t acknowledge the centrality of love and caring and kindness and generosity, even though that’s what motivates almost everybody who’s come into the liberal and progressive world. They come in there but then think, oh, I can’t talk about those things—love, kindness, generosity, caring for others. That’s something for private life, but in public life, I can’t do that. Now, why do they think this? Because our society as a whole, thanks to the triumph of the capitalist order, has put forward the notion that what is indisputable is that which can be verified through sense-datum or measured. Still, it turns out that all of the most important things in life are these many examples of the important things in life: love, kindness, generosity, a sense of commitment to other people, the caring that we need.

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