How Rabbi Michael Lerner merged spirituality and social justice and influenced a generation of progressives
The founder of Tikkun, who coined the term ‘politics of meaning’ was a prophet for our time
Rabbi Michael Lerner Photo by Getty Images
Contributing Columnist Jay Michaelson August 30, 2024
Progressive Judaism has lost one of its true lions: Rabbi Michael Lerner, who died Wednesday at 81. May his memory be for a blessing.
It’s hard to overstate the impact Michael had on progressive Judaism, as well as on American progressive politics and spirituality more broadly.
In a sense, Michael’s magazine and community, Tikkun, which was founded in 1986 and closed its doors earlier this year, was a response to a moment not unlike our own. Then as now, massive funding from a relatively small number of wealthy individuals had tilted the Jewish intellectual and institutional communities rightward. Epitomized by Commentary and by the rise of neo-conservatism (which could practically be described as Jewish conservatism, or conservatism without its antisemitic baggage), the zeitgeist of the Reagan years was the antithesis of the leftward-moving 60s and 70s.
Remarkably, Michael’s work quickly found success beyond the boundaries of the Jewish community. A single phrase of his — “politics of meaning” — catapulted him to fame when Bill and Hillary Clinton adopted it in 1993. There was substance behind the catchphrase: Americans thirsted, Michael said, not merely for economic wellbeing and national security, but for a sense of belonging, connection, and, well, meaning.
That term fell out of favor over time. Right-wingers (including many Jews) derided it as fuzzy and New Age, and Lerner himself disavowed the centrism (what we would later come to call neoliberalism) of the Clinton administration.
Looking back 30 years later, though, the phrase seems prophetic. Donald Trump, of all people, seems to understand it best: His ardent followers don’t care about policy details, they care about meaning, purpose and value. They care about an America they correctly see as rapidly changing, and incorrectly believe they can somehow restore to its previous “greatness.” Their nationalism and love of authoritarianism is the antithesis of everything Lerner stood for, but their power and devotion have proven his point.
But it’s true on the Left, too. Kamala Harris is now the candidate of joy, just as Barack Obama was the candidate of hope. Both epitomize the deeper values we find in politics and community — what might be understood as the spiritual values.
As time went on, Michael developed these ideas in great detail. In 1996, joined forces with Cornel West to address the growing rifts between Jewish and Black communities (as relevant now as then). His 2006 book The Left Hand of God: Taking Back our Country from the Religious Right made the spiritual case for progressive politics, while also bemoaning how the Right seems to “get” the linkage of politics and spirituality more than the Left does. And in 2011, he attempted, in Embracing Israel/Palestine, to articulate a progressive Zionist vision that deeply empathized with and substantively addressed the oppression of Palestinians.
How distant that vision seems now. Even then, it seemed a bit rosy to call on Israelis and Palestinians to cultivate “love, kindness, and generosity” for one another. Nowadays, both populations would probably welcome an amicable (and fair) divorce.
Yet however distant or idealistic Lerner’s vision may seem today, it still is the only way forward for these two intertwined nations — and it is the exact policy given voice by Harris in her DNC speech. Ultimately, neither the ethnic-cleaning maximalism of Jewish nationalists nor the ethnic-cleaning maximalism of some pro-Palestinian voices is politically, militarily, or morally tenable. Deride Lerner’s progressive, two-state Zionism all you want; I remain certain that, one day, it will become reality. Because every other option is horrible.
Personally, Lerner was both an inspiration and support to me.
Tikkun was a central inspiration for me in co-founding Zeek, an online journal of Jewish thought and culture that ran from 2002 to 2015 (we even ended up hiring two of its former editors!). We shared ambitions: to create a Jewish magazine of equal quality and seriousness to non-Jewish ones, to bring together spirituality and social justice, to elevate the conversations around Jewish theology and contemplative practice, and many more.
Michael was also a generous supporter of my activist and spiritual work, endorsing my book God vs. Gay? and publishing the first iteration of that work back in 2011. We did events and meetings together, griped about the Left and the Right, and shared our overlapping passions for spiritual practice and social justice. Everyone who knew Michael knows that he had strong, even irascible personality — visionaries usually do. But he was also kind, generous, and truly, deeply committed to justice.
Of course in the climate of 2024, it’s hard not to see this passing in a larger context. Tikkun was always, deliberately to the left of American Jewish liberalism. Yet Lerner’s progressivism valued nuance, dialogue, and complexity, often absent on today’s hard left. Michael wasn’t a boycotter; he sat down with people he disagreed with, dialogued with them, gave them space in the magazine to articulate their ideas. He was an idealist but also a pragmatist, supporting imperfect candidates even when his friends (including West) bitterly disagreed. And he revised his own views over time. The arrogant certainty found among some progressives today was anathema to him.
We also have come full circle, it seems, in the philanthropy-aided flowering of the Jewish Right, both in overtly nationalistic forms and in new, supposedly “centrist,” but actually quite reactionary ones. When Tikkun closed earlier this year, I couldn’t help but reflect on how Michael and others held it together with scotch tape and glue, while right-wing philanthropists have showered money on their own ecosystem of publications, media networks, schools, and even quasi-universities. Commentary was just a journal; now we face a huge ecosystem of Jewish conservatism propped up by a handful of centimillionaires.
But I won’t end on either a pessimistic or optimistic note. Rather, I’ll leave it to Michael to have the last word (which he often insisted on anyway) that combines both some of each:
“These are difficult times for anyone seeking a world of love and justice,” Lerner wrote in his email announcing Tikkun’s closing. “Yet I continue to believe that within the next hundred years, those who survive the many hurtful human forces and the massive destruction of the environment will be living in a more loving and just world. May those in your life — your children, grandchildren, friends, coworkers, people you meet along the way — learn from you to reject the cynical belief that money and power is what gives people lives of joy and meaning.”
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