Rabbi challenges Dalai Lama at peace summit
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Rabbi Michael Lerner said, “Our goal is to create a political movement with spiritual practices.” Photos by Robert Wiener
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May 18, 2011
A leading left-of-center rabbi took issue with the Dalai Lama at the May 13 opening session of the three-day Peace Education Summit at Newark’s New Jersey Performing Arts Center.
Although not quite a dispute, the respectful jousting the panelists engaged in suggested that even among global peace activists, there are disagreements over policy and politics.
The summit, hosted by Newark Mayor Cory Booker, Buddhism scholar Robert Thurman, and advertising executive Drew Katz, was planned as an opportunity to “examine how individuals, communities, cities, and nations can build foundations for peaceful societies.”
The headliner for the summit was the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan spiritual leader and 1989 Nobel Peace Prize laureate.
Rabbi Michael Lerner, who chairs the Network of Spiritual Progressives and edits the left-wing Tikkun magazine, took issue with the Dalai Lama and other spiritual leaders on the panel who claimed that inner peace is a prerequisite for social change.
Instead, said Lerner, social change demands political movements as well as spiritual practices.
Among the sharpest exchanges was one between Lerner and Deepak Chopra, the physician, author, and frequent television guest.
“It is very clear that peace is the context for curing social injustice and economic injustice,” said Chopra. “At the same time, it is very important to understand that in the absence of personal transformation, peace can only be created by those who are peaceful.”
Challenging Chopra, Lerner said, “We need to be the peace we believe in. We need to be the love we believe in. But there is a danger there. The danger is that once you have that as a criterion, many people abandon social change movements.
“Our goal is to create a political movement with spiritual practices,” he said to loud applause. “We have a bottom line that flows from the echoes of selfishness and careerism. We need a new bottom line in America that says every institution, every social policy, should be judged as to whether it is rational or creative or productive and maximizing our capacity to be loving and caring, kind and generous, ethically and ecologically sensitive, and restore the universe to the grandeur of creation,” said the rabbi.
After arriving some 20 minutes late for the discussion, the Dalai Lama suggested that American democracy — though imperfect — was a model for healing societies.
The rabbi took issue with this notion.
“Either we have to acknowledge that this country is not a democracy or we have to argue that democracies are not a guarantor of peace, given that we are engaged in three wars at this very moment that are opposed by many of our people,” Lerner said.
Lerner was not the only panelist to take issue with the exiled Buddhist leader’s vision of peace.
“I thought it was strange to be asked to be on this panel on inner peace, because I don’t have much,” said the Dalai Lama’s fellow Nobel laureate, Jody Williams, who has worked to ban landmines. “It isn’t just that I am an angry human being; I am angry at injustice. It is righteous indignation which fires many of us because of inequality. I am still struggling with meditation and inner peace, and I am not sure I will ever work it out.”
Williams received loud applause when she said, “This nation spends more on defense than every other nation in the world combined, and we close the schools of our children.”
First step democracy
Lerner, who was born in Newark and raised in South Orange, also challenged Iranian human rights activist Shirin Ebadi, who won a 2003 Nobel Peace Prize for her defense of women’s and children’s rights.
“Our children have to be taught to love others and to respect others like themselves,” said Ebadi, warning of technology that challenges the world’s peaceful intentions. “We bring computers into our homes that teach children how to kill others on the computer. In order to make our children happy, we buy them guns and other simulations of violence. Children learn from childhood what violence is,” she said through an interpreter.
“How do you imagine peace coming to Iran?” asked Lerner.
“The first step is to create democracy in Iran,” she replied.
Mahishan Gnanaseharan, a 13-year-old seventh-grader at Newark’s Science Park High School, who was born in Sri Lanka, addressed the audience as the youth representative on the panel.
“We need to focus on the hope for a better life for all those living on this planet,” said Gnanaseharan, who was honored by the Library of Congress for his winning essay on teen violence.
Wilbert Rideau, a journalist who won his freedom from death row after 44 years in Louisiana’s Angola State Prison, said he started his quest for inner peace “after being in a place as far down in life as you can be — an outcast condemned to die with anger at the world, yet along with those feelings was revulsion that I had taken someone’s life…. I can never make up for the deep rage and the actions of my youth, but I am determined to go forward working to improve the world around me.
“Individuals need to feel that they are important, that they are understood, and they need to feel that they belong,” said Rideau. “If they don’t, we’ve got problems.”
‘We are about “shaloming” everybody’
Among the offerings at Newark’s Peace Education Summit at Newark’s New Jersey Performing Arts Center was an interfaith workshop featuring a Short Hills rabbi and other area clergy.
The workshop, “Interfaith Conjunctions: Buddha, Jeremiah, Jesus, and Muhammad on Inner Peace/Shalom/Salaam,” was held during the summit’s opening day, May 13.
Rabbi Matthew Gewirtz, senior rabbi at Temple B’nai Jeshurun in Short Hills, joined Christian and Muslim colleagues in suggesting ways they learn from other faiths.
“I learned very early in my rabbinate that the learning in all the scholarly texts is extraordinarily important,” said Gewirtz. “But I realized that doing the ordinary — taking a piece of food and feeding your neighbor, taking a piece of clothing and putting it around someone who is cold, taking the key to unlock the shackles of oppression — somehow, if you do those things, everything else falls into place. Indeed it is doing those things that can bring heaven and put it here on Earth.”
“The hardest part is you do it with people you don’t like,” he said.
“We are about ‘shaloming’ everybody,” said the Rev. Michael Christiansen, a Methodist minister who is international director of the Communities of Shalom and an affiliate professor of spirituality and religious studies at Drew University in Madison.
“There is a word in almost every language, whether it is paz, or pax, that seems to bring health or wholeness not just to you as a person but to whole communities,” he said.
“We have an urge to not stop until we find the goodness in ourselves,” said Imam W. Deen Shareef, a founder of the Newark Interfaith Coalition for Hope and Peace and a senior adviser to Newark Mayor Cory Booker. “In Islam this is called the tranquil soul. You know the expression ‘No justice, no peace?’ The first justice is the justice of one’s self.”
“I have learned immeasurable wisdom from the Jewish tradition and the Buddhist tradition and the Muslim tradition,” said the Rev. Robert Morris, another founder of the Newark Interfaith Coalition for Hope and Peace and pastor at the Calvary Episcopal Church in Summit.
“I am a Christian who believes I can be faithful to my tradition but not bound by it.” Speaking of “the great divide between religious totalitarians and religious pluralists,” Morris said, “We may end up disagreeing about X, Y, or Z, but we can find enough common ground that we can be pluralists with people who are religious, with people who are secularists, and with people who have no religion but are seeking to live a good, moral life.”
— ROBERT WIENER
Comments
Bruce
May 19, 2011
Your rather interesting article is plagued by a misconception. Michael Lerner is not, as you stated, “a leading left-of-center rabbi.”
Lerner is an so far from center that it is more accurate to say that he is “an ultra-left-wing rabbi” or perhaps “a far-left rabbi.”
Rabbi Eric Yoffie, on the other hand, is “a leading left-of-center rabbi.”