Rabbi Says Karma may have a role in Tsunami

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God and Tsunami and the Goodness in Human Beings that forms the Basis for Radical Hope

"the answer from karma or universal justice"Note: forwarded message attached.

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Rabbi Michael Lerner magazine

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God and Tsunami and the Goodness in Human Beings that forms the Basis for Radical Hope

Mon, 3 Jan 2005 15:04:50 -0500 (EST)

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God and Tsunami and the Goodness in Human Beings That Provides A Basis for Radical Hope

Greetings!

In the midst of grieving for the horrible losses of life and collectiing monies

to help the victims, I received a note on the Ask The Rabbi section of Tikkun's

website (www.tikkun.org). He asked: how could God have allowed this to happen?

Most religions seem to imply that their is order and reason which guide the

events of the world. Yet, my questioner pointed out, the recent tragedies in

South and Southeast Asia and a range of other unfair things in the world make

these notions of order and reason very problematic and unacceptable.

My answer follows.

Let me start with this: I don't know. I think that whatever else I say below, I

want to start with the fact that I do not know, that there is a limitation of

knowledge and understanding built into being a human being at this stage in the

develoment of the consciousness of the universe. I was not there when the

foundations of the universe were being put together-and that is a point that

was made to in the Book of Job long ago when he similarly questioned the way

the universe works. Having said that, I want to consider several lines of

possible response, as long as you understand that I know that these are NOT

ANSWERS but only responses to the question as you pose it. The difference is

this: an answer seeks to dissolve the question, a response recognizes the

ongoing validity of the question and seeks to remain in connection with it.

1. I'll start with a response I have some (but not 100%) sympathy with, but

which I think deserves some contnuing attention-the answer from karma or

universal justice, and it goes like this: The tectonic moves of the earth are

part of a totally integrated moral system that has been in place since the

earth began to evolve. That moral system, described by the Bible, tells us that

the physical world will be unable to function in a peaceful and gentle way until

the moral/spiritual dimension manifest in the behavior of God's creatures

coheres with God's will: that is, is filled with justice, peace, generosity and

kindness. The earth is a biological/ethical/spiritual unity, and its functioning

is in accord with its aspirations toward consciousness, love, enviromental

sensitivity, generosity, and social justice but when there are contradictions

or constraints in the development of love, consciousness, environmental

sensitivity, social justice, and generosity then there is a malfunction which

eventually manifests in physical disorders, whether they be disease or whether

they be earthquakes or tornadoes or floods or other disruptions of nature. This

is basically the point of the Bible's account of the plagues facing Egypt, but

now working on a global level. As the Torah makes clear, this karmic order

doesn't happen on a one-to-one basis: i.e. it isn't as if everyone who suffered

in the plagues of Egypt was directly responsible for the enslavement and

oppression of Jewish slaves, and the Torah's claim that if we do not create a

society based on love, kindness, generosity, justice and peace we will face

ecological disaster is not a claim that each person who suffers from ths

disaster will be equally responsible for the moral disorder that generated the

ecological crisis. But what the Torah is implying is this: there is noone alive

on the planet who doesn't have some part of the responsibility for the craziness

that manifests in lack of justice, kindness, generosity, peace and love. We are

all ONE, and that means the totality of the moral craziness is our collective

responsibility, and the environmental dysfunction that that moral craziness

produces will eventually impact on all of us alike. Now, if you answer, "but

why strike the weak in SouthEast Asia and not the strong in the US?" the answer

might be, "it will happen here as well, has been happening in many ways already

in the form of cancer epidemics and other environmental diseases," but it might

also be, "we are all one, and when the earth is morally dysfunctional the

tectonic movement of its plates manifests all over and not in ways that we can

directly correlate in a one to one relationship with who did the latest moral

outrage and where." An analogy: when we inhale and eat various environmental

poisions which we ourselves created in the factories of advanced industrial

societies, they may eventually cause cancer of the liver or the kidneys or the

stomach. Now imagine a stomach or liver cell making the following argument: "It

wasn't me who took in this cancer-causing material, but the brain, the mouth,

the hands-so it is unfair that I should be suffering when it was done by these

other organs!" Well, I guess it has a case to be made, but only on the

supposition that the liver cell or the kidney or stomach cell isn't part of the

same unity as the hand, brain or mouth that ingested the poison in the first

place. In any event, this is the current form of the argument that there is in

fact a karmic explanation for what is happening today that should alert us to

the need to do immediate tikkun olam to bring the world into a lasting harmony.

[one other objection to consider to this: how can the deaths of tens of

thousands be seen as a result of global injustice, which after all is so much

of a lesser offense than this massive death caused by the tsunami? Well, if we

could measure justice by numbers involved, then the objection is completely

misguided. According to a U.N. report issued a few weeks ago, the results of

which should be familiar to all of you who regularly receive Tikkun Mail where

these results were summarized, over 29,000 children die every single day as a

result of malnutrition and diseases related to inadequate food,health care, and

other socially constructed problem. More on this below.]

2. But will there really be no earthquakes in the messianic era

-the period when human beings create our institutiions based on love,

generosity, environmental sensitivity, kindness, compassion for all life,

social justice, non-violence nd peace? The first point above needs to claim

that that is how it will be, but I'm not sure that that is true. So if it is

not, then we need to reject the notion that everything that happens has a

divine cause. We need not reject that there is a karmic order such as is

described in point one, only that it does not explain IT DOES NOT EXPLAIN

EVERYTHING. But, if it doesn't, the questioner can legitimately ask, how do we

understand the nature of God? My answer here is very tentative, because I know

how very little I can possibly know about the ultimate reality of the universe.

So what I say must be filled with the crude level of understanding that we

humans have gotten to at this point in the evolution of consciousness. But here

is what I would say (Ideas developed partially in my previous books,

particularly Jewish Renewal: A Path to Healing and Transformation, and in

Spirit Matters: Global Healing and the Wisdom of the Soul, and which will be

further developed in a book that I'm writing now for which I have not yet found

a publisher: Global Judaism and Universal Healing of the Planet):

First, stop thinking of God as some big man up in heaven sitting there and

making individual judgments about who shall live and who shall die, where he

should put a tsunami and where he should put a beautiful sunset. Instead,

understand God as THE FORCE OF HEALING AND TRANSFORMATION IN THE UNIVERSE, the

aspect of the universe that is the source of love, kindness, generosity, social

justice, peace and evolving consciousness, and that this aspect of the universe

permeates every ounce of being, every cell, and unifies all being as it moves

the beiing of the universe toward greater and greater levels of love and

connection and consciousness, and makes possible the transcending of that which

is toward that which ought to be. Seen this way, God is not the all-powerful

being that determines every moment of creation, but rather the part of creation

aspiring toward love, kindness, generosity, peace, and social justice which is

evolving toward greater power to shape our common destiny to the extent that we

choose to embody it more fully. Heresy, you say? Only if your conception of God

derives from a Greek notion of the All-Knowing, All Powerful Unmoved Mover-a

conception which at times has seeped into and shaped medieval theologies of

Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, but which isn't the only possible way to

understand God. If, on the other hand, we take our cues from parts of Torah

that think of God as bemoaning the choices that human beings made, even at

times thinking that maybe S/He made a mistake in creating humans, or as weeping

over the consequences of Diaspora (Shechina, the Divine presence, going into

Exile with the Jews according to one midrash), or as sufferiing from the

consequences of human choices, or the Christian vision of God as needing to

suffer on the Cross, then you get a different and more vulnerable vision of

God, one more in accord with the notion of God not as the one responsible for

everything that happens, but as an emerging voice of compassion and love in the

midst of a world not totally under His/Her control.In that case, and this

conception aligns more closely to what I understand with my limited

understanding, God is joining us in mourning for the victims of the Tsunami,

not its cause. Or, to put it another way, God is the part of Being (including

the part of us) that is yearning for a world in which this kind of suffering

will be diminished and in which those parts of the suffering that can't be

stopped will be accompanied by responses of generosity and kindness.

The GOOD NEWS OF THE TSUNAMI:

Look at the worldwide outcry of pain and concern about the victims of this

terrible tragedy, and the universal response of people trying to help, donate

money, time, energy to supporting the victims. From every corner of the world

people are standing up and acting in generous and kind ways. This is the

foundation for our Tikkun Community position of Radical Hope. When people are

freed momentarily from the societal constraints laid upon them by the cynical

realist worldview that tells them they would be foolish to be altruistic

because everyone around them is goiing to take advantage of them should they

act on any such "utopian" or "adolescent" fantasies that the world is made up

of good people, when they are no longer being told by the media that "the

other" is really an "enemy" that is just waitiing for a chance to hurt us, then

watch how generously they act! This aspiration toward goodness, generosity, care

for the stranger whom we have never met and who will never give us a "return on

our investment" of caring--this is the aspect of human nature that is totally

obscured and denied by contemporary capitalist culture, as it has previously

been obscured and denied by every previously existing ruling elite and their

religious/

philosphical/social theory ideologies. When there are no such social, religious,

political, or other constraints, when the society momentarily lets down its

demands that everyone be a cynical realist, then what pops out from only an

inch below the surface of our collective consciousness is a huge amount of

compassion, generosity, love and caring for others, caring for the stranger,

etc. That is why I interpret the Torah's injunction "You shall love the

stranger" not solely as a commandment, but also and most importantly as a

prediction of what will happen when we build a world based on our highest

understanding of what it means to be created in the image of God.

DOWNSIDE of THIS MOMENTARY UPSURGE OF CARING: Nothing is ever just one thing and

not something else as well--all of reality is filled with both A and Not A,

because the laws of logic are not a satisfactory description of the way the

world really is. So, yes, there is tremendous amount of caring. But there is

another truth: the powerful only allow this caring to be expressed when there

is no conceivable link to changing their global class structure and the

elaborate systems of oppression that they've set up. Let me explain:

The powerful have decided to make this the headline story in every newspaper and

every news broadcast on television, radio, and webcast. No wonder they are able

to get the world's attention, and once there, and with appropriate cues that it

is allowed for us to be generous, the generosity that is REALLY ALWAYS THERE

pours forth from all humanity.

But a few weeks ago I forwarded you a UN report that told you that on average

over 29,000 children die every single day from preventable malnutrition and

disease.

The media gave this almost no attention when it was revealed.

Imagine if every day the headlines in every newspaper in the world and every

television show was: "29,000 children died yesterday from preventable diseases

and malnutrition" and then the rest of the stories alternated between detailed

personal accounts of families where this devestation was taking place, and side

bar features detailing what was happening in advanced industrial countries, like

this: "all this suffering was happening while the wealthiest people in the world

enjoyed excesses of food, worried about how to lose weight because they eat too

much, spent monies trying to convince farmers not to grow too much food for

fear that doing so would drive down prices, and were cutting the taxes of their

wealthiest rather than seeking to redistribute their excess millions of dollars

of personal income." If the story were told that way every day, the goodness of

human beings would rebel quickly against these social systems that made all this

suffering possible, suffering far far far far far in excess of all the suffering

caused by tsunamis and other natural disasters (if there really are such things

as "natural" disasters--point no. one above questioned that separation between

the natural and the spiritual). If we were being told this true story every

day, we'd quickly find that the progressive forces seeking a new global reality

would come to power in democratic elections, and that the ideas that we in The

Tikkun Community propose, like the Social Responsibility Amendment to the US

Constitution (corporations with incomes of $50 million/yr or more must get a

new corporate charter once every ten years, and will only be granted to those

which can prove to a jury of ordinary citizens a satisfactory history of social

responsibility), the Global Marshall Plan (let the U.S. lead the advanced

industrial societies in a global consortium dedicating 5% of their combined GNP

each year for the next twenty years to alleviating hunger, homelessness,

poverty, inadequate education and inadequate health care), and the Sabbatical

Year (every one on the planet stop producing goods one year out of every seven

and we all engage in collective reflection on how we want to remake our

world--described more fully in Spirit Matters) would no longer seem

"unrealistic" to most people on the planet, but immediate survival necessities.

CONCLUSION: those who despair are mistaken--the goodness of humanity is just on

the verge of being released, and our task is to find the best way to facilitate

that development. The point is that we are never encouraged to show caring for

the kinds of problems we could actually deal with through collective

restructuring of the world's economic and political arrangements--because that

would threaten the interests of the powerful. So they are all too glad to

divert our attention to the disasters that can't be changed, and to channeling

our anger into anger at God instead of anger at our social system. And this, I

might add, is the limit on how we are encouraged to respond. All the newspapers

tell us how to make individual donations to relief agencies, and we at TIKKUN

100% support your doing just that. For example, we endorse giving money through

:American Jewish World Service, Asia Tsunami Relief, 45 West 36th Street, 10th

Floor, New York, NY 10018, 800- 889-7146. However, we also know that there has

been little willingness to make demands on the governments ofthe advanced

industrial societies to make serious levels of contributions. In light of a

comment made criticizing the stinginess of US efforts, the State Dept.

announced a decision to increase aid by $20 million, when adequate aid would be

in the tens of billions of dollars (still far less than what President Bush will

be seeking to pursue his insane and destructive and immoral war on the people of

Iraq). As long as the focus is on our individual donations, and not on

governments using their huge resources to provide adequate levels of relief and

rebuilding, the powerful are happy to focus on this particular disaster while

leaving the socially constructed disasters of the globalization of their

economic system out of the picture and out of our attention.

In any event, I hope you understand that these reflections are put forward in a

spirit of humility, because I do not really claim to understand, and yet still

feel that it is important to begin this discussion with those who are asking

deep questions about the current disaster. I apologize in advance to those who

hold different conceptions of God, or certainty that there is no God, and ask

that even with these differences please let us work together to bring about the

world of loving-kindness that we seek in The Tikkun Community, because all of

these differences are welcome, and our community is not one based on one

"correct line" about God or the absence of God, because every form of theology

and every form of atheism are still welcome within our community, as long as

you remain committed to our fundamental belief: that we can and should build a

New Bottom Line of love, caring, generosity, ecological sensitivity, awe and

wonder at the grandeur of all that is, and celebration of all th3e goodness in

the universe (even as we mourn for and do our best to alleviate all the

unnecessary suffering).

It's not too late to help Tikkun spread its message and do the work we are

doing--spreading our message of hope, building a Progressive Spiritual

Activism, building the support for Middle East Peace and reconciliation,

supporting our campaign for ethical consumption in the U.S.and the advanced

industrial societies and for a Global Marshall Plan to alleviate world hunger

and homelessness and poverty, supporting our campaign to challenge the economic

forces that have created global warming, and supporting our campaign for a New

Bottom Line in all our economic, political and social institutions.

Please send a tax-deductible contribution now--

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P.s. Some people wonder why these messages get accompanied by requests for

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backing.

Try to imagine for a second how very little I like asking for money. It pains me

to have to do this--because I wish I lived in a world where money had been

abolished and each of us just voluntarily gave our energies to each other,

shared food and resources and talents freely, etc. Unfortunately, till we get

there, we at Tikkun need to ask for your support. So please act now--either to

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Warmest regards for a

Happy New

Year to all who observe this New Year as a holiday!!

Let peace prevail on earth, let this year see an

end to the war in Iraq, the genocide in Darfur, and

the Occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, massive funding to rebuild all that

has been destoryed in wake of the Tsunami--

and the

beginning of a new awakening of the world toward

greater and greater levels of kindness, generosity

and love, and a recognition that we are all one,

that our well-being depends on the well being of

everyone else on the planet.

Rabbi Michael Lerner

The Tikkun Community

 

email:

rabbilerner (AT) tikkun (DOT) org

phone:

510-644-1200

web:

http://www.tikkun.org

 

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