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the Message Continues ... 4/91
Newsletter for March 2009
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Rabbi Lerner's Report on the Inauguration Experience in D.C.
Posted Sunday January 25, 2009
It was amazing.
I wish my father and mother
had been alive to experience the joy and incredible relief that
went through our country as Barack Obama took the oath of
office. I wanted to be able to say to them,”It will be alright
now, things will never be as bad again as they have been in our
country after forty years of imperialist war, undermining of
civil liberties, the penetration of me-firstism and materialism
and selfishness into the very marrows of the bones of our
citizens, the corporate media that bought the lies of the
Republicans while scrutinizing with cynicism the hopes of the
Democrats, the escalating destruction of the life-support
systems of our planet, and the withdrawal of good people into
their own private lives as they despaired about the
possibilities of social change or healing our wounded society.”
But with my father’s death in November, so many years after my
mother had passed, it was no longer possible to take care of my
parents.
So my wife Debora and I went to Washington to taste the
experience, to be part of it, to celebrate and to reassure
ourselves that it was really happening.
And it was a great celebration. On Monday evening the Network of
Spiritual Progressives (NSP) joined many other religious
communities at All Souls Church for an evening of prayer and
talks by some of the people (many of them Tikkun authors) who
I’ve come to love in the past decades. My friend Rabbi Arthur
Waskow and Mark Johnson of the Fellowship of Reconciliation had
worked on the details of the program, and had put together a
remarkable crew of speakers that gave living proof that
spiritual/religious progressives remain a vibrant and creative
force.
There was deep appreciation expressed to me, and through me to
you, for the full page ad that had appeared a few days before in
the New York Times sponsored by Tikkun and the NSP and calling
not only for an immediate cease fire in Gaza and asking Obama to
call for an international conference to resolve the larger
Israel/Palestine issues. I learned that day that the ad
(together with the brief story about it that appeared in the
Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz) had actually caused a flurry of
interest inside the Obama circle, had been the subject of
discussions at the highest levels, and had succeeded in upping
the pressure on Israel, already considerable, for a
pre-inauguration cease fire which Israel had indeed proclaimed
and to which Hamas had quickly (though indirectly, since Israel
still refuses to talk to them directly) acquiesced. So it was
wonderful to hear from people from many diverse backgrounds the
congratulations for the ad, which for most people was the only
public (outside of cyberspace petitions) statement that they had
seen of people who were countering the narrow media framing of
the issues (who started or who was most responsible for the
current round of violence?) and insisting on using this moment
to call for a serious attempt to solve the larger
Israel/Palestine conflict which would certainly flare up in
violence again or else revert to the daily and largely hidden
violence of the Occupation. I wanted you to know how much
appreciation was experessed through me to you for making that ad
possible—not only by many Arabs and Muslims and progressive Jews
whose voices have otherwise been ignored by the media, but also
by many Christian Americans who have felt horrible to watch as
their fellow Americans seemed to line up behind the brutality
being inflicted upon the Palestinian people. Many people noted
with deep appreciation the fact that our ad had not engaged in
blaming, but only in putting out a forward-looking strategy for
how to end the conflict. I don’t think I would have known how
grateful people were for this ad had I not been in D.C.—because
people who tend to write to us usually do so only when they have
a complaint).
Later that night we went to a dinner-party sponsored by Tikkun
publishers Trish and George Vradenburg, a fund-raising event in
which people had paid lots of money to support a feeding-the-
We had tickets and good seats for the Inauguration and were
surrounded by two million people, many of them as excited as we
to be tere. There was much to be appreciated in Obama’s
Inaugural Speech. After 8 years of systematic undermining of the
basic civil liberties and human rights that the American
revolution had sought to guarantee against the tyranny of
another George (III), the reaffirmation of the Constitutional
tradition felt like a major accomplishment. That that was
followed up in subsequent days by a set of Presidential
directives insisting upon transparency in the Obama
Administration, forbidding the CIA and others from using
torture, setting the path toward closing Guantanamo’s torture
house, lifting the ban on discussion of birth control for US
funded health care projects, made me feel so elated that I
nearly forgot that these accomplishments were really only a
return to that which Americans had fought for 240 years ago.
And there were many other good aspects of Obama’s speech. For
the first time ever, a President acknowledged that we are a
country of “Christian and Muslims, Jews and Hindus, and
non-believers.” This was an important formulation, both in
affirming Muslims, who have been subject to harassment ever
since 9/11, but also and equally important in affirming the
legitimacy of non-believers. Our Network of Spiritual
Progressives has gone out of its way to affirm “spiritual but
NOT religious” people as being equally welcome. We believe that
one of the perversions of religion occurs when it defacto
becomes part of what is required of citizens—it’s bad for the
society and its bad for religions which then get filled up with
people who are there more out of civic obligation or political
opportunism than out of spiritual encounter with the mystery and
magnificence of all that is.
Finally, there was in this speech a reaffirmation of the
importance of judging outcomes in term of “the common good.”
However little he failed to explain what it would mean to really
consider that seriously, articulating the notion of “the common
good” could provide a leverage for future policy directions.
I wished that Barack Obama had spent some time acknowledging
the anti-war movement and the civil rights movement that had
made his candidacy possible in the first place, rather than
using the occasion to insist that “we will not apologize for our
way of life” ( why not? a way of life in which the U.S. with 5%
of the world’s population consumes 25% of the world’s resources
and produces a majority of the world’s weapons and is
responsible for a war in Iraq that has caused the death of
hundreds of thousands and the wounding/maiming of millions plus
3 million refugees—there is plenty to apologize for). I wished
he had used the occasion to question the wisdom of an economic
system that rewards selfishness and materialism rather than, as
he did, merely mention that there was a problem about greed and
irresponsibility that had weakened our economy and then hasten
to add that it was really “our collective failure to make hard
choices and prepare the nation for a new age” (I couldn’t help
wondering how anyone I knew had participated in this collective
failure). I wish he had not committed himself to “forging a hard
earned peace in Afghanistan” since that can only be a way of
saying that he really intends to escalate the war there (despite
the many who had assumed that he was just talking about
Afghanistan during the campaign as a way of sounding tough to
win votes, hopeful that he would not commit new troops to a
guerilla war that could not be won). I wished that when
talking about the sacrifices made by people in the past so that
we could have the America of the present he had not listed,
along with those who had immigrated here, and “ toiled in
sweatshops and settled the West” those who “endured the lash of
the whip” as though that too had been a voluntary sacrifice when
in fact it was a manifestation of an as-yet-unrepented-
I hope that years from now, looking backward, I’ll be able to
say that these were minor quibbles, that Obama was deciding not
to use this moment to educate but to reassure Americans that he
was not to be feared but to be supported, and that his
subsequent policies achieved in practice the transformation of
consciousness that could have begun at this moment.
The ceremony itself seemed a bit stiff (it was no pleasure to
see Senator Diane Feinstein chairing the event—the memory of her
congratulating Bush for his fine accomplishment of “shock and
awe” after the first night of the Iraq war and her vote to
support Bush appointees to the Supreme Court and for Attorneys
General reminded me how slippery the category “moderate
Democrat” has become in the past forty years and sounded the
alarm for me when I heard that Gov. Patterson has chosen a
“moderate Democrat” to replace in the U.S. Senate Hillary
Clinton while the impeached governor of Illinois had chosen a
“moderate Democrat” to replace in the U.S. Senate Barack Obama
from Illinois).
I wasn’t moved by the poetry or by the music, and would have
preferred if at least at one point the crowd had been asked to
stand and sing “We Shall Overcome” or “Imagine” or in some other
way been given a chance to acknowledge that the cultural milieu
was not being set by homophobic pastor Rick Warren’s recitation
of The Lord’s Prayer (something that we Jews,and many of our
non-Jewish civil libertarian allies, had fought to get out
of the public sphere in the 1950s when it was imposed upon us in
public schools as a daily requirement until the Warren Court had
rightly ruled that this was not appropriate for our collective
public space). Mostly, people around us were rolling their eyes,
not wanting to get upset about Warren or why Obama had chosen
him to speak. And he would later be balanced by Joseph Lowery
whose civil rights years flowed through his fiery talk.
The details of the speech and the culture of the event
were mostly overshadowed by the fact standing before us—an
African American man in a country that had for hundreds of years
enslaved, murdered, raped and exploited African Americans. For
me, as for so many around me, that single fact overwhelmed us. I
had given up my path to a comfortable career in the 1960s by
engaging in civil disobedience that had led to my arrest and
imprisonment. I, like millions of others like me, had been
filled with rage at the oppression of Blacks, and had put my
body and my life on the line to stop it. I had met with Martin
Luther King, Jr. to encourage him to run for President. I had
worked with the Black Panther Party in an attempt to form an
alliance in which whites and Blacks could struggle together for
a change in the defacto segregation and economic exploitation
that persisted even after Civil Rights legislation had passed. I
had later written a book with African American intellectual
Cornel West called Jews and Blacks: Let the Healing Begin
(Putnam, 1995) and we had traveled around the U.S. in our
attempt to model the healing we sought. So, yes, tears welled up
in my eyes and prayers of thanksgiving to the God of the
universe at this most moving moment when suddenly it seemed as
if decades of effort had not been in vain.
I don’t know who Barack Obama will turn out to be as
President. Will he be the Obama who asked to speak at our Tikkun
conference in Chicago in 1996 and who assured me that he
embraced the politics of meaning that we were then calling our
spiritual progressive worldview and the Obama who, when we spent
time with each other in 2006, assured me that he was reading my
book The Left Hand of God. the young Senator who assured me that
we shared much in our worldviews? I can’t be sure. But
that there is even such a possibility gives me great hope. And
yet, as I stated in the Jan/Feb 2009 editorial inTikkun, who he
will be depends in part on who we will be—whether we can create
a powerful voice to support Obama to be the best possible Obama
he could be, or whether the forces of fear will reassert
themselves so powerfully that the message of loving community
and generosity will seem too utopian to Obama to fight for them.
I hope you’ll re-read that editorial (it’s at
www.tikkun.org)
In any event, back to Washington, D.C. where my wife and I
then spent the next four hours after the inauguration walking in
freezing weather because we could not get a cab nor find a way
to get through the hundreds of thousands of people flooding the
subway system. And…we survived. We managed to change our clothes
and make it to the inaugural Peace Ball put on by Andy Shallal
for progressives. a spirit-lifting event that was all the things
that we had hoped for: Joan Baez singing Imagine, Harry
Belafonte, Holly Near, and two floors of elegance at the
National Postal Museum filled with people who have been giving
their life energies to the movements for social change. And
almost every few minutes we’d be stopped by people who wanted to
thank us for what Tikkun, the Tikkun Community, and the
Network of Spiritual Progressives have been doing these many
years.
Everyone in that room knew that our work is still ahead of
us, that the outcome of the years ahead is not predetermined,
that Obama is not our savior and he is not even a man blessed
with the vision and courage of a Martin Luther King, Jr. or a
Gandhi. He is a politician, and a good one, and he can do a lot
of good, and a lot more good if we can find the right ways to
support what is best in him. But for an evening, and perhaps for
many of us for longer than that, we allowed ourselves to just
enjoy and celebrate the victory that we had won.
And the joy and hope of these moments remains
with me to this moment.
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