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• W2538595615 abstract "First i must thank you, the people of the Beyt Tikkun community, for the invitation to be with you during these High Holy Days and also for the splendid spirit and warmth with which you have welcomed me to your community and to the Bay Area. I am grateful to you for making me feel at home!I cannot talk with you in this context without also naming the deep tension that I experience in doing so as a follower of that extraordinary first-century Jewish teacher, Jesus of Nazareth. I am painfully aware that my faith forbearers, throughout history and still today, have brutalized and murdered yours. I am particularly aware because I am situated in the Lutheran heritage, and Martin Luther’s violent writings against Jewish people are some of the most vitriolic anti-Semitic writings the world has known. They added fuel to the Holocaust.Learning of that some years ago is one of the reasons that I believe one cannot be faithful to a religious tradition without being highly critical of where it has betrayed itself and the good it seeks to express. So I am situated very critically within Lutheran traditions. Rabbi Lerner once wrote that the Scripture contains both the word of God and the word of human brokenness. Reading that—long before I knew him or Tikkun—was very helpful to me in understanding that religious traditions, including my own, both pass on and betray the good that they seek to know and embody.Human brokenness and betrayal of the good to which we are called gives rise to the profound need for and power of repentance. This need and power bring us to today, Yom Kippur.Let me ask you a question: how many of you have experienced some moments of anguish or grief or anger or hunger to repent when your heart faces the realities of climate change or of economic injustice in our world today?Take a step back in time, if you will, some millions of years. Imagine a world of splendor and abundance beyond belief—a dawn every 24 hours. Sun called forth from indigo sky. Birdsong fills the air. Fragrance wafts from living blossoms in glorious shapes and colors. Drops of glistening water powder the land at the birth of each day. Air shimmers with fluttering leaves. Light rays dance. Luscious fruits hang from trees. Everywhere is breath. Life is birthing.In this fertile circle of life, the weave of interdependence is breathtaking: a radiant ball of energy from eons past issues energy to meet the needs of all. All that dies nurtures life for others. A decaying log nurses her young. Death brings life. Days and planets, creatures and colors are born and die and bring new life. Complexity and simplicity unite.It is a wild, raucous, fire-spewing, earth-quaking, communion of life, joined in the hymn of all creation, praising the Source of all that is. Only one thing surpasses the splendor of this world. It is the radiant love of its Creator embracing Her creation and coursing through it. This world is beloved.In the world’s most recent moments appear creatures of particular consciousness. As all other creatures and elements, these human ones are crafted from the dust of long-past stars, fashioned as community, by community, and for community. They depend for life itself on a web of interrelated beings and elements. Take a moment now to close your eyes and give profound thanks for all of the beings who enable you to breathe this day—hundreds of unseen organisms living in their eyes, hair, and guts, thousands of life forms in a foot of soil, trees of the Amazon Forest.The Source of all, the Holy One, reveals to the human ones their lifework. They are called not only to praise God but to love. Forever beloved by God, they are to receive God’s gift of liberating, healing love, allowing it to work through them to transform whatever thwarts God’s gift of abundant life for all. They are created to be lovers—offering to God, self, others, and the entire creation the marvelous and mysterious love that they are fed by the Great Mystery who gives them life. For by so doing, they are given, in the image of that Mystery, hearts of infinite compassion. And—as you well know—they are given ten guides or principles or rules for living. All are grounded in one firm foundation: You shall love your god (Deut. 6:5) and “love your neighbor” (Lev. 19:18). This norm of love is a gift to the world from the Torah and the prophets of ancient Israel. It is a particular kind of love centered in liberating justice. According to this norm of love, Earth’s bounty is sufficient to provide for all, but only if no one accumulates too much.However, rejecting God’s guides for living, some of the human creatures crafted contrary rules. The new rules enable a few—largely descendants of Europe—to use most of Earth’s bounty, and to use it up at deadly cost to countless others around the globe. The species created for justice-making love now lives the opposite. They—or rather, we—live in strata. For those on the bottom, “poverty means death.”1 The pathos of our situation stuns. We, the few who consume far more than our fair share of Earth’s bounty, are complicit in ecocide and brutal economic injustice—not by intent or will, but by virtue of the economic and political structures that shape our lives.Humankind now hovers on a precipice. One side of the precipice—continuing unchecked and unaccountable corporate and finance power to maximize consumption and the use of fossil fuels—does not look good. The other side, however, is the potential before us: the vision that we all hold—in varied forms—of a world in which 1) all people have the necessities for life with dignity and 2) Earth’s life-systems flourish.In the words of the Torah: The Holy One “set before [the human ones] life and death, blessings and curses,” and commanded them to “choose life so that you and your descendants may live” (Deut. 30). They have chosen death. Unknowingly, unintentionally, blindingly, they have chosen for the living world, death. They alone now threaten Earth’s capacity to sustain life.This great choice is before us now—ways of life or ways of death. The choice of life requires radical change on all levels of being. Where something great is required of humankind, something great is required of religion. The task of religion in the early twenty-first century (the end of the petroleum era) is to plumb the depths of our religions traditions for the moral-spiritual wisdom and power to answer this calling.We must bring the gifts of varied religious traditions into conversation with each other and with other bodies of human knowledge in the quest for a just and sustainable way of being human. Judaism, it seems to me, offers myriad gifts to the world for this great work of our day. We look briefly at two.The first is the call to repentance—the gift of Yom Kippur. As taught by your rabbi, Michael Lerner, this is not a call to guilt or self-flagellation. Rather it is a call to turn the other direction, to turn back to God from the idols of accumulation, consumption, addiction to fossil fuels and such.What would it mean to turn away from ways of life that are killing people the world over? What would enable us to embody repentance as radical resistance to systems of economic and ecological violence, and as lived commitment to build more just and sustainable alternatives?One potent tool for such repentance is what I call “critical mystical vision.” By this I mean a mode of vision that sees three things at once.The first is seeing “what is,” especially social structural sin where it parades as good or where we are seduced into ignoring or denying it. That is, we are called to see and understand more fully the forms of ecological devastation and social exploitation that pervade what may look like a good life.Daring to see the impact of our collective lives draws us into a stark landscape—a terrain from which we would far rather flee. But please have the courage to go with me into the region of social sin or structural sin. I do promise that this is not where we will end up in my comments today. The great truth shaping all that I say is the surmounting power of God’s liberating healing presence, at-one-ment. Repentance is one step toward it.So we step with courage to see the unprecedented two-fold moral crisis now facing us as a result of the practices and public policies that shape our daily lives. The first fold is ecological. The Torah teaches that God created a fruitful, fecund Earth—a planet that spawns and supports life with a complexity and generosity beyond human knowledge. Fundamental to Jewish faith is the claim that it is “good” (Genesis 1). According to Genesis’ first creation story, “God saw that it was tov.” The Hebrew tov, while often translated as “good,” also implies “life-furthering.” And God said time and again that this creation was tov—a good that is life-furthering.Here we arrive at a haunting theological problem. The primal act of God—creation—is not merely to create a magnificent world. This God creates a magnificently life-furthering world. The scandalous point is this: we are undoing that very “tov,” Earth’s life-generating capacity. We—or, rather, some of us—are “uncreating.” Indeed, one young and dangerous species has become a threat to Earth’s life-generating capacity. The credible scientific community is of one accord about this basic reality.Less widely accepted, however, is a corollary point of soul-searing moral importance. It is this: the horrific consequences of climate change and other forms of ecological degradation are not suffered equally by Earth’s people. Nor are the world’s people equally responsible. Those least responsible for the Earth crisis are suffering and dying first and foremost from it.Here we have moved into that ominous link between ecological degradation and social injustice and the second fold of the moral crisis shaping our world today: the social justice impacts of ecological degradation. Eco-justice is the term used to designate this nexus of social and ecological.It was in India that I realized more fully the extent that race-based and class-based climate injustice permeates our lives. Climate change may be the most far-reaching manifestation of white privilege and class privilege yet to face humankind. What do I mean? Climate change is caused overwhelmingly by the world’s high-consuming people who are disproportionately descendants of Europe. Yet, it is wreaking death and destruction first and foremost on impoverished people who also are disproportionately people of color. The now nearly 25 million climate refugees are primarily Asian and African. That number will increase dramatically and will represent overwhelmingly people of Asia, Africa, and low-lying Pacific Islands. The Maldives, for example, a nation of islands no more than a mile wide, is threatened with loss of its entire landmass due to rising seas. Martin Parry, chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPPC) Working Group II, declares: “The people most affected by climate change are and will be those living in developing countries . . . and within those regions it will be the poor that will be most affected.”2 Even a slight degree of warming decreases the yield of the world’s food staples—wheat, corn, barley, rice—in seasonally dry areas.3 Subsistence farmers and people with little money will go hungry. We will not. Coastal peoples without resources to protect against and recover from the fury of climate-related weather disasters are not the people largely responsible for gas emissions. Nor are they, for the most part, white.Many voices of the Global South recognize this as climate debt (or climate colonialism). In theological terms, these are manifestations of “social sin.” The prayer of Al Cheyt in which we have named were we have “missed the mark,” is calling us to confess such social sin.Enough—danger lurks.Facing realities such as these breeds despair and powerlessness. To acknowledge the widespread suffering that may be linked to my material abundance would be tormenting. How could I live with the knowledge if I truly took it in? And if I dare to see, then I view also the power and complexity of structural injustice and the relative insignificance of individual efforts at change. Where would I find the moral-spiritual power to transgress tidal waves of cultural, political, and economic force pushing to maintain the way things are? A sense of inevitability may suck away at hope.I speak straight from the heart here. As a young person, when I first learned about social sin or social injustice—especially U.S. economic imperialism—I fell into profound despair that lasted for a long time. In making my way out of that despair I learned that seeing “what is” is dangerous and unwise unless that form of vision is accompanied by a second and a third.The second is seeing “what could be”—more just and sustainable alternatives. This means attuning ourselves to the movements, groups, and people—both distant and near—who are working in multiple ways toward more just and sustainable societies. These efforts remain largely unknown to much of the American public because they are not highlighted in the public discourse. They include the work of Tikkun magazine and the Network of Spiritual Progressives to promote a “New Bottom Line” and a constitutional amendment that will—among other things—rescind the rights of personhood granted to corporations and take big money out of elections. Work toward alternatives also includes fair trade channels, vital and growing networks of small local business, grassroots resistance to unfettered fossil fuel extraction, eco-theology, greening synagogues, mosques, and churches, boycotts, demonstrations and civil disobedience, alternative energy sources, urban gardening, carbon neutral towns and cities, local agriculture, socially and environmentally conscious investing, and a host of other examples. You of Beyt Tikkun Synagogue are part of that vast movement. Seeing the outpouring of creative alternatives—its power as a global movement—is vital to critical vision. A Chinese proverb cautions, “unless we change direction, we will get where we are going.” Changing direction begs first recognizing, even dimly, alternative viable destinations. This is the second form of seeing in critical mystical vision.The third mode of vision is recognizing the transformative and repairing presence of the Holy One, coursing throughout all of creation, and working within it to repair and transform this world. That is, acknowledging sacred powers at work in the cosmos enabling life and love ultimately to reign over death and destruction. I call this “mystical vision.”“Critical mystical vision,” then, is a phrase to signify the union of vision in these three forms:Seeing “what is going on,” and especially unmasking systemic evil that masquerades as good.Seeing “what could be,” that is, alternatives.Seeing ever more fully the sacred transforming and healing Spirit of life coursing throughout creation and leading it—despite all evidence to the contrary—into abundant life for all.My point is that this three-fold vision is crucial for repentance. That is because we cannot repent of cruelty and injustice unless we admit that it exists and that we are part of it. Acquiescing to the way things are in this climate-violent and economically violent society, rather than repenting, resisting, and building alternatives, is so very easy precisely because—failing to see clearly the full reality of the horror—we fail to repent. Said differently, the seductive lure of the way things are is so fierce, so mesmerizing, so seemingly impenetrable because we do not fully see the depth of the crisis and, in particular, the extent to which those who “suffer most acutely [from climate change] are also those who are least responsible for the crisis to date.”Judaism brings to our perilous situation of climate change and gross economic violence the call to repent—to repent collectively for our collective wrongdoing. Judaism issues this call straight from the heart of its High Holy Days—and offers powerful rituals to guide people in this repentance. It may be a necessary step toward freedom from social sin—and climate sin in particular. We can repent only if we honestly see: 1) What is going on, 2) More just and sustainable alternatives already in the making, and 3) The transformative power of the universe at play, including in our communities of repentance and resistance. Judaism has at its heart the crucial task of holding these three in one lens. Vision of this sort is subversive because it reveals a future in the making and breeds hope for moving into it.Jewish traditions offer a second gift to the great work of our day. That gift is the great norm of love, understood not only as an interpersonal virtue but as an ecological–economic calling. We began these comments with God’s call to the human creature—heard in Torah—to love God, neighbor, self, and the created world. Two millennia of people in the heritage of Sarah and Abraham have sought to understand and heed this calling “to love the Lord your God” (Deut. 6:5), and “to love your neighbor as yourself” (Lev. 19:18). Our responsibility as people of faith, Martin Luther King, Jr., declared, “is to discover the meaning of this command and seek passionately to live it out in our daily lives.”4 What love is and requires is a great moral question permeating Jewish as well as Christian history.The question for us takes new form: what does love mean for the world’s high consumers if we are, through climate change, killing people and threatening Earth’s God-given capacity to generate life? Never before in this three—or four millennia-old faith tradition have the stakes in heeding our calling been so high.If sin is structural—not only individual—then so, too, is the force that counters sin: love. Love in our day takes structural form, as it did in the texts of Torah and the Prophets. More specifically, today love in its structural form becomes ecological as well as economic and political. This means that love is lived out not only in how we treat one another but in how we shape our business practices and the corporate world, our institutions, our public policy. To illustrate, love itself may beckon us to seek a constitutional amendment to limit corporate powers, or demand water justice in California, or stand up against racism in the criminal injustice system, or work for climate reparations, or counter free trade treaties that really bring freedom to exploit.In closing, it is an astounding moment in history to be people who serve the God revealed in the Hebrew Prophets, the Torah, and the Wisdom writings, and in the life-transforming, world-mending Spirit of tikkun olam that is present with and within us, and that speaks in winds and waters calling mountains to bear witness and skyscapes to sing.Today U.S. citizens of relative economic privilege bear a sacred calling. It is to reverse a fiercely compelling trajectory of climate violence linked to economic injustice. That is, we are called to resist ways of life and power structures that generate climate change and its disproportionate impact on the world’s already impoverished people, and to rebuild Earth-serving, justice-seeking ways of being human in the twenty-first century. Will the people of this synagogue step up to the plate? Will we heed the calling?My purpose in these comments is to nurture among us all, myself included, moral-spiritual power to repent of what we are doing to the Earth and its vulnerable people by the way that we live, and then—with joy and courage born of faith in the transformative power of the universe, the power known by some as God, Yud Hey Vav Hey, or Allah—to change direction and, in the words of Torah, to “choose life” so that we and our descendants might live." @default.
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