The Tikkun Community
'To mend, repair and transform the world'
by Marianne Arbogast

This past December, more than 700 people gathered in New York for the founding conference of the Tikkun Community, described by co-founder Michael Lerner as "a new national organization of spiritual politics." The weekend meeting included music, dancing, prayer and presentations by speakers ranging from Buddhist scholar Robert Thurman to Pacifica radio host Amy Goodman to writer Naomi Wolf, along with Arthur Waskow, Susannah Heschel, Lerner and others associated with the Jewish Renewal movement articulated in Tikkun magazine, which convened the gathering.

Tikkun is a Hebrew word translated as a mandate "to mend, repair and transform the world," and the Tikkun Community founders aspire to nothing less.

"I really got a renewed sense of how much people would love to have a national movement that was talking about love and caring, about the deprivation of meaning and the spiritual crisis generated by the ethos of selfishness and materialism of American society," Lerner wrote in a conference report on the Tikkun website (www.tikkun.org). "And how much they'd love to have a movement that could legitimate our desire to respond to the universe with awe and wonder and could transcend the narrow utilitarian and manipulative frameworks that dominate most politics (including even Green or leftie politics)."

September 11 provided the "immediate impetus" for the creation of the Tikkun community, Lerner said in an interview with The Witness.

"What we were seeing coming out of 9/11 was a view of the world that basically saw the alternatives as either supporting American penetration and domination of the world, or going with the forces of Islamic fundamentalism. We wanted to present a third alternative."

The third alternative is one that Lerner has been advocating for many years, as editor of Tikkun magazine and author of books including Jewish Renewal, The Politics of Meaning, and, most recently, Spirit Matters. Lerner, who studied under Abraham Heschel, has sought to articulate a vision "that people in spiritual communities and people who previously didn't even think of themselves as spiritual can buy into."

'A movement-building vocation on poverty' On the last Tuesday in March, Jim Wallis and other members of Call to Renewal met first with members of the Congressional Poor People's Caucus, then with a group of Republican Senate staffers, and finally with White House staff members involved with welfare reform. "It was a very bi-partisan day pushing the agenda of poverty," says Wallis, the convener and president of Call to Renewal, a five-year-old effort to link Christians across the political and theological spectrum in anti-poverty advocacy. In one of the meetings, conversation got bogged down in the language of "poverty reduction" vs. "self-sufficiency," Wallis says. "I looked around at all these faith-based leaders -- they're grassroots, on the ground -- and they're shaking their heads, you know, what the hell are we talking about, this is a Washington conversation. "So we try to build common ground. We say, yes, we want self-sufficiency, we want sustenance for people who are poor -- not endless subsidy, because that doesn't end poverty, that just maintains poverty at some barely sustainable level. But how do you help welfare families and single moms? You've got to deal with child care and transportation and affordable housing and health care. Is work the way out of this? Yeah, but only if it works -- if you work and you're poorer than you were on welfare, something's not working." Wallis feels that the greatest achievement of Call to Renewal has been "getting the warring factions of the churches together on this issue of poverty. It's the only thing we really can agree on -- we disagree on almost everything else. We have been able to bring together a wide spectrum of people. We really do have evangelicals deeply involved -- the National Association of Evangelicals is at the table and so is the National Council of Churches. The NCC and the NAE have been like the Crips and the Bloods -- they've been literally acting like rival gangs. We joke that when the NCC and the NAE are there we put a Mennonite between them at the table." This constituency means that Call to Renewal has "access across the political spectrum where just a liberal group wouldn't," Wallis says. In addition to Call to Renewal's national office in Washington, D.C., about a dozen local Call to Renewal "roundtables" are meeting across the country. Each works independently on local projects, but also participates in national efforts such as the recent "Pentecost 2002" mobilization on TANF (welfare reform) reauthorization. "Our job is to help them connect with each other and then connect with the national agenda," Wallis says. "Springfield, Ohio, has a very active Call to Renewal roundtable, and their work has resulted in the construction of a new health clinic for low-income kids, which serves 5,000 kids a year. But they're also putting together a delegation of faith-based leaders to come to our mobilization in May to meet with their Senator on welfare reform." Call to Renewal intends to expand its efforts to organize local groups, Wallis says. "Wes Granberg-Michaelson, our board chair, said, 'We've shown that we can convene and inspire, now we have to show that we can organize.' So the task ahead now is state-by-state, community-by-community organizing. I think our vocation is to help local efforts to connect with each other across these chasms in the churches -- even within the churches -- and then to connect them together for a national agenda. It's a movement-building vocation on poverty." Movement-building is a necessary component of social change, Wallis contends. "Do you think we'd have a civil rights law and a voting rights act if there had been no SCLC? There was lots of local activity for years.The local activity, initiative, creativity, leadership -- all of that is the prerequisite for social, cultural change. You can't build a national anything if it doesn't have local feet. But at some point, that's got to be networked and connected and lead to some national agendas. "What a social movement is is that people in Albany, Ga., and Raleigh, N.C., know that their struggles and their hopes and their dreams and their failures -- that others are going through it, too, in different places, and they feel connected to that. Mostly what I do, I think, around the country is I help people not to feel alone. It's not just them -- there are people like them in other places, and the more we can connect together and support each other and then come together on things we all care about, the more we can accomplish. "We just saw a big victory on campaign finance reform. I had lunch with Scott Harshbarger, the head of Common Cause, and Scott is clear that this victory happened because for the first time all the campaign finance organizations who normally fight each other worked together on this. It was like networking the networks. And on poverty we have to do the same thing." In addition to working with churches, Call to Renewal builds alliances with other groups working toward the same goals. "There's this new group called the Campaign for Jobs and Income Support, and I think they have the best network around issues like welfare reform," Wallis says. "A lot of welfare moms' groups are in this, a lot of immigrants' rights groups, a lot of living-wage efforts. Just as we have a strategic alliance on welfare reform with the Roman Catholic bishops and with Bread for the World, we're also working with Campaign for Jobs and Income Support. They're organizing poor people's organizations, we're organizing churches and faith-based groups, and we're tracking the debate -- and we're going to impact the debate in a way that's allied to each other." Wallis also met recently with Jim Hightower, who is working with Michael Moore and Molly Ivins on a project called "Rolling Thunder." "They are going from city to city trying to have a big revival with speakers and music to get a whole new progressive movement going. They want a clear, strong, faith-based component in this, and that's why they want us to come in with them." Wallis feels that Call to Renewal's Christian identity is helpful to its mission. "If you go interfaith too quickly, you get all the liberals together who are interfaith. And that's fine, but we've done that, that's not new. Call to Renewal has succeeded where no one else has in getting evangelicals together with liberals and Catholics, and black and white churches. We've got to get our own act together. I think interfaith things are better when each tradition is the best they can be and then makes alliances." -- Marianne Arbogast More information on Call to Renewal can be found on their website, <www.calltorenewal.com>.

A religion of secular materialism

"Our fundamental message is that the central deprivation in people's lives is a spiritual deprivation," Lerner says. "In this society the central thing that's wrong with global capitalism is not that it doesn't deliver enough material goods to people. It's that it values the wrong thing."

In Lerner's worldview, secular materialism is no less a religion than Islamic fundamentalism.

"The world system of which America is the dominant beneficiary is based on a religion. This new religion historically emerged as a rebellion against the misappropriation of religion in the ancient and medieval world as an instrument for domination by ruling elites over everyone else. So this new religion said that there should be no authoritative decisions about what's right and wrong in the public sphere, that moral judgments are purely subjective because what's objective is that which can be verified through sense data. This religion preached a vision of the world in which the highest value was to maximize the individual and his or her self-interest."

While this new religion offered some benefits -- the advancement of science, respect for individual rights and liberties, and a realm of privacy -- it also brought negative consequences: "It drove moral, spiritual discourse totally out of the public sphere and created a new group of priests and ministers that call themselves 'professionals' -- people who profess the dominant religion.

"This made possible the sprouting up of a society in which each individual is pursuing his or her own self-interest without regard for the consequences for anyone else, and the disintegration over time of the bonds of caring and mutual support -- whose highest articulation was in the dismantling of welfare programs -- a society with the greatest wealth that humanity has ever known, and yet with extremes of poverty that could be eliminated very easily were anyone to use our collective resources for that purpose."

In this analysis, it is a clash of religions that underlies current global conflict.

"When capital globalizes, it brings with it the dominant religion, and its very strong conflict with existing religious systems that preach a different vision of the world. When people say, as Bush said originally, 'This is a crusade,' he was right. Because it's not just that global capital is presenting an economic system -- it's presenting a worldview, and it's very much in conflict with traditional religious systems that have a different view of where ethics and spiritual concerns should fit into our lives."

Traditional religions, Lerner says, "emphasize that human beings should be cared for and valued not for what they can produce in the economic marketplace, but because they are fundamentally valuable in and of themselves, because they are part of a particular religious or spiritual community -- although you could substitute here the word 'national community' to explain the appeal of nationalism also. The good part is that people are valued simply by virtue of their connection to a particular kind of community. The bad part is that that community is an exclusivist community."

Emancipatory spirituality

If there is one thing the new Tikkun Community is not, that is exclusivist. Although some two-thirds of participants in the founding conference were Jewish, Lerner strongly desires greater diversity.

"I'm certainly hoping that it will shift to not have a Jewish majority," he says. "I'd like to go to every religious community in the country to start with, and try to appeal to people in those communities to become core elements in the Tikkun Community. We're trying to invite Christians, Muslims, Buddhists and others to be part of building it."

The community's "Core Vision and Founding Principles" is a 16-page, densely worded document covering innumerable facets of social reality. Inclusion, says Lerner, is at the heart of the "emancipatory spirituality" he sees as an antidote to the errors of both traditional and secular religion.

"Emancipatory spirituality rejects the ethos of materialism and selfishness of the capitalist order and instead values a spiritual and ethical vision. But with regard to the religious world, it rejects the exclusivism of those communities, and says that people are to be valued not because of their membership in any particular community. Instead it emphasizes the Unity of All Being and the fact that every human being is equally a creation of God, equally embodying the spirit of God, and equally deserving of love and caring, regardless of what their beliefs are, what their particular approach is of connecting to God or connecting to the spiritual realm."

A new bottom line

"If I have to say what's fundamental, I sort of summarize in one sentence what we're about: We want a new bottom line," Lerner says. "We want a new definition of productivity, efficiency and rationality. Because in the contemporary capitalist world, the bottom line is money and power, and the definition of productivity and efficiency is that anybody who maximizes money and power is running an efficient institution, or a social practice is efficient. What we're saying is, no, that definition has to be transformed, so that institutions and social practices are judged efficient, productive and rational not only to the extent that they maximize money and power, but also that they maximize people's capacities to be loving and caring, to be ethically, spiritually and ecologically sensitive, and to be capable of responding to the universe with awe and wonder at the grandeur of creation. Schools would be judged failures if they produced great computer experts who didn't give a damn about other human beings."

Does this raise concerns about the separation of church and state?

"I'm not for the state imposing a particular religious approach, but I am in favor of it supporting a particular moral and spiritual consciousness," Lerner says. "I'm just as troubled by the First Amendment fundamentalists as by the right-wing fundamentalists. And the separation of values from the public sphere is a terrible error.

"In the Jewish world, we've been the first ones to advocate that separation because we've been afraid that the Christians would go right back and start throwing us in the concentration camps or burning us at the stake or whatever. So we wanted a public sphere that had no values in it, because we didn't trust that once they started going with their values, that they wouldn't kill us. But I think we're in a different historical period in which Christians won't kill Jews on these differences. I think we're moving to a point in history where it's possible to have a spiritual, ethical debate in the public sphere which is nonviolent and mutually respectful."

Campaign to End the Occupation

Still, Lerner's own experience demonstrates that such debate is not without risk. In a full-page ad in the Oct. 1, 2001, issue of The Nation featuring a photo and letter of support from Cornel West (who collaborated with Lerner on the 1995 book, Jews and Blacks: A Dialogue on Race, Religion and Culture in America), Tikkun magazine appealed for contributions in the face of death threats to Lerner and financial losses to the magazine because of its stance on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The Tikkun Community organized its first major campaign around that issue, calling for a fast day on March 27, the day before Passover, and taking out ads in The New York Times and an Israeli newspaper in support of the Israeli army reservists who are refusing to serve in the West Bank and Gaza. Lerner hopes that the fast day will become an annual event and draw Christian as well as Jewish participation.

"One important component of our campaign is to try to speak to Christians about the reluctance that many Christians have to criticize Israel and Israeli policy," he says. "Christians are absolutely right to feel guilty that their traditions have caused a huge amount of pain and cruelty to the Jewish people. But the way to rectify that is by internally challenging all of the kinds of teachings in the Christian tradition that have generated anti-Semitism and by taking responsibility for that history, not by giving a blank check to Israeli policy -- particularly once you understand that the current Israeli policy is self-destructive and against the best interests of the Jewish people."

Tikkun Community goals

The Tikkun Community founders have established a leadership structure with Lerner serving as the first executive director. A National Advisory Board will select a Council of Spiritual Pathfinders to work with Lerner on a day-to-day basis. In addition to education and organizing around peace for Israel and Palestine, Tikkun leaders have set five other initial goals, which Lerner spells out on their website.

One is building a "network of support" to "create a way for people who are committing themselves to the principles of an Emancipatory Spirituality to be able to learn from and support each other." Practical steps include a yearly week-long gathering and a website forum for members to share their experiences in trying to live out the Tikkun Community vision. The long-term vision includes youth programs, retirement facilities and a matchmaking service ("to create a network for singles to meet each other while actively combating the false ideology that there is something wrong with being single").

A second is the Planetary Consciousness Project, which includes a Media Education Committee and a Religious Education Committee to help promote awareness of global interconnectedness and the threats from climate change and nationalism. It also includes a Campaign for a New Bottom Line, which will work to enlist support for the Social Responsibility Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (a Tikkun proposal that ties renewal of corporate charters to ethical impact assessments).

Thirdly, Tikkun Community members are also asked to volunteer to help conduct and analyze telephone polls which will ask questions designed to elicit people's highest ideals -- as opposed to "narrowly shaped questions asked in public opinion polls shaped by the dominant media" which convince people that they are the only ones who want change.

A fourth goal is the creation of a "network of spiritually oriented professionals and business people who support a new bottom line in the world of work." Suggestions for building it include website sharing, monthly telephone conferences with others in the same field, workplace caucuses, and national conferences.

Finally, the community will establish a National Office to coordinate activities and advance its goals.

Some 3,500 people have joined the Tikkun Community to date -- meaning, at least, that they offer a financial contribution above and beyond the cost of a Tikkun magazine subscription (which all members receive); and, potentially, that they become active in one or more of the Tikkun Community projects. To Lerner, 3,500 people is "minuscule," a small fraction of the numbers he hopes to organize.

"The purpose of the Tikkun Community is to help people recognize each other. If they can recognize each other, they would see that they are much less alone than they thought. The founding conference was an amazing experience of people from many different backgrounds recognizing each other as allies, and that giving people a sense of hope that something could actually be different in the world."

The Witness' associate editor, Marianne Arbogast lives in Detroit, where she is co-manager of a Catholic Worker soup kitchen.

More information on the Tikkun Community can be found on their website, <www.tikkun.org>.