An Orgy of Inclusiveness

By BEZALEL STERN

TIKKUN READER
20^th Anniversary Edition
By Michael Lerner
256 pages. Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc. $24.95.

Tikkun Magazine. In the Jewish world, the name alone often conjures almost visceral reactions. This is primarily due to the magazine’s outspoken and often unequivocally controversial positions on Israel. Many American Jews view Tikkun as an increasingly radical and potentially radicalizing force that legitimizes, among other perfidies, Palestinian aggression against Israel. Others believe that the magazine—with its stated goals of viewing all humans (read: Palestinians) as equal to all others (read: Jews)—stands as a voice of reason perhaps unparalleled in the American Jewish establishment. In other words, practically no Jew in America today would fail take a position on Tikkun, and that position would almost certainly relate to that hypothetical Jew’s political and ideological stance.

But I would like to ignore the 900-pound gorilla that is Tikkun’s position on Israel for a moment. This is, of course, practically impossible, which is unfortunate, because outside of the magazine’s dangerously naïve stance towards Israel and the Palestinians, Tikkun has much to offer. Much of what is refreshing as well as some of what is ridiculous about the magazine can be found in a new collection of writings from its pages.

The Tikkun Reader, surprisingly, is for the most part an uncontroversial read. Much of the book—and practically everything in it that is intellectually satisfying—is made up of commentaries on the modern spiritual experience, mostly from a left-wing spiritualist perspective. Michael Lerner, the co-founder and editor of the magazine, is entirely correct when he writes in the book’s introduction that the Left of this country has largely ignored the spiritual longings of a generation, and, in doing so, alienated a significant segment of the population. Tikkun has tried for 20 years to fill this spiritual void.

Thus, the Reader contains numerous articles on spiritual environmentalism, on making modern Judaism meaningful, on a postmodern-but-still-religious understanding of God. This is where Tikkun, as a magazine, most often succeeds. How does one, to give an example, deal with the wisdoms of an ancient tradition when, as Arthur Green puts it in his illuminating article: “Scientists are the new kabbalists of our age”? What do you do, in other words, when you are confronted with new horizons, and new possibilities, for which the old answers no longer function? Answers to questions like these are hardly simple, and it is in these complexities that the magazine shines.

Unfortunately, when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, complexity almost completely drifts away. The section of the Reader on the conflict is composed of article after article outlining the faults of the Israelis, while virtually ignoring the vast accomplishments of the Jewish democracy in the Middle East. The articles on Israel range from the ridiculous to the naïve. While confirming, over and over, that Israeli checkpoints, for example, are evil, and a sign of the utter depravity imposed upon the Palestinian populace (the checkpoints, in an article by Cherie Brown, are seen as a touchstone of the harshness of life in the West Bank), the articles included in the Reader never bother to explain why those checkpoints may be necessary. You’ll never hear, in this Reader, that checkpoints are sometimes the only thing that protects innocent civilians from men and women who strap explosives to their belts.

It is surprising, to me, that a magazine that can be so open-minded in its understanding of religion, in its virtual orgy of inclusiveness of all faiths and streams of belief and identification within those faiths, can be so biased and myopic when it comes to this issue. I find it hard to understand how Michael Lerner—still the editorial force behind the magazine—who seems to be so adept at displaying open-mindedness, continues to delude himself into thinking that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a David and Goliath situation, with the Palestinians forever playing the part of the beleaguered Israelite.

But Tikkun doesn’t falter solely in its political understandings. Even some of the spiritualist pieces can seem a bit silly. The final piece in the book, “Millennial Possibilities” by Neale Walsch, is a bit of New Age claptrap that reads like it came out of the pages of a fly-by-night cult. “Though I am very hopeful about the twenty-first century,” Walsch writes, “the reality of change at an exponential rate is already producing social, political, and spiritual chaos in our lives. That chaos will increase in the next twenty years. But the chaos is good and will be followed by rapid advancement for the human race.”

That Lerner chooses to end his retrospective of his magazines’ first 20 years with “Millennial Possibilities”strikes me as somewhat odd. He may mean well, but Walsch writes likes a nut. Could it be possible that in his spiritualistic fervor Lerner lost his way, that in trying to create a left-wing religious movement he found the New Age cult that he writes, in his introduction, that he was trying so desperately to avoid? I, for one, am not sure; but I’m not drinking any of Lerner’s kool-aid.