Winter 2005, Volume 10 Number 1

Table of Contents

The unimaginable levels of suffering caused by the Tsunami have reminded all of us of the fragility of human life. We know that our individual efforts to send money, sacred and important though they are, cannot come close to reaching the level of the tens of billions of dollars that will be needed to help the millions of people who have lost homes, work, and everything they own or with which they could make a living. Only a full-scale governmental effort on the part of all the countries of the world, and most particularly the wealthy countries, could make much of an impact at this level of financial need.

         So it is particularly distressing to find once again that those of us who live in the U.S. have to witness our own country giving a pathetically small amount of money. The hundreds of billions of dollars being sunk into a war against Sunnis in Iraq is money that could have been spent providing the kind of advanced warning systems, and solid construction of buildings, that might have dramatically limited the damage and deaths caused by this terrible storm. Once again, the unequal distribution of wealth on the planet plays out dramatically in the poorest and most defenseless being those most hurt.

         So when I was asked, during a guest appearance on an ABC radio call-in show, "Where was God during the Tsunami?" my first response was to say, "Isn't this an attempt to avoid the more pressing question of "Where was humanity? Why have we been so unwilling to take serious responsibility for the well-being of others on the planet?"

         But I want to get to the theological questions, also, once we begin to understand a bit more about the political role the Tsunami and similar disasters play in the consciousness of many in the advanced industrial world.

         To get there, some context is needed. Two weeks ago the United Nations issued a report detailing the deaths of more than 29,000 children every single day as a result of avoidable diseases and malnutrition. That’s over ten million children a year!! The difference between the almost non-existent coverage of this ongoing human-created disaster and the huge focus on the terrible tsunami-generated suffering in South East Asia reveals some deep and ugly truths about our collective self-deceptions.

Imagine if every single day there were headlines in every newspaper in the world and every television show saying, “29,000 children died yesterday from preventable diseases and malnutrition.” The rest of the stories alternate between detailed personal accounts of families where this devastation was taking place, and side bar features detailing what was happening in advanced industrial countries; “All this suffering was happening while the wealthiest people in the world enjoyed excesses of food, worried about how to lose weight because they eat too much, spent monies trying to convince farmers not to grow too much food for fear that doing so would drive down prices, and were cutting the taxes of their wealthiest rather than seeking to redistribute their excess millions of dollars of personal income.” If the story were told that way every day, the goodness of human beings would rebel quickly against these social systems that made all this suffering possible, suffering far in excess of all the suffering caused by tsunamis and other natural disasters.

         If we were being told this true story every day, we'd quickly find that the ideas that we in the Tikkun Community propose, like the Global Marshall Plan (let the U.S. lead the advanced industrial societies in a global consortium dedicating 5% of their combined GNP each year for the next twenty years to alleviating hunger, homelessness, poverty, inadequate education and inadequate health care) would no longer seem “unrealistic” to most people on the planet, but necessary for immediate survival.

         One important reason this doesn't happen, whereas the suffering from the Tsunami does get the coverage, is that the Tsunami can be seen as “natural” and therefore no one is being blamed, no one has to feel guilty about consuming a disproportionate amount of the world's resources, and no one is mobilized to challenge the existing systems of power which fund and control the mass media. However devastating, the Tsunami's story line is safe and predictable and unlikely to challenge the current global distribution of wealth or power.

         Most reporters and news editors have internalized their sense of what the top-management in their industry considers “news-worthy” and thus they didn't give much attention to the recent U.N. report and its dramatic and tragic dimensions for millions of children and families. If you pressed these reporters and editors, they would probably say something like this: stories about global poverty don't interest anyone, because most people know that nothing can be done about it, given that everyone they know is more concerned with satisfying their own material needs than with helping to meet the needs of others through global redistribution of wealth—so there is no point in pursuing that story, because the kinds of changes needed to deal with it will never happen anyway.

         One reason that social change seems so unrealistic is because it is not only these news people but almost everyone else that has been taught that others are motivated by narrow material self-interest. Yet when we watch the response of the people of the world to this tragedy, we see just the opposite—a huge outpouring of generosity. Millions of people are making contributions, and billions are showing signs of caring.

         Those who despair are mistaken—the goodness of humanity is always just a few inches from the surface, on the verge of being released. One reason why Right-wing Christian churches have been so successful is that they give people a spiritual context within which to let out their caring sides without worrying that they will face cynical put-downs from others around them. One task for progressives interested in social change is to find the best way to facilitate that process in a progressive context, but that will require a new sensitivity to a spiritual framework that validates and supports that spirit of generosity within most people.

         Yet in the rest of our lives, few of us are ever encouraged to show caring beyond our small circles of friends and families.  If we are urged to show caring, it is only for the victims of some kind of natural disaster, but not for the kinds of problems we could actually deal with through collective restructuring of the world's economic and political arrangements—because that would threaten the interests of the powerful. They are all too glad to divert our attention to the disasters that can't be changed, and to channel our anger into anger at God instead of anger at our social system.

         So here we get to the question of blaming God.

         It's quite amazing to behold, actually, how many people responded to the question on the radio talk show I appeared on by calling to give messages of the following sort: “I am really angry at God, and this is precisely why I don't believe in Him.”

         I don't know any other non-existing being who gets such a bad rap. It's as if people need to invent God in order to blame Him for something about which they are justifiably in despair.

         But of course, I do believe in God, so how can I think about this God and His/Her/Its role in the Tsunami?

         I don't know. I think that whatever else I say below, I want to start with the fact that I do not know, that there is a limitation of knowledge and understanding built into being a human being at this stage in the development of the consciousness of the universe. I was not present when the foundations of the universe were being put together—and that is a point that was made in the Book of Job long ago when he similarly questioned the lack of justice in the world God had designed.

         I have no answers—where answers dissolve the question. I have responses.  Please understand a response as a way of staying in connection with the validity of the question and the questioner.

Global Judaism and a New Conception of God  

         For several thousand years, at least since the destruction of the First Temple in 586 BCE, Jews have been grappling with the absence of God in history. That thinking must now move to a new stage in the 21st century in which we fundamentally transcend some of the older stories we told ourselves about God.

         To put it bluntly (for the radio talk show audience): stop thinking of God as some big man up in heaven sitting there and making individual judgments about who shall live and who shall die, where he should put a tsunami and where he should put a beautiful sunset. Instead, understand God as THE FORCE OF HEALING AND TRANSFORMATION IN THE UNIVERSE, the aspect of the universe that is the source of love, kindness, generosity, social justice, peace and evolving consciousness, and that this aspect of the universe permeates every ounce of being, every cell, and unifies all beings as it moves the universe toward greater and greater levels of love and connection and consciousness.  Understand God as the force that makes possible the transcending of that which is toward that which ought to be. Seen this way, God is not the all-powerful being that determines every moment of creation, but rather the part of creation aspiring toward love, kindness, generosity, peace, and social justice which evolves greater power to shape our common destiny to the extent that we choose to embody it more fully. Or in more traditional theological language, God is a Creator, and the creation is still taking place as the God energy of the universe develops and manifests more and more through the universe, shaping it to be more fully in accord with God's aspiration for a world of love, compassion, justice, peace and generosity.

         Heresy, you say? Only if your conception of God derives from a Greek notion of the All-Knowing, All Powerful Unmoved Mover—a conception which at times has seeped into and shaped medieval theologies of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, but which is not the only possible way to understand God. If, on the other hand, we take our cues from parts of Torah that think of God as bemoaning the choices that human beings made, even at times thinking that maybe S/He made a mistake in creating humans, or as weeping over the consequences of Diaspora or as suffering from the consequences of human choices, or consider the Christian vision of God as needing to suffer on the Cross, then you get a different and more vulnerable vision of God.  A vision more in accord with the notion of God not as the one responsible for everything that happens, but as an emerging voice of compassion and love in the midst of a world not totally under His/Her control.

         In that case, God is joining us in mourning for the victims of the Tsunami, not its cause.

         Our task is to be God's partner in tikkun (the healing and transformation of the world) and in mourning for those aspects of suffering that cannot be overcome.

         Rabbi Michael Lerner is editor of Tikkun magazine, co-chair of the Tikkun Community, and Rabbi of Beyt Tikkun Synagogue in San Francisco.  You can contact Rabbi Lerner at        rabbilerner@tikkun.org and read more about Tikkun at www.tikkun.org

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