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WHERE THE VIOLENCE COMES FROM 
A World Out of Touch With Itself  {Newer version}
Michael Lerner | 09.16.2001 

 A World Out of Touch With Itself: Where the Violence Comes From by Rabbi
Michael Lerner Editor, TIKKUN Magazine 

 There is never any justification for acts of terror against innocent
civilians -- not in Israel and not in the U.S. -- it is the quintessential
act of dehumanization and not recognizing the sanctity of others, and a
visible symbol of a world increasingly irrational and out of control.

 It's understandable why many of us, after grieving and consoling the
mourners, feel anger. Unfortunately, demagogues in the White House and
Congress have manipulated our legitimate outrage and channeled it into a
new militarism and a revival of the deepest held belief of the conservative
world-view: that the world is mostly a dangerous place and our lives must
be based around protecting ourselves from the threatening others. In this
case, terrorism provides a perfect base for this worldview -- it can come
from anywhere, we don't really know who is the enemy, and so everyone can
be suspect and everyone can be a target of our fear-induced rage. With this
as a foundation, the Bush team has been able to turn this terrible and
outrageous attack into a justification for massive military spending, a new
war and the inevitable trappings: repression of civil liberties,
denigration of "evil others," and a new climate of fear and intimidation
against anyone who doesn't join this misuse of patriotism toward distorted
ends.  Of course, the people who did this attack are evil and they are a
real threat to the human race. If they could, they would use nuclear
weapons or chemical/biological weapons.

 The perpetrators deserve to be punished, and I personally would be happy
if all the people involved in this act were to be imprisoned for the rest
of their lives. But that is quite different from talk about "eliminating
countries" which we heard from Colin Powell in the days after the attack.
Punishing the perpetrators is different from making war against whole
populations. The narrow focus on the perpetrators allows us to avoid
dealing with the underlying issues. 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 ourselves -- thus reenforcing the cycle of
violence in the world?

 We in the spiritual world will see the root problem here as a growing
global incapacity to recognize the spirit of God in each other--what 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 its 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 are literally starving. 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 that's a different story
that is going on somewhere else. But we live in one world, increasingly
interconnected with everyone, and the forces that lead people to feel
outrage, anger and desperation eventually impact on our own daily lives.

 The same inability to feel the pain of others is the pathology that shapes
the minds of these terrorists. Raise children in circumstances where no one
is there to take care of them, or where they must live by begging or
selling their bodies in prostitution, put them in refugee camps and tell
them that that they have "no right of return" to their homes, treat them as
though they are less valuable and deserving of respect because they are
part of some despised national or ethnic group, surround them with a media
that extols the rich and makes everyone who is not economically successful
and physically trim and conventionally "beautiful" feel bad about
themselves, offer them jobs whose sole goal is to enrich the "bottom line"
of someone else, and teach them that "looking out for number one" is the
only thing anyone "really" cares about and that anyone who believes in love
and social justice are merely naive idealists who are destined to always
remain powerless, and you will produce a world-wide population of people
feeling depressed, angry, unable to care about others, and in various ways
dysfunctional.

 I see this in Israel, where Israelis have taken to dismissing the entire
Palestinian people as "terrorists" but never ask themselves: "What have we
done to make this seem to Palestinians to be a reasonable path of action
today." Of course there were always some hateful people and some religious
fundamentalists who want to act in hurtful ways against Israel, no matter
what the circumstances. Yet, in the situation of 1993-96 when Israel under
Yitzhak Rabin was pursuing a path of negotiations and peace, the
fundamentalists had little following and there were few acts of violence.
On the other hand, when Israel failed to withdraw from the West Bank, and
instead expanded the number of its settlers, the fundamentalists and haters
had a far easier time convincing many decent Palestinians that there might
be no other alternative.

 Similarly, if the U.S. turns its back on global agreements to preserve the
environment, unilaterally cancels its treaties to not build a missile
defense, accelerates the processes by which a global economy has made some
people in the third world richer but many poorer, shows that it cares
nothing for the fate of refugees who have been homeless for decades, and
otherwise turns its back on ethical norms, it becomes far easier for the
haters and the fundamentalists to recruit people who are willing to kill
themselves in strikes against what they perceive to be an evil American
empire represented by the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. Most
Americans will feel puzzled by any reference to this "larger picture." It
seems baffling to imagine that somehow we are part of a world system which
is slowly destroying the life support system of the planet, and quickly
transferring the wealth of the world into our own pockets.

 We don't feel personally responsible when an American corporation runs a
sweat shop in the Phillipines or crushes efforts of workers to organize in
Singapore. We don't see ourselves implicated when the U.S. refuses to
consider the plight of Palestinian refugees or uses the excuse of fighting
drugs to support repression in Colombia or other parts of Central America.
We don't even see the symbolism when terrorists attack America's military
center and our trade center--we talk of them as buildings, though others
see them as centers of the forces that are causing the world so much pain.

 We have narrowed our own attention to "getting through" or "doing well" in
our own personal lives, and who has time to focus on all the rest of this?
Most of us are leading perfectly reasonable lives within the options that
we have available to us--so why should others be angry at us, much less
strike out against us? And the truth is, our anger is also understandable:
the striking out by others in acts of terror against us is just as
irrational as the world-system that it seeks to confront. Yet our acts of
counter-terror will also be counter-productive. We should have learned from
the current phase of the Israel-Palestinian struggle , responding to terror
with more violence, rather than asking ourselves what we could do to change
the conditions that generated it in the first place, will only ensure more
violence against us in the future. Luckily, most people don't act out in
violent ways -- they tend to act out more against themselves, drowning
themselves in alcohol or drugs or personal despair. Others turn toward
fundamentalist religions or ultra-nationalist extremism. Still others find
themselves acting out against people that they love, acting angry or
hurtful toward children or relationship partners.

 This is a world out of touch with itself, filled with people who have
forgotten how to recognize and respond to the sacred in each other because
we are so used to looking at others from the standpoint of what they can do
for us, how we can use them toward our own ends. The alternatives are
stark: either start caring about the fate of everyone on this planet or be
prepared for a slippery slope toward violence that will eventually dominate
our daily lives. None of this should be read as somehow mitigating our
anger at the terrorists. Let’s not be naïve about the perpetrators of this
terror. The brains and money behind this operation isn't a group of
refugees living penniless in Palestinian refugee camps. Many of the core
terrorists are evil people, as are some of the fundamentalists and
ultra-nationalists who demean and are willing to destroy others. But these
evil people are often marginalized when societal dynamics are moving toward
peace and hope (e.g. in Israel while Yitzhak Rabin was Prime Minister) and
they become much more influential and able to recruit people to give their
lives to their cause when ordinary and otherwise decent people despair of
peace and justice (as when Israel from `1996 to 2000 dramatically increased
the number of settlers).  

So here is what would marginalize those who hate the United States.
  Imagine if the Bin Ladins and other haters of the world had to recruit
people against America at a time when:
 1. America was using its economic resources to end world hunger and
redistribute the wealth of the planet so that everyone had enough.
 2. America was the leading voice championing an ethos of generosity and
caring for others—leading the world in ecological responsibility, social
justice, open-hearted treatment of minorities, and rewarding people and
corporations for social responsibility..
 3. America was restructuring its own internal life so that all social
practices and institutions were being judged "productive or efficient or
rational" not only because they maximized profit, but also to the extent
that they maximized love and caring, ethical/spiritual/ecological
sensitivity, and an approach to the universe based on awe and wonder at the
grandeur of creation (what I call an Emancipatory Spirituality).

 We are trying to develop this kind of "New Bottom Line" in Tikkun. To
build support for this approach we are now starting what we call "The
TIKKUN COMMUNITY" -- both as a vehicle to raise money for the magazine, and
as a way of taking some steps to acknowledge the reality that we have been
functioning not only as a magazine, but as a kind of movement. The TIKKUN
COMMUNITY will be a cadre of people who agree with certain basic
principles. The founding statement can be found in this very issue of
TIKKUN magazine (Nov.Dec, 2001) and on our website. We hope you'll join us.
If you want to, contact me at RabbiLerner@tikkun.org . 

Think it's naive and impossible to move American in that direction? Well,
here are two reasons why, even if it’s a long shot, it’s an approach that
deserves your support:
 a. It’s even more naïve to imagine that bombings, missile defense systems,
more spies or baggage searches can stop people willing to lose their lives
to wreak havoc and capable of airplane hijacking, chemical assaults (like
anthrax), etc.
 b. The response of people to the World Trade Building collapse was an
outpouring of loving energy and generosity, sometimes even risking their
own lives, and showing the capacity and desire we all have to care about
each other. If we could legitimate people allowing that part of themselves
to come out, without having to wait for a disaster, we could empower a part
of every human being which our social order marginalizes. Americans have a
deep goodness—and that needs to be affirmed. Indeed, the goodness that
poured forth from so many Americans should not be allowed to be
overshadowed by the subsequent shift toward militarism and anger. That same
caring energy could have been given a more positive outlet -- if we didn't
live in a society which normally teaches us that our "natural" instinct is
toward aggression and that the best we can hope for is a world which gives
us protection. The central struggle going on in the world today is this
one: between hope and fear, love or paranoia, generosity or trying to shore
up one's own portion. In my book Spirit Matters I show why there is no
possibility in sustaining a world built on fear.

  Our only hope is to revert to a consciousness of generosity and love.
That's not to go to a lalla-land where there are no forces like those who
destroyed the Word Trade Center. But it is to refuse to allow that to
become the shaping paradigm of the 21st century. Much better to make the
shaping paradigm the story of the police and firemen who risked (and in
many cases lost) their lives in order to save other human beings who they
didn't even know. Let the paradigm be the generosity and kindness of people
when they are given a social sanction to be caring instead of
self-protective. We cannot let war, hatred and fear become the power in
this new century that it was in the last century.

  And it's up to us. We can't expect the Left to be able to organize a
successful movement, because they will define it in the most narrow terms.
They will talk about the rights of the oppressed and make everyone believe
that they don't really care about the terrible loss of life and the
terrible fear that everyone now how to endure about our own safety. Their
justified anger at the way capitalist globalization has hurt people around
the world will make them play down the outrageousness of this particular
attack--and hence be disconnected to the righteous indignation that most
the rest of us feel. Rather, we need a movement that puts forward a
positive vision of a world based on caring--and a commitment to rectify the
injustices that the globalization of selfishness has wreaked on the
world--while simultaneously making it clear that we have no tolerance for
reckless acts of violence and terror such as those which Israel has had to
experience this past year or those which the U.S. faced in September. It's
only with that balanced view that we can say that it is a huge mistake to
make war or violence the primary way we respond to this situation.

  It's about time we began to say unequivocally that violence doesn't work
-- not as an end and not as a means. The best defense is a world drenched
in love, not a world drenched in armaments. We should pray for the victims
and the families of those who have been hurt or murdered in these crazy
acts. We should also pray that America does not return to "business as
usual," but rather turns to a period of reflection, coming back into touch
with our common humanity, asking ourselves how our institutions can best
embody our highest values. We may need a global day of atonement and
repentance dedicated to finding a way to turn the direction of our society
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 turn ourselves into a society in which
social justice, love, and compassion are so prevalent that violence becomes
only a distant memory.

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--Rabbi Michael Lerner is editor of TIKKUN 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 and most recently (Sept 2001)
editor: Best Contemporary Jewish Writing RabbiLerner@tikkun.org

 P.S. Because TIKKUN Magazine has taken the stance that Palestinians are
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