Excerpt from A Jewish Renewal (Kabbalistic-Mystical-NeoHasidic) Approach to God, by Rabbi Michael Lerner

The 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 and unfair distribution of wealth 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.”

One need not be overly optimistic about how quickly it is possible to overcome the legacy of cruelty—that might take thousands and thousands of years. But from the standpoint of this Jewish sensibility, what we do, how we live, the kind of society we build, can contribute to the defeat of cruelty, not merely to its amelioration.

Not that Torah has some naïve notion of how easy that might be. Very early in the childhood of the human race, cruelty and violence emerge. As Genesis tells us a few chapters after creation, yetzer ha’adam rah mee ne’urav–which can be roughly translated as: there is some part of human beings that was already distorted from the experience our youth. The early experiences of the human race have left a legacy of pain that is passed on from generation to generation, creating a tendency toward malevolence that is also part of our situation.

What causes this distortion? Our Torah does not tell us. What it points to is the pain, anger and fury that come from non-recognition. Cain seeks God’s acknowledgement that his contribution, his sacrifice, is as valuable as that of his brother Abel, yet he does not get that sense of being recognized as valuable and contributing. In his pain and fury, he kills his brother.

When confronted by God and asked, “Where is Abel your brother?” Cain responds with what becomes the classic line of distorted consciousness—as much the line of those who turn their backs on the homeless and the starving of the world today as it was of those who have in every age allowed themselves not to see the pain of others— “Am I my brother’s keeper?”

Torah’s unmistakable implication is that the moment one recognizes one’s “other,” one must simultaneously recognize the obligation toward caring and mutual concern.

If blame is to be assigned at all, it is to God, who failed to give Cain the recognition that he so badly needed; and it is perhaps out of this understanding of His own culpability that God does not kill Cain but instead only banishes him. Yet in raising the question about responsibility and in recounting Cain’s punishment, the Bible makes clear that it does not accept evil as some inevitability that must be accepted, but as a distortion that must be combated. This is NOT part of God’s scheme, and it causes God shock and upset to discover this kind of behavior.

We may have the germs of what might be called a Biblical theory about the origins of violence. Cruelty is made possible when human beings do not recognize in each other the image of God that is the essence of their being–and hence turn away from others; do not hear their pain. Once this process begins, it builds upon itself, becomes a powerful force that is transferred from generation to generation. The people living in material abundance, fearful that they will not have enough if they share with everyone who is hungry, protect themselves from knowing others’ pain by allowing themselves to believe that these others are really not human beings like themselves. Hence it is okay to turn their backs on others’ pain. And this is the key to racism of all sorts–the need to deny the others’ right to be taken care of by finding some aspect of that other which makes the other NOT REALLY a human being like ourselves.

The exciting news of Torah is this: we are not stuck in this non-recognition. The God of the Bible is the Force that makes possible a transformation of the world from one characterized by estrangement and lack of mutual recognition to one in which moral actions and compassion abound.

This God is YHVH–the Force of transformation and healing. God is The Force that makes possible the movement of reality from that which IS to that which OUGHT TO BE.

The Torah thus places Transcendence on the agenda of the human race. Human beings need not be stuck in a world of pain or oppression. We can regain contact with a deeper level of being, a level more consonant with who we really are—namely beings who are created in the image of God, who embody an inherent tendency toward goodness and holiness, toward being “embodied spirituality.” Transcendence does not mean rejecting this world, but rather our ability to bring more fully into being in this world aspects of ourselves and aspects of reality that are already present in germ but which we need to nurture and develop within ourselves and each other. Every inch of creation, every cell of being, not only contains atoms stored with physical energy, but also contains and reflects the spiritual and moral energy that we call God. Much of the pain and oppression we experience in this world is a reflection of the way WE DO NOT RECOGNIZE GOD IN THE WORLD IN ONE ANOTHER AND IN OURSELVES.

Many other religions had the intuition that something was fundamentally missing from human experience. But then they posited some higher realm apart from this world which would be the place where this higher reality dwells. Judaism insists that this split between what is and what ought to be is not an ontological necessity. God’s absence from the world can be repaired and human beings can be partners with God in the process of repair. This is what the word Tikkun means–it is the word for this repair that is badly needed and possible.

Bringing God back into the world involves recognizing one another both for that which is unique about each of us but also for the way that each of us shares this common potential to partially embody God’s presence in the world.

We become fully human when we come to know ourselves through a process of recognition by the other, whom we simultaneously recognize as a self-constituting subject capable of reflecting God’s goodness and love and as capable of seeing those same capacities within us. This mutual recognition is recognition not only of that which is unique within each of us, but also and most deeply of what we have in common–the way that the energy of God manifests in each of us, making it possible for us to be free, creative, loving, caring, spiritually sensitive, conscious and self-transforming beings who both receive and embody God’s energy.

But transcendence is only possible, not inevitable. Each generation has layered into its psychic structure the histories of the past failures of transcendence, the accumulated legacy of the world of oppression. Those failures are embodied in the increasingly textured and powerful structures of domination that shape the social order, just as they are embodied in the individual’s psyche and belief system. The system of persecution and oppression does not inhabit only the external world, although it is importantly and centrally there. It also infects our internal worlds of belief and feeling.