(RNS) — I had not thought of him in many years.
But when I learned recently of the death of Rabbi Michael Lerner, a left-wing Jewish activist and author, at the age of 81, I winced and I smiled and I shed a small tear.
I winced, because once upon a time, we had been friendly, until we drifted apart.
I smiled, because he had taught me much, and he had made me think.
I shed a small tear, because … well, let’s talk about that later.
I first “met” Michael Lerner through Tikkun magazine, the left-wing Jewish journal he founded as a deliberate response to Commentary magazine.
Lerner sought tikkun olam, that rabbinic and mystical phrase that means “repairing the world,” and which, at some point, had come to symbolize left-leaning social justice.
In creating a worthy ideological balance to Commentary, Lerner did his job. It was a beautiful magazine — glossy, visually rich and intellectually playful. I mined it for its political, cultural and religious critique, even/especially when I disagreed with the articles. Tikkun ceased publication in April, predeceasing its creator by five months.
How successful was Lerner? Probably more than he had imagined.
There is that quote, often attributed to the late artist Andy Warhol: “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.”
Lerner got his requisite 15 minutes of fame because of his temporary relationship with Hillary Rodham Clinton. They had met in the White House in 1993. Hillary Clinton and Michael Lerner shared an interest in what Lerner called the politics of meaning — the notion that politics (and beyond that, religion) should speak to the inner anguish of the contemporary individual.
Clinton put it this way, in a speech in Austin in 1993:
We need a new politics of meaning. We need a new ethos of individual responsibility and caring. We need a new definition of civil society which answers the unanswerable questions posed by both the market forces and the governmental ones, as to how we can have a society that fills us up again and makes us feel that we are part of something bigger than ourselves.
And so, why that small tear I described at the beginning of this article? Because for years, I had been intellectually “quoting” Lerner and had never fully realized it. In my teaching and my writing. I have been saying that Judaism, in particular, succeeds when it transcends market forces, consumerism and individualism, when it fills our lives with meaning — a meaning that connects us to something bigger than ourselves.
That is the subject of my new book, and it contains the word tikkun in its title — this was, unconsciously, my subtle nod to Michael Lerner.
And then, in Lerner’s memory, I reread his book, “Jewish Renewal: A Path to Healing and Transformation.”
In that work, Michael Lerner lifted up a psycho-therapeutic analysis of Judaism. He sees Jewish history beginning in a trauma. The trauma? It is one of Judaism’s most famous stories: how Abraham, at age 13, shattered his father Terach’s idols.
Where is the trauma? The breaking of the idols was one thing, but then there is the rest of the story: Terach, Abraham’s father, takes him to King Nimrod, who puts him on trial for heresy against the gods. Nimrod casts the young Abraham into a fiery furnace. At the last minute, an angel redeems Abraham from the furnace.
This makes Abraham the first almost-martyr, and the first survivor, of Jewish history. And, says Lerner, this makes Abraham a survivor of child abuse — the violence of fathers against children.
In my book “The Gods Are Broken! The Hidden Legacy of Abraham,” I examined that legend of Abraham. I concluded that, trauma or not, the sound of gods breaking had reverberated over the generations.
My little tear about Lerner’s death? I had not realized how much he had influenced my own thinking about Abraham and about Judaism itself.
That pain in Abraham’s childhood gives birth to pain in his adulthood. He is a victim of abuse — and so he abuses others. He almost gives Sarah to Pharaoh for his sexual use. He allows Hagar and Ishmael to be cast into the wilderness. Only when the angel stops Abraham from sacrificing Isaac does he break the great chain of pain. Lerner suggests the angel was, in reality, Abraham’s redemptive voice speaking within him — a voice that finally says: No!
That inner struggle of Abraham repeats itself over the generations: the voice of pain or the voice of healing. That inner voice of Abraham creates two voices in Torah that compete with each other.
There is the “good” voice: a voice of compassion, justice, freedom, anything that fights against racism, sexism, homophobia, classism, etc. Anything we do to strengthen the good voice of our tradition will redeem Judaism, the Jewish people, and heal the world.
But there is also the “bad” voice, which is equally easy to trace.
- It happens when the ancient Israelites killed Sihon, the king of Heshbon, because he would not let them pass through his territory — because he refused us food and water, because he waged war against us.
- It continues in Deuteronomy’s fantasies about how our ancestors totally wiped out the nations of Canaan.
- It continues in the Book of Joshua, which is about war and conquest.
- It continues when Saul refuses to kill the cruel Amalekite king Agag, and the Prophet Samuel takes the very sword from his hand and hacks Agag in two. “As your sword has bereaved women, so shall your mother be bereaved among women.” (I Samuel 15: 33)
Yes, there are aspects of Judaism that are not “nice.” Of all these scriptural and modern violations of the code of niceness, Lerner says: “This is not the voice of God. It is the voice of pain and cruelty masquerading as the voice of God.”
That “bad voice” is the re-occurring of Abraham’s primal trauma. It goes down through the centuries. Ultimately, it emerges as the actions of Israeli and Jewish extremists — most notoriously for Lerner, in 1994, when Baruch Goldstein opened fire at the mosque in Hebron — the cave of Machpelah, the tomb of the patriarchs and matriarchs (though not Rachel), killing 29 people and wounding 125 others.
Let us not be surprised: Michael Lerner believes far too much of Israeli policy is the “bad voice” of Torah. That would have included, of course, the policies of Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir.
I agreed with Lerner that such acts of wanton violence were unacceptable abominations. Where we disagreed was that Lerner went much further than that. He was a staunch critic of Israel’s actions. In some of our conversations, that tension became apparent, though there was still great affection between us. Once again, that little tear.
Moreover, I found the whole “good voice” vs. “bad voice” thing to be far too simplistic and even problematic. His interpretation of Judaism was dualistic. It was straight out of “Star Wars” — the Luke Skywalker of nice Torah, and the Darth Vader that speaks in a Yiddish accent, of bad Torah (as I write these words, I note, and mourn, the death of James Earl Jones, who provided Darth’s voice).
I wonder if Lerner realized how closely his “good vs. bad” interpretation resembled classic Christian anti-Jewish theology: the “bad god” of the so-called Old Testament and the good god of the so-called New Testament. More than that, I do not know if he realized how subjective his analysis was: What he liked was the good voice of God; what he did not like must then be the bad voice.
How shall I now eulogize my old friend, my teacher, my intellectual sparring partner?
By partially agreeing with him.
Yes, there are multiple voices in Torah. God appears differently to different peoples at different times. Each generation chooses its own voice of Torah to hear. Living in a Jewish universe of multiple voices, I would want Jews to hear a voice that says we are all made in God’s Image; a voice that teaches compassion for the poor and the displaced; a voice that says God owns the Earth, and we are only renting it; a voice that says: Choose life, that you and your children may live.
A voice that says: In all you do, seek out and find the spheres of holiness that abide in your midst.
Rabbi Michael Lerner would have heard that, and I suspect he would have agreed.
Perhaps he would have smiled, and perhaps we both would have shed small tears.
May his memory be a blessing.
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