A daring Thanksgiving thought
This year it is hard not to be dismayed at the murdering that goes on between Israel and Palestine, and the suffering of both Israelis and Palestinians. This Thanksgiving some of us commit ourselves to doing all we can to stop the conflict and to start the process of non-violent open-hearted reconciliation and peace.
We reject the advice of the “political realists” who tell us that this struggle will go on forever, at untold levels of human suffering. Instead, we’ve urged our own government to work with others to impose a cease-fire (which is now apparently holding), and then to convene an international conference of the most powerful and spiritually responsible countries that can act together to build the new consciousness our planet so badly needs.
Some of us. whether or not we believe in God or Goddess or Spirit, are Spiritual Progressives—that is, people who want the world to be reorganized in ways that promote love, kindness, generosity, ethical and ecological sensitivity, and awe, wonder and radical amazement at the grandeur and mystery of all that is.
We spiritual progressives believe that the real source of strength for any country or people will come from the degree to which its neighbors and the people of the world see that country as a source of generous love, social justice, peace, non-violence and generosity toward all and environmental sanity toward the earth.
So on this Thanksgiving we call upon the world to actively involve itself with bringing peace and prosperity to all places where violence and wars continue to be waged.
We call upon the advanced industrial countries to launch a domestic and global Marshall Plan by dedicating 1-2% of the GDP of the economically advanced industrial countries of the world, the G-20, to be used to eliminate poverty, homelessness, hunger, inadequate education, inadequate health care, and to repair the global environment—to be paid for by the trillions of dollars that will otherwise be spent on militarism and attempts to dominate and control the world.
We know that this approach will require major political changes, and that is why we support the Network of Spiritual Progressives’ “Money out of Politics” campaign that goes way beyond affirming that corporations are not people and money is not speech. The ESRA also bans all private and corporate monies from national and state elections (check it out at www.spiritualprogressiives.org).
And we affirm the Unity of All Being, the oneness of all with all, and the fundamental interdependence of us who are celebrating Thanksgiving with all other people on the planet, and we commit ourselves to save this planet from environmental destruction.
And in the spirit of Thanksgiving, we affirm our dedication to being unrealistic for peace, social justice, environmental sanity, and a world based on love, caring, kindness and generosity. In so doing, we will make realistic what at first seemed to be unrealistic. And so it is. Amen.
(Rabbi Michael Lerner is editor of the Jewish and interfaith quarterly Tikkun magazine [in print by subscription and on line at www.tikkun.org], chair of the interfaith [and atheist-welcoming] Network of Spiritual Progressives www.spiritualprogressives.org, and rabbi of Beyt Tikkun synagogue in Berkeley and San Francisco California www.beyttikkun.org.
He is the author of 11 books, including The Politics of Meaning, Spirit Matters, Jews and Blacks: Let the Healing Begin (with Cornel West), The Left Hand of God: Takiing Back our Country from the Religious Right, Jewish Renewal: A Path to Healing and Transformation, and most recently, Embracing Israel/Palestine (North Atlantic Books, 2012). RabbiLerner welcomes your feedback at RabbiLerner.tikkun@gmail.com.)
