Some 1,800 people from across the country and the religious spectrum convened here this week to launch a national progressive campaign to counter the Christian right’s exclusive claim to spiritual and family values.
The three-day “Summit on Ethics and Meaning,” which drew the grass roots as well as the celebrated in politics, academia and religion, issued the Covenant with American Families as “an explicit alternative to the Christian Coalition’s Contract with the American Family.”
It also produced the Social Responsibility Initiative, which is committed to rebuilding a “spirit of community and mutual respect in our nation.”
These initiatives included calls for increasing the minimum wage, a year of paid family and medical leave, full employment, improved housing and child care as well as calls for challenging violence in children’s television programs.
The conference was spearheaded by Michael Lerner, the editor of Tikkun magazine, a progressive Jewish journal, and had at its central principle the need for a “politics of meaning,” the hallmark of Lerner and his associates.
For a brief period after President Clinton’s election, the politics-of-meaning message and its messenger were embraced and touted by the White House, but then seemed to fall into disfavor because of what Lerner has described as a lack of political courage.
Still, Lerner is undaunted, viewing this week’s summit as a watershed.
It marked the start of a “national conversation” on the need to change the “fundamental paradigm” of politics and society “from selfishness, cynicism and materialism to idealism, caring and community,” he said.
While many Jewish organizations have been actively working to counter the policy goals of the Christian Coalition, what distinguished this week’s gathering was the wide-ranging religious representation of the participants.
The conference had strong Jewish components, including a ceremony marking Holocaust Remembrance Day, co-led by Jewish Renewal leader Arthur Waskow.
But only about 20 percent of the registrants were Jewish, Lerner said.
Lerner, who has been marginalized by many in the Jewish mainstream, said the conference was an important opportunity to have “Torah values” brought into the mainstream political arena.
For him, the politics of meaning is a “transformative vision rooted in the Bible” that he hopes will be a “central part of the politics of the 21st century” and help address the despair and alienation rampant in the culture.
Indeed, “much of the impetus for this movement stems from the Bible,” the social obligations therein and the vision of each person “created in the image of God,” he said.
A sense of urgency permeated the conference in the face of recent political gains by the religious right and the Republican Congress.
“This is my 14th year in the Congress,” said Rep. Major Owens (D-N.Y.) at the summit news conference, “and if ever there was a time we needed the politics of meaning, it’s now.”
Owens said he long had preached for a “coalition of caring” and had reason to hope that at the summit he was witnessing the “birth of a caring majority movement.”
At the same time, Lerner and others repeatedly called for a halt to demonizing the Christian right and said the new progressive campaign could offer inspiration to people of all political stripes.
Referring to the Christian right, Rabbi David Saperstein, director of the Reform movement’s Religious Action Center, said, “They’re fighting to protect their children” and “they’re asking profound questions” about the breakdown of the family and the community, and about abortion.
“I agree with all of their questions, I just profoundly disagree with their answers,” he said.
Traditional liberalism also came under attack by many summit speakers for failing to respond to people’s alienation and fears.
That failure has prompted some of its traditional Democratic Party constituency to move to the right, responding to appeals that often include scapegoating of Jews, blacks, homosexuals and immigrants, said speakers.
Liberals traditionally have focused too narrowly on economics and individual rights at the expense of a focus on the “ethical and spiritual crisis” gripping the lives of most Americans, Lerner repeatedly said.
Part of that crisis comes from people’s frustrated desire for community, for spirituality and for serving the common good as well as from a sense of not being valued for anything beyond their contribution to the marketplace, according to his theory.
“We are not left or right,” said Lerner. “We are critics of the left and the right. We’re seeking a different politics.”
For Bonnie Cushing of Montclair, N.J., who identified herself as a mother and a psychotherapist, the summit left her with an “inspiration for a new movement and for hopes our deepest needs will be recognized and met.”
It also reflected her commitment to Judaism.
“Michael’s message is universal, but what fuels it is specifically Jewish,” she said. “It’s Torah.”
A student of the Unitarian Universalist ministry in Chicago, Valerie Mapstone Ackerman, also called Lerner’s message both Jewish and “universal.”
“If Christians are true to their religion, they have to be open to an understanding of their Jewish roots,” she said.
At the summit, she said she felt “a new energy which will sustain us for the long haul.”
For Rabbi Arturo Kalfus, originally of Buenos Aires and now of Congregation Beth Emeth in Albany, the summit’s vision of a just and meaningful society is one of “radical transformation” and a “radical challenge.”
For Kalfus, it was a matter of pride that Lerner, “a clearly identified Jew, a man who wears a kipah,” is “the head” of what he termed this new broad-based movement.
“It shows the best face of Judaism to the world,” he said.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
