Jewish Renewal
Lerner, Michael
R ichard Brookhiser once famously said that the only distinction between the Democratic Party and Reform Judaism was the holidays. Here is the proof. Michael Lerner is a longtime leftist activist...
...Putting aside, again, babble like "meaning needs" and looking at the substance, Lerner is simply contradicting himself...
...Is that not clear enough...
...Our book manufacturer, a Clinton Democrat, commented upon laying out the back cover: "This is gross...
...Lerner's reply is that It does not follow that Jewish secularism must be abandoned...
...Putnam's Sons / 426 pages / $25.95 reviewed by ELLIOTT ABRAMS 78 The American Spectator December 1994 paid advertisement Dear Readers: We have just published an outstanding new book which we are profoundly pleased to be advertising in The American Spectator for the FIRST TIME ANYWHERE...
...Army, not like anybody you've ever heard before ¨C that's going to set Washington on its teeth...
...Since early Zionism meant Socialism and giving land to the Jews, Lerner's redefinition will hardly strike most Jews as an improvement...
...While specific political organizing strategies tend to be avoided because of the anxiety that would be provoked by having to debate them out, more theoretical analyses of contemporary situations are encouraged...
...Nor is Israel left unscathed by "Jewish renewal...
...He also realizes that the left has contributed much to this problem...
...other than it explicitly reveals some of the highlights of the contents...
...In its way, Jewish Renewal is, as publishers like to hear, an important book...
...We scrutinized the source of his repulsion and found nothing wrong at all...
...B ut Lerner deserves more than mockery, for his ideas are seriously bad...
...Too many Jews already have trouble distinguishing their religion from contemporary liberal cure-alls...
...He emerges from his writing as a well-meaning, if often silly and confused, man, and the damage his proposals could do to contemporary Judaism is no joke...
...Actually, Phil is not a carbon copy of Mr Limbaugh at all...
...Jewish homosexuals "could agree to abide" by these verses because "the way they would lie with a male would be different from the way they would lie with a female...
...Use separate sheet If more space is needed Name Address City State Zip Card no...
...Makes a wonderful Christmas or Hanukkah giftfor your least favorite congressperson...
...The man was obviously too busy to have read the book...
...Just because he'd give bad guys the needle doesn't mean he's "extreme radical right," as the printer believes...
...His proposals, if adopted, would decimate the Jewish community like a plague...
...While he seems, on page after page, to recognize man's search for the spiritual, his answer to that longing is more politics¡ªto be precise, a "politics of meaning" in the phrase he and Hillary made famous...
...Lerner, two voices in the Torah, and the old-fashioned stuff "is not the voice of God...
...it is abhorrence," and in Leviticus 20:13, "If a man lie with a male as one lies with a woman, the two of them have done an abhorrent thing...
...Such faith in socialism and central planning is ludicrous, but attempting to wrap Judaism around it is repellent...
...Lerner's handling of the Jewish holidays offers the best example of his warping of religion to serve his politics...
...Exp LPhone ? Visa ? Masterchargej P.S...
...It was in the Torah," Lerner tells us, "that I learned a profound radicalism and a commitment to revolutionary transformation...
...God spare us...
...Now what should Jews do...
...The bottom line for saving the planet," Lerner writes, "is this: we need to develop a worldwide plan for how to use the world's resources and how to distribute the world's wealth...
...Here is his historical analysis: We were presented with secular and antispiritual social movements of democracy and individual rights, which had emerged in a struggle against feudalism...
...Here Lerner twists the text to achieve his political goal, but that is not his usual method...
...while the Washington crowd mumbles to itself...
...Secularists need to address the ways that society systematically frustrates these meaning needs, and then to develop a "politics of meaning" that aims to achieve societal transformations aiming to eliminate those aspects of our economic and political life that frustrate our meaning needs...
...Hesuggests that the ancient rules of kashrut, determining which foods are forbidden, be amended to "add a new code for ecokosher practices" based on the goals of the ecological movement...
...Rather than imagining a different possibility, a democratic movement that could validate the ethical and spiritual truths of our tradition, most Jews were so grateful for the chance to be accepted by non-Jews in any joint venture that they enthusiastically embraced the secular enlightenment of liberalism that was being offered, and even became its most outspoken advocates...
...Lerner's own search for meaning has led him from politics, through religion, and then back again...
...Oh, What's the book about...
...Lerner has a prescription, and in a word it is politics...
...And Jewish renewal turns out to be little more than, well, as Brookhiser put it, the Democratic Party with holidays...
...Allow 2 weeks for delivery (Colorado residents add .45 sales tax) Total enclosed $ aspects of Judaism, reject its racist and repressive aspects, and articulate a critique of the emerging world capitalist order...
...We have a reform plan ¨C not like Perot, not like Mr...
...More typically, he simply urges the infusion of politics into Judaism...
...Those who argue that the Torah is a profoundly conservative document, at odds with the moral relativism of our day, can be dismissed...
...Take the case of homosexuality...
...While Jewish tradition interprets the words as a prohibition on homosexual acts, Lerner calls that interpretation wrong...
...Well, its about the revolution we're about to throw...
...Nobody's gonna get hurt, hopefully...
...I think you should change it...
...The harvest holiday of Sukkot becomes "the time the community gathers to make concrete assessments of current ecological struggles, and develops strategies for how to strengthen ecological movements in the coming year...
...This he describes as "an experimental loose-leaf siddur [prayer book] drawing together gender-balanced, dance- and movement-sensitive liturgical innovations...
...That mission is to "heal" the world, by which he means "heal" its class divisions and maldistribution of wealth...
...Don't worry...
...It is merely "the voice of accumulated pain" being transmitted by the mortals who conveyed God's word to us...
...It just jumps out at you ¨C if I were to read this cover in a book store, I'd slap it back on the shelf...
...Man's search for meaning cannot, he understands, be satisfied in Freudian psychology, Marxism, or science, but it is to be found in an equally secular political quest nonetheless...
...The tragedy of contemporary Jewish history is that the only way available for us to achieve liberation from previous systems of oppression has been to identify with a secularist form of thinking that belies the deepest truths that we have been fighting to preserve throughout our Jewish history...
...He realizes that the secularization of our society is bad for religion in general, and for Jews as a small minority in particular...
...It is easy to make fun of the excesses Lerner indulges and advises...
...Judaism is, to him, a religion whose whole point is politics, and "healing" the world turns out to be awfully close to adopting the usual environmental, economic, and sociological nostrums of the left...
...This form of "Zionism" he describes as competing with the one now extant in Israel, and his version, "based in Jewish renewal . . . will embrace the redemptive and liberatory JEWISH RENEWAL: A PATH TO HEALING AND TRANSFORMATION Michael Lerner Grosset—G.P...
...needs to be reconstituted in ways that acknowledge the ethical, spiritual, and psychological concerns that have often been ignored or denied in the various materialist forms of secular thought...
...Although, the printer did comment that Phil sounds a little like Rush Limbaugh...
...Not to Lerner...
...His brief stint as Hillary Clinton' s guru brought him fame, so his new book, Jewish Renewal, has attracted considerable attention...
...Its suggestions to the Jewish community are precisely wrong...
...With intermarriage rates way up and the Jewish population going down, Jews are wondering what they must do to reverse the present discouraging trends...
...its remedies for the decline in that community are exactly incorrect...
...No Phil's face doesn't appear on the back...
...When Beyond Revolution hits the book stores it's going to start Americans talking like they've never talked before...
...The effort to turn Jews into some sort of revolutionary vanguard for ecology and welfare benefits is ridiculous, and it is hard to think of anyone taking it very seriously¡ªeven Hillary Clinton...
...At one level, Lerner understands this...
...Beyond Revolution, by Phil Menges, is as controversial as it is imaginative...
...Michael Lerner is a longtime leftist activist and the editor of the left-wing Jewish magazine Tikkun...
...Jews are to be the "vanguard committed to healing and repairing the world," Lerner says, adapting the Leninist terminology...
...It is Lerner's attempt to explain his view of Judaism, and it is well timed...
...His book ends with a list of suggested new liturgical sources, and for the Sabbath services he proposes a prayer book called "Or Chadash: New Paths for Sabbath Mornings...
...The Passover seder must be used not just to talk about the good-old days, but to become actively engaged ourselves in planning how to transform the world...
...Passover seders should have this element of strategic focus—it's not just a ritual, it's an occasion to move forward the collective discussion about the strategy we are going to use to defeat the contemporary embodiments and successors to Roman imperialism...
...The American Spectator December 1994 79...
...Fact is, he Claims he's just a "litty" ¨C his own acronym for "line-item thinker...
...The American Jewish community is engaged in an energetic self-examination, caused in part by the grim results of the 1990 National Jewish Population Study...
...There are, according to Elliott Abrams is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and the author of Undue Process: A Story of How Political Differences Are Turned Into Crimes (Free Press...
...The Torah could not be more straightforward, for it is written in Leviticus 18:22, "Do not lie with a male as one lies with a woman...
...For one thing, he espouses no particular religious faith nor political party...
...While "liberatory" is not actually a word, we get the gist...
...Deprecating that country's security problems with Palestinian forces, Lerner urges a move to what he calls "post-Zionism...
...But secularism...
...Post-Zionism, in the end, means Socialism and giving land to the PLO...
...The two things that are never ruled out of a Jewish-renewal community are God and politics...
...Shorn of its annoying neologisms and psychobabble, Lerner's view is that Jews have a mission on earth...
...How, then, does one distinguish between God's true voice and "the voice of accumulated pain...
...They shall be put to death...
...and that he wished Rush would stop hammering away at our president, day after day after day...
...For if there is one thing the Jewish community needs today, it is a revival of religiosity and a turn away from secularism and the politicization of religion...
...Phil shuns political labels...
...Worse yet, Sabbath morning services must also include a political meeting: Jewish renewal does not accept the notion that the week's political events are somehow irrelevant or a distraction from Shabbat services...
...To scoop the nation with your piece of this dazzling, 260-page hot-bed of cutting-edge ideas, please send check, money order or credit card number to: OUTSIDE NEW YORK 10420 W. 44TH AV, BOX 141A WHEAT RIDGE, CO 80033 1-800-842-9597 *4 ~we eve ejlere et otegarfaek riesgaiteee r Please send copies of Beyond Revolution at $14.95 each, plus $2 shipping & handling...
...No vulgarity was used...
Vol. 27 • December 1994 • No. 12
