Many of us are involved in or greatly admire the accomplishments of social change movements like the peace movement, the women's movement, the environmental movement, the movement for economic justice, the civil rights movement, the gay rights movement, the labor movement, struggles for civil liberties, and the disability rights movement, to name just a few. And yet, we believe that these movements have tended to underplay or even deny a very important dimension of human life—the spiritual dimension. And this deficit has limited the potential impact that all these movements could have. It will take a very different kind of movement—one founded on and giving central focus to a spiritual vision--to create a real alternative to the political Right, to the fundamentalists (religious and political), and to our society’s ethos of selfishness, materialism, and cynicism.

We seek to create that alternative. We are a community of people from many faiths and traditions, called together by TIKKUN magazine and its vision of healing and transforming our world. We include in this call both the outer transformation needed to achieve social justice, ecological sanity, and world peace, and the inner healing needed to foster loving relationships, a generous attitude toward the world and toward others unimpeded by the distortions of our egos. Our movement will encourage a habit of generosity and trust, and the ability to respond to the grandeur of creation with awe, wonder and radical amazement.

We are guided in our work by our belief in the principle of solidarity. For us, this principle has spiritual roots in the Jewish commandment to remember that we were all slaves in Egypt; we believe that we are all harmed by oppression directed at any group or individual. This is a message which is common to most of the religious and spiritual traditions of the human race for the past several thousand years, and is part of the tradition also of many secular and even "orthodox atheist" groups that came into existence in the past few hundred years when the religious and spiritual communities that supposedly were committed to these values actually failed to take them seriously and became, instead, embedded in economic and political realities that were oppressive.

We in the Tikkun Community use the word "spiritual" to include all those whose deepest values lead them to challenge the ethos of selfishness and materialism that has led people into a frantic search for money and power and away from a life that places love, kindness, generosity, peace, non-violence, social justice, awe and wonder at the grandeur of creation, thanksgiving, humility and joy at the center of our lives. We believe that many of the secular movements that exist in the world today actually have deep spiritual underpinnings, but often they are themselves unaware of those foundations, unable or unwilling to articulate them and sometimes even holding a knee-jerk antagonism to explicit spiritual or religious language. This antagonism limits their effectiveness, though it derives from legitimate anger at the way that the language of spirituality and religion has been sometimes used to justify war, oppression, sexism, racism, homophobia, ecological indifference, or insensitivity to the suffering of the poor and the homeless of the world. Solidarity means that we affirm our responsibility towards each other within our families, within our nation, and within our spiritual/religious community—and also beyond the narrow boundaries of ethnicity, religion, and geography. We affirm the obligation to actively resist injustice and refuse to take part in it even when we can't prove that our resistance will produce change. In solidarity with the oppressed, we wish to see the democratization of economic and political institutions and a redistribution of wealth so that all people can share equally and sustainably in the benefits of the planet. We hope to have the courage--in the tradition of the Jewish prophets and interpreters of Torah, in the spirit of Jesus and the early Christian communities of resistance to Rome, in the spirit of Muhammed, in the spirit of the activists of the labor & civil rights and feminist and gay rights movements—to speak truth to power. Tikkun is a Jewish magazine, but the Tikkun Community is an interfaith organization (and welcoming to agnostics and orthodox atheists as well).

At the same time, we will challenge the lack of a spiritual dimension in the agendas of our allies in progressive social change movements. That gap has allowed the Right to present itself as the force that cares about spiritual issues. And the Left’s failure to address spirituality has led many to believe their hunger for a larger framework of meaning and purpose must be separated from their involvement with social transformation.

Social change activity gets focused on a narrow political agenda that lacks the depth that can inspire sustained commitment or nourishing involvement. Imagine an international group of people who would see themselves as allies to each other in advancing this way of thinking, people who are unashamedly utopian and willing to fight for their highest ideals, yet unashamedly humble in knowing that we don't know all that we need to know to do the healing that needs to be done.

Imagine that this group would help each other in our individual as well as group activities, affirming what is good and brainstorming with us about how to create a movement that gives equal priority to our inner lives and to social justice, that takes loving and caring as serious goals for social healing, and that rejects the utilitarian and materialistic assumptions of the contemporary world and actively fosters awe and wonder in its participants. Imagine that you could be part of creating that.

You can—by helping us create the TIKKUN Community. The TIKKUN Community starts from this fundamental recognition: The sources of external injustice, suffering, and ecological numbness are to be found not only in economic and political arrangements, but also in our alienation from one another, in our inability to experience and recognize ourselves and each other as holy, in our inability to respond to the call of the universe which bids us to deeper levels of consciousness and love, and in our inability to overcome our own egos and see ourselves as part of the Unity of All Being.

We need a spiritual consciousness along with a political consciousness if we are to heal and transform the world. Some of us in the TIKKUN Community are atheists or secularists, some of us belong to traditional religious communities, some of us are just beginning to work out our relationship to Spirit. But all of us understand that we need a movement that can address spiritual needs.

 It is our contention that social change and inner change go hand in hand. We are building a movement in which we can talk about love and caring for each other--and this is the only way we can overcome the old left/right dichotomies and dead policy debates that fill academic journals, leftie magazines, the insipid television confrontations between shouting talkiing heads, the vacuity of so many of the speeches at leftie anti-war demonstrations, and the rhetoric of elected officials. For too long these predictable slogans and divisions have paralyzed American politics and made most of us feel like withdrawing into a purely personal life. At this moment, we are particularly excited by and supportive of the upsurge of social justice activism aimed both at promoting environmental sanity and at challenging the destructive impact of globalization. But we hope to play a role in deepening those and other social change movements to integrate into their core the kind of spiritual awareness that can make it possible for them to reach a much wider audience and thus be able to actually achieve their social justice goals.

To do so we must talk at a far deeper level than merely repeating or reframing the traditional leftist demands for economic and political rights. While we support those demands and thus welcome any advances that provide adequate food, clothing, shelter, health care, child care, and other basic rights, we also believe that these will only be won on a global level when the social change movements are able to address the spiritual consequences of the triumph of corporate globalization: a society-wide depression and repression of what we can variously call the life-force, eros, God-energy or Spirit.

Please note that this is very different from those who talk about spiritual politics but actually mean only this: that it would be politically advantageous and opportune to take the traditional liberal agenda and dress it up with some spiritual or “values” language. So they take the existing liberal/left agenda, with its primary focus on social justice, inclusion of those who have been left out, economic redistribution, and peace—and then they find some Biblical quotes to bolster the case for the pre-existing liberal/progressive agenda. We support all that, but our movement goes much deeper. We don’t believe that the liberal agenda can be won simply by reframing it in spiritual language. For a large section of the American public, the primary source of pain in their lives is not about economic deprivation or non-inclusion, but about the way that the ethos of selfishness and materialism plays out in their personal lives and in the lives of people around them in ways that are destructive and feel terrible. They can’t stand being part of the manipulative, narrowly utilitarian way people treat each other and themselves and the earth. They want a framework of meaning to their lives and to the lives of those around them that speaks of higher meaning to life, shows a path to a life that is not only about maximizing money but about maximizing a meaningful life—in short, they want and need a politics of meaning, and need a meaning-oriented movement that can counter the spiritual depression that surrounds them. Our challenge is not only to the Right—but also to the liberals and progressives, to the Greens and the Democrats, who have not allowed themselves to get beyond their knee-jerk antagonism to religion and spirituality, an whose openness to religious or spiritual people is only utilitarian and does not include a willingness to learn about the actual dimensions of the spiritual deprivation which is endemic to the way global capitalism functions today, and the ways that it generates a global emotional depression.

This spiritual depression and emotional repression that suffuse contemporary life are the near-universal responses to the globalization of a self-congratulatory individualism, obsessive materialism, and consumption—all provided as compensation for the meaninglessness of our present-day culture. The one-dimensional technocratic consciousness, speed-up of work, perception that we have "no time" to do what we really believe in, and our inability to recognize others in terms that go beyond what they can do for us to advance our own agendas as rational maximizers of self-interest—all these combine to create human beings who, if they don’t explode in violence or self-destructive alcohol and drug abuse, find themselves in varying degrees of disconnection to their inner selves, their feelings, and their capacities to be loving towards others and responding to the universe with joy.

In contrast to this, we encourage an engagement with the Sacred, an Emancipatory Spirituality which affirms pleasure and joy and the recognition that "there is enough," a replacement of postmodernist self-alienation with a renewal of Being based on awe, wonder and radical amazement at the mystery of the universe and the mystery of every human being on the planet as a manifestation of the sacred. Our economic, social and political institutions need to be replaced and rethought not only because they are unjust, but because they foster a consciousness that keeps us from connecting to the deepest truths of the universe and make it harder for us to recognize each other as fully free, fully conscious, self-creating, loving beings. In this sense, the globalization of Spirit is the antidote to the globalization of Capital. We reach out for a spiritual dimension not as a replacement for, but as a deepening, of our understanding of social action, and not as a replacement for but a deepening of our understanding of informed science. Our spirituality does not reject the value of rational thought nor does it suspend scientific enquiry.

Why is it that people who live in the advanced industrial societies of North America, Europe and Japan, the richest societies that history has ever known, believe we "can’t afford" to share what we have with the rest of the world so as to eliminate poverty, hunger and homelessness? It is partly because of our collective paranoia that no one will be there for us if we should ever really need their help that leads us to think our only security lies in endless accumulation, to protect our isolated self-interest in face of a deep inner certainty that others can’t be counted on. And partly because we have a deep emptiness inside and we have come to believe that only material goods can fill it. We buy things to buy happiness, to compensate ourselves for the alienated work, the disconnection from each other, and the estrangement from our own inner selves that constitute the texture of our daily lives.

In our spiritually impoverished world, acquiring ever more things provides an illusion of fulfillment—and a replacement for the deep connection with each other and to the spiritual realities of the universe for which we both hunger and simultaneously deny to ourselves (lest we re-experience the pain and disappointment we had at earlier points in our lives when we allowed ourselves to be vulnerable and then failed to receive the loving and recognition we needed but didn’t fully get).

In addition, almost every child in our culture gets strong messages to focus attention on that which can be useful, and away from the spiritual dimension which has no "practical application." Indeed, this message has been so deeply ingrained in many of us that we instinctively shy away from the spiritual realm as though it were as dirty as not being toilet trained. We fear that were we to acknowledge to ourselves or others that we actually wish for connection with that which cannot be used or made practical, cannot be subject to empirical observation or turned into a commodity or something that will make us more attractive or salable on the job or relationship marketplace, we would subject us to ridicule and humiliation.

Fearful that we will experience that pain once again, we often build strong external walls to keep us out of touch with this deep yearning for connection to each other and to the universe. Instead of drawing on our own inner resources, we too often find ourselves looking to the media-dominated mass culture for fulfillment and reassurance that our scaled-down sense of possibility is "what everybody else is doing" and hence "the only possible path for us too." The media is one of the many institutions that speeds up time—protecting us from the quiet moments in which we might doubt the whole way our lives our being lived.

Instead of finding our own pace, we find ourselves rushing about, seeking machines and gadgets that make things go faster, becoming accustomed to media and technology which speed the pace while “shallow-ing” the intellectual and emotional level of our daily consciousness. We learn to forget the past and focus only on the new while devaluing the old, which leads to decreasing literacy and an increasing difficulty in following a complex discussion, sustaining a long-term relationship, or committing to social goals that can't be accomplished immediately.

Sadly, our social institutions only reinforce this materialist view. Our institutions provide us with the illusion of permanency (pretending we won’t die) and the illusion that the "real world" is the world of power and wealth. Compound this with the patriarchal assumption that we should be tough and ignore our feelings, and we are left with a "common sense" that dismisses the relevance of our inner lives. We are told that spirituality should be left in the home, relegated to the weekend, kept separate from the pragmatic decisions that should shape politics and the business world.

 In the TIKKUN Community, we refuse this kind of "realism." We will unashamedly use and learn from the language and practices of spiritual communities. The spiritual life can give us a level of mindfulness, focus, and calm so that we can re-center ourselves and discover what we truly value.

1. INTERDEPENDENCE AND ECOLOGICAL SANITY
We are one mutually interdependent human race, and we have a responsibility to be stewards of the planet and of all other life forms. Our well-being depends on the well-being of every other human being on the planet and on the well-being of our environment. It is time to overcome all forms of national, religious, and ethnic chauvinism. It’s time to realize that it is in our own personal self-interest to ensure a world in which everyone is invited to be part of loving, spiritually deep, emotionally satisfying, and materially thriving communities of their own choice, and to live in a world in which mutual respect and care are the common sense truths by which we live.
As Americans we can no longer worry only about what is "best for America," as Jews we can no longer worry only about what is "best for the Jews," as Christians we can no longer worry only about what is "best for the Christians," etc. We need to see ourselves as manifestations of Spirit—the unfolding of the love and goodness of the universe as it becomes conscious through us. The world is entering a new period in which this understanding of ourselves as fundamentally aligned with all other human beings on the planet becomes the prerequisite for building a global political and economic movement capable of challenging corporate power and saving the planet from ecological destruction.

2. A NEW BOTTOM LINE IN OUR ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL INSTITUTIONS
Productivity and efficiency must no longer be judged solely by the degree to which any corporation or institution maximizes profits or power, but also by the degree to which a corporation, school, government institution, or social practice tends to :

• support ethical, spiritual, and ecological sensitivity and to promote the sustainability of our environment;
• support human beings to be loving, caring and capable of sustaining long-term loving relationships;
• promote the well-being of everyone on the planet;
• help people overcome a narrow utilitarian attitude toward each other or toward the universe and encourages them instead to see other people in a non-utilitarian way, and to view the physical world not primarily as something that can be used for human purposes but also through the lens of awe and wonder at the grandeur of creation.

Beyond all definitions of efficiency and productivity, we seek to shape a society in which there is time not only to Do and to Make but there is time also to Be and to Love—time for family, community, and spiritual exploration.

We want this New Bottom Line brought into all aspects of our public life, so that we can begin to reshape our schools and hospitals, our government, our professions, our media in ways that encourage people to see each other as fundamentally valuable and deserving of love and caring. We reject the notion that values should be kept out of public life, and instead seek to champion the values articulated in this statement, and to encourage social change that would foster these values throughout the society.

3. SUPPORTING THE STRUGGLES FOR SOCIAL JUSTICE AND PEACE
We are committed to the efforts to create peace and social justice throughout the world. We insist that hunger and poverty can be eliminated—and that this be given a very high priority in allocating our taxes. We support the struggles for adequate health care and access to medicine, for child care and elder care, and for other fundamental human rights including the right of working people to meaningful work with a living wage, the right to organize in defense of their own interests, the protection of children from exploitation, and the end to all forms of slavery, forced labor, and sweatshops.

4. A SPIRITUAL MOVEMENT
The world we want to see cannot be created solely by external economic and political changes. We wish to see the democratization of our economic and political institutions, and a redistribution of wealth so that all people can share equally in the benefits of this planet. But as we indicated above, the sources of our worldwide economic and political problems are not solely external in nature, but reflect also distortions in how we experience ourselves and each other. So work on changing our own inner selves and our ideas about the world is an important aspect of changing the world—not a diversion from the healing that is necessary, but an important component of it.
We need to engage in activity that aims at fostering a new consciousness and the development of an inner life that is not merely private and individual in nature, but is rather both social and spiritual in nature—an inner life that is also an interconnected life with other human beings and with the Unity of All Being.

We hope you join us, and we pray for guidance and wisdom, humor and love as we build this exciting venture.

Michael Lerner

Rabbi Lerner, author of The Left Hand of God: Taking Our Country Back from the Relligious Right (HarperSanFrancisco, 2006) is not only rabbi of Beyt Tikkun but is also the editor of TIKKUN magazine: A Bimonthly Jewish Critique of Politics, Culture and Society.

He holds a PhD in Philosophy and another in Psychology, he has served as a professor at several universities, he is considered a cultural and spiritual activist, he is a prolific author, and speaker.

TIKKUN