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A Jewish Renewal (Kabbalistic-Mystical-NeoHasidic) Approach to God
by Rabbi Michael LernerThe Jewish people came to historical consciousness in a world dominated by great imperial powers, first in Mesopotamia where Abraham grew up, then in Egypt where a family became a nation. Imperial powers stayed in power through imposing force and violence on their own population, enslaving some, forcefully taxing others--and exercising a monopoly on violence and cruelty.
No wonder, then, that the first issue confronting the Jewish people was how to understand the nature and meaning of cruelty. One can read the Torah as a first, conflicted, sometimes ambiguous but often enlightening meditation on how to handle the cruelty that the Jewish people were encountering in the world.
But the cruelty was not ONLY something imposed upon pure and noble beings by the outside--it was in US, the Jews, as well--and DISTORTED US EVEN AS WE SOUGHT TO TRANSCEND IT.
Abraham, Moses and alter Ezra were themselves products of the world of cruelty. Their perceptions and the ways in which they heard the voice of God were shaped by the ways they had been distorted by the cruelty that reverberated through their own lives. Yet what they heard when they heard the voice of God was a message that was very different from that heard by most of their contemporaries.
The ancient world was full of religious systems that validated the mystery and wonder of the natural order. They cycles of nature were revered and feared. But most of these religions saw the social world as another part of the same natural reality. Existing class systems, unfair distribution of wealth and , were as much a part of the natural order as the sunset. Throughout much of recorded history the oppressed have been socialized to believe that cruelty and oppression are "natural"--part of the structure of reality. Spirituality for them became identified with reconciliation to a world of oppression, either through learning how to "flow" with the world as it is or through imagining that the material world in which they lived was a prelude to some higher nonmaterial world, and that the task of the living was to escape material reality into this spiritual realm which embodied the purity and deeper reality that could not be attained on this earth.
The Jewish people had a very different message: that this world could be fundamentally transformed. Spirituality and morality were not features of some other reality apart from this world, but were inherently ingredients of this world, because the God who created the universe is also the God who brought morality into the world, and we embody God's spirit by being made in the divine image. On the Jewish account, cruelty was built into social institutions and into the psychological legacy of human beings. It appeared to be an "objective fact" about human reality only because oppressive social arrangements are very hard to change and psychological legacies are very hard to uproot. But "very hard" is different from "impossible."
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