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Great souls

By Michael J. Smith on Monday November 14, 2011 12:00 AM

Speaking of Great Souls, somehow or other I have ended up on the unctuous, oleaginous, saponaceous Rabbi Michael Lerner's email list. ha-Rav favored me this evening with the following, much snipped(*):

Here is [a] letter I received on email this morning:

JORDAN ASHE wrote:

I attended the Oakland camp yesterday.... To my horror, however, I observed and heard things that left me in a state of great concern. The 99% need healing, they need repair, they need transformation. The camp was ripe with hostility towards police....

Mr Jordan goes on to deplore a hostility toward Israel which also seemed to be pretty 'rife'.

The rabbi responds:

I share your sadness at the distortions within Occupy Oakland....

I know that at least 90% of the people who marched on Nov. 2nd during the General Strike and marched to the Port of Oakland are people who agree with you. But there is a determined group of violent self-described "anarchists" who ideologically believe in violence and seek it out. [Their] arguments are, in my view, not good reasons to allow violence or provoke violence or property destruction by demonstrators...

Basta! You get the idea. I'll paste in the whole thing -- it's incredibly long -- below the fold here, for anybody who has ten minutes to waste reading it.

Really, the only reason I posted this at all is that Soapy Mike's arguments are exactly the same as those put forward by a number of red-hot Reds of my acquaintance. These underlying affinities amuse me, in a Saturnine sort of way.

----------------------

(*) No link provided in the email and Teh Google wot not of it.

The full Lerner eructation:
I think you might find this exchange between a student and me about Occupy Oakland and the Oakland community of some interest. There is a rumor that there may be a new violent confrontation hours from now as the occupiers refuse to leave (the mayor had previously offered for us to be able to stay 24/7 but without tents--in other words, just as people coming to present our ideas, but not as occupiers. Let me hasten to add that I believe that the police riot 12 days ago was totally unjustified, and believe that the police who were involved should be sent to prison like others who violate the law. The violence of Oakland police is a daily reality for people of color in Oakland and many other American cities, and always a shock to everyone else because it is only when it happens to white people that the media stays on the story for more than a day or two!

So here is the letter I received on email this morning: "

JORDAN ASHE wrote:

Dear Rabbi Lerner:

My name is Jordan Ashe and I am a student member of your Tikkun community. I attended the Oakland camp yesterday. I washed dishes, observed, and engaged in conversation. My children left sidewalk chalk drawings as gifts to the occupiers. It felt good to be part of the 99%. It felt good to give of myself to others and to see my legacy-my family-do the same.

To my horror, however, I observed and heard things that left me in a state of great concern. The 99% need healing, they need repair, they need transformation. The camp was ripe with hostility towards police. My conversations with the occupiers revealed little or any willingness to forgive and seek atonement from the police. Even more horribly, the occupiers seemed content to forget or even ignore the basic lessons our great non-violent leaders left for us. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said the most dangerous thing about violence is its futility. This great leader recognized that fighting violence with violent resistance leads to a continuing cycle of inter-generational trauma and hatred.

Yet many of the occupiers seemed ready for a violent fight-some welcomed it- and many more were unready to forgive. I fear this movement is in need of spiritual guidance less it lead to the same horrible cycles history has witnessed many times over. This guidance was sorely lacking at the occupation and even as I journeyed throughout the camp, I was unable to find a spiritual center. It is the lack of spiritual consensus and guidance that, I believe, is responsible for what I observed next.

The highlight of the day was a speech and a reading from the Egyptian movement that was followed by a "Solidarity March." The reading was disturbing to hear because its focus was on the justification for violent resistance. Although the need for violent aggression may be debatable in Egypt, it is not here in America. The activists of our past changed this county by being willing to die, not by being willing to kill. What shocked me more was that no one (including myself) booed or hissed. We sat there and many applauded. Worse followed.

A leader of a Palestinian youth group read his own speech. "Down with Israel," he said near the end of a speech that focused on past wrongs. There was resounding applause. Then one of the leader's crew standing next to me said "fucking Jews," and in the face of this I could stand it no longer. I told him that I believed it was racist to say that and that forgiveness and atonement is the only hope for peace in the middle east. I told him that I forgave him and he should be careful with his thoughts and words. I told him that my best friend is Palestinian and I am close to many Jews and I wished sincerely to see the differences reconciled for the sake of the innocent generations of the future. Then I had to leave because I was overcome with tears and wanted to scream out to the crowd (I wish I had). The Solidarity March went out shortly thereafter but some people stayed out of the march for the same reasons I did. After all, it makes no sense to march in a "Solidarity March," when the speeches before the march openly contradict the concept of solidarity.

I wish our American youth and people around the world would use the tools passed down by the legacy before them. Organized Non-Violent Non-Cooperation is a gift of strategy from our greatest activists. MLK, Gandhi, Cesar Chavez-these are men who changed the world by doing but not by killing and we squander their memory and their message when we ignore their teachings. How quickly the world forgets. To the religious and faithful and spiritual around the world (those like myself), I would ask: Does God want us to kill in God's name? Or, Does God want us to be willing to die in God's name? Shall we sacrifice the lives of others before we sacrifice of ourselves? Shall we win the battle against our external enemies yet loose the battle against our inner self? In the struggle against oppression, against fear, against the machine of death and war, perhaps our greatest weapons will be forgiveness, atonement, selflessness, and love. I hope people arm themselves with these weapons and I hope they fight back with all their might. I would give my life to that kind of fight.

I am not sure why I wrote to you. But I am sure that writing to you helped me put the sadness of this event behind me. Thanks for reading and for being there.

-Jordan Ashe
Law Student, Father, Husband, 99%er

Dear Jordan, Thanks so much for this letter. I share your sadness at the distortions within Occupy Oakland.

I have been participating both in Occupy Oakland and Occupy San Francisco, and I feel that the Occupy movement nationally has made a tremendous contribution to our society. By formulating things in terms of "the 99%" it finally did what many other progressives have failed to do-namely, identify us as having a common interest in protecting ourselves from the class war that has been waged against us, all of us, for the past 30 years by the 1% and their representatives in the government, media, academia and military. So I remain a passionate supporter of this movement.

Yet some of the strengths that exist elsewhere are notably lacking in the core group that led people into the struggle in Oakland. Let me be clear, however: I know that at least 90% of the people who marched on Nov. 2nd during the General Strike and marched to the Port of Oakland are people who agree with you. But there is a determined group of violent self-described "anarchists" who ideologically believe in violence and seek it out. They correctly note that destruction of property is not the same as destruction of human beings, and they correctly note that the amount of violence against human beings built into our global economic and political systems makes any violence that they do pale in comparison. Moreover, the violence of the Oakland police has been a central reality in the lives of people of color in Oakland, and only stays in the attention of the media for more than a day or two when the victims are white (or in this case, a former US soldier back from Iraq and Afghanistan). So there is a built in hypocrisy when the media makes the story "the violence of the demonstrators."

But those arguments are, in my view, not good reasons to allow violence or provoke violence or property destruction by demonstrators, for two reasons: 1. We should be non-violent because it is the right way to treat other human beings created in the image of God, and should not seek to create circumstances in which police violence is inevitably triggered unless we do so by ourselves being totally nonviolent in action and words. I'm in favor of non-violent disruptions of oppressive institutions (e.g. a sit-in in the Bank of America or in a Wall Street firm or in a corporation involved in illegitimate foreclosures or in producing military equipment or at the State Dept or the various offices of the Immigration and Naturalization Services given their vicious processes) as long as we keep a 100% non-violent stance. I do not think people need to sit down and get arrested--though that works in many cases; it is also legitimate to do nonviolent disruptions using mobile tactics in which demonstrators disrupt and then withdraw to disrupt somewhere else--as long as the demonstrators avoid destruction of property or creating a situation in which violence is inevitable. Non-violence does not mean passivity, but it must mean a fundamental respect for human life and for the dignity of human beings, including those with whom we strongly disagree. Our actions must reflect that sense of respect for the humanity of the Other--because that is precisely what is absent from the policies and practices of the 1% and those who do their bidding. 2. Though breaking windows or destroying property is not the same as breaking bones, it is perceived by much of the American public as a wrongful act, and a movement that engages in that activity quickly loses public support and isolates itself no matter how much the American public agrees with its goals. That is why the FBI and other elements of the "security apparatus" of the US government have consistently planted their youngest employees inside social movements with the goal of trying to encourage acts of violence so as to provide an excuse to repress those movements with public approval.

But non-violence has not been the stance of the inner core at Occupy Oakland. I was deeply disturbed, and have withdrawn from active involvement with, a group of clergy who were meeting to discuss how they could assist in Occupy Oakland. At the third meeting I attended I proposed that we urge Occupy Oakland to officially endorse non-violence, train monitors to non-violently restrain violence-oriented demonstrators, and appeal to the majority of demonstrators to support these monitors to restrain the violence-oriented ones. To my shock, the clergy voted that down. They were only willing to endorse a resolution saying that they themselves supported non-violence, but they objected to the notion that they should call upon OO to share this same orientation.

Not surprisingly, then, a few days later when one of the participants at OO suggested a resolution for non-violence, without the active support of this clergy group the people who agreed with him felt silenced after some part of the crowd actively booed when he mentioned Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi's commitments and teachings for non-violence.

The dominant reason given by the clergy for their cowardice was that "we have no right to impose our view on those who are taking the risks of sleeping outside at Occupy Oakland; we should respect their process." But advocating is not imposing, and a movement that claims to speak for 99% of the population ought to have some mechanism to pay attention to the sensibilities of the people whom they claim to be speaking for! If those of us who have been in the movement, marched with the movement, and publicly advocated for the movement, do no have a legitimate voice in that movement, it seems transparent that such a movement cannot claim to be fighting for democracy. It thus undermines itself.

I watched this same thing happen in the 1960s and early 1970s when a small group of violence-oriented Weathermen, and the FBI agents who infiltrated the anti-war movement and a few of their more suggestible followers, managed to play an important role in undermining support for the entire movement by demeaning people who weren't ready to "prove their commitment" by violent or property-destroying acts. Not only did the violence provide public justification for an increase in repression of the anti-war movement, it also soured the millions of people who were attracted to the possibility of building a different kind of world based on love, kindness, generosity and caring for others. The mass of participants in our movement abandoned it once the violence-prone got the attention of the corporate media, and I fear that the same thing is happening now.

There's yet another twist in our current situation. The Occupy movement is meant to challenge the class war being waged against the 99% by the 1%. Sitting in front of a particular building to make that point was a useful tactic. But the people who are there have turned the tactic into a fetishization of the encampments, as though the movement was really about their right to set up tents and stay their all night, rather than about challenging the materialism and selfishness of the global marketplace and the lack of democracy in a society that allows the wealthy and the corporations to give endless monies to elect people (in both major parties) who in turn support the corporate agenda and the tax benefits for the rich. I personally believe that the city governments should actively help the demonstrators find a place to demonstrate in an area adjacent to the forces they are demonstrating against. But if they don't, we should not make that the center of the struggle, because there are a myriad of other tactics to keep the issue on the front burner.

I share with you a deep distress at the hatred toward Israel and/or toward Jews you encountered. I've seen little of that in the days that I've been down there, but I'm not surprised that a handful of people retain those feelings. Again, I feel it is the obligation of the clergy and the adults to stand up to this publicly, raise the issue and challenge those who misuse legitimate outrage at the current policies of the current government of the State of Israel as their excuse for delegitimating the State of Israel itself or for expressing anti-Semitism. While I fully reject the attempt to label all criticism of Israel as anti-Semitic, and have myself been subject to attacks and death threats from right-wing Zionists who have labeled me a "self-hating Jew," I do think that we should insist that our friends in the Occupy movement or any other activist movement of progressive bent challenge anti-Semitism or the double standard applied to Israel by a handful of people who thereby sully our movements and give ammunition to those who seek to discredit us entirely!

Comments (25)

sk:

Brings home why Israel Shahak "prefer[red] to deal with the overt chauvinism of a Podhoretz who is at least intelligible, than with ‘the politics of meaning’ of a Lerner devoid of any meaning and therefore more dangerous":


Then round up [Gilad Shalit's] captors, the slaughtering, death-worshiping, innocent-butchering, child-sacrificing savages who dip their hands in blood and use women—those who aren’t strapping bombs to their own devils’ spawn and sending them out to meet their seventy-two virgins by taking the lives of the school-bus-riding, heart-drawing, Transformer-doodling, homework-losing children of Others—and their offspring—those who haven’t already been pimped out by their mothers to the murder god—as shields, hiding behind their burkas and cradles like the unmanned animals they are, and throw them not into your prisons, where they can bide until they’re traded by the thousands for another child of Israel, but into the sea, to float there, food for sharks, stargazers, and whatever other oceanic carnivores God has put there for the purpose.

LeonTrollski:

misuse legitimate outrage at the current policies of the current government of the State of Israel as their excuse for delegitimating the State of Israel itself

so, if enthusiastically shitty policies don't 'de-legitimize' a state, what does? losing the recipt?

The 99% need healing, they need repair, they need transformation....

Yeah, they need healing and repair, alright -- from the flash-bangers, the rubber bullets, the tear gas and pepper spray and truncheons.

...The camp was ripe with hostility towards police. My conversations with the occupiers revealed little or any willingness to forgive and seek atonement from the police....

Well, duhhhhhh. No shit, Sherlock:
http://www.sinkers.org/posters/oakland/oakland.jpg

Even more horribly, the occupiers seemed content to forget or even ignore the basic lessons our great non-violent leaders left for us...

Yeah, like just sit there and let yourself be beaten, gassed and shot at, so that when your movement is crushed, its tombstone will read "They Were Losers, But At Least They Held The Moral High Ground".

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said the most dangerous thing about violence is its futility...

You mean, like in Egypt, and Nicaragua, and right around here in 1776?

...The highlight of the day was a speech and a reading from the Egyptian movement that was followed by a "Solidarity March." The reading was disturbing to hear because its focus was on the justification for violent resistance...

...because unlike your standard geezing-assed Gandhi-groupie pissant American "activists", the revolutionaries of Tahrir Square didn't fetishize Nonviolence™, and had no qualms about resisting state thuggery in the streets by any means necessary -- nor did the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto who took up arms rather than trudge meekly off to be gassed to death.

Jesus H., has this doorknob been living under a goddamn' rock for the past half century or so? Seriously, man; we need to find out where this guy lives so we can go over to his house and smack some sense into him. Wotta frickin' pompous-assed tool, man.

chomskyzinn:

"I attended the Oakland camp yesterday.... To my horror, however, I observed and heard things that left me in a state of great concern. The 99% need healing, they need repair, they need transformation. The camp was ripe with hostility towards police...."

It really works as comedy and parody. Read it a couple of times and it just gets funnier.

Or try this: Imagine the writer is describing a Hooverville as recreated so powerfully is "Grapes of Wrath."

"The camp was ripe with hostility towards police...." Steinbeck could've written this sentence: lovingly and with righteous passion.

chomskyzinn:

"I attended the Oakland camp yesterday.... To my horror, however, I observed and heard things that left me in a state of great concern. The 99% need healing, they need repair, they need transformation. The camp was ripe with hostility towards police...."

It really works as comedy and parody. Read it a couple of times and it just gets funnier.

Or try this: Imagine the writer is describing a Hooverville as recreated so powerfully is "Grapes of Wrath."

"The camp was ripe with hostility towards police...." Steinbeck could've written this sentence: lovingly and with righteous passion.

op:

i think the joker e mailing
his "master" here
is an fbi agent period full stop
no one can be that ridiculous

non violence here that gets shaved down to no property distruction is an act of police provocation
a provocation to passive idiocy
and tin ear
divisive holy joe ing
agent trying to provoke this wretched
musak like fool of a master

or is he

maybe its clearer to suggest this is a two agent gig
an abbot and costello bit

two expressions by the master
undermine his misty sheen
of liquid "innocence"

"property destruction "
and
"delegitimating the State of Israel itself "

two quite orthogonal bogeys

"two expressions by the master
undermine his misty sheen
of liquid "innocence"

"property destruction "
and
"delegitimating the State of Israel itself "

two quite orthogonal bogeys "

OP, sometimes I have a hard time parsing your epic poetry, but I hear ya on this one.

Anonymous:

Flugenrock would prefer the tombstone read, "They Were Losers, But at Least They Fought Back".

Anonymous figures, losers are losers. We're all dead in the end, and no one will bother reading the epitaph anyway. To Hell with futile struggle. Get drunk.

"To Hell with futile struggle. Get drunk."

I say get drunk and then engage in futile struggle!!!!!

They don't call me the drunk pundit for nuthing I tellz ya.

From the Bhagavadgita:

There saw Arjuna standing fathers and grandfathers, teachers, uncles, brothers, sons and grandsons as also companions.
And also fathers-in-law and friends in both the armies. When the son of Kunti (Arjuna) saw all these kinsmen thus standing arrayed
He was overcome with great compassion and uttered this in sadness;
When I see my own people arrayed and eager for fight O Krishna,
My limbs quail, my mouth goes dry, my body shakes and my hair stands on end.
The Gandiva slips from my hand and my skin too is burning all over. I am not able to stand steady. My mind is reeling.[2]

Yet Arjuna fought against his kin.

Here's a lesson for you Mr. Anonymous. Your life is short and it's meaningless, but it is the only life you have. Live it, fight it, do it, and to use the meaningless of existence and the futility of your actions as an excuse to not fight for what you believe in is the most cowardly of excuses.


MJS:

Funny, isn't it? if we live on, or if we don't live on, the conclusion is the same: every minute matters.

RedPhillip:

Good Friend,

Funny, isn't it? if we live on, or if we don't live on, the conclusion is the same: every minute matters.

Because there is only this minute, this moment, that exists. The experience of the past and the hope for the future inform each of these essential, evanescent moments that comprise our waking lives.

LeonTrollski:

Losers are losers. We're all dead in the end, and no one will bother reading the epitaph anyway. To Hell with miserable despair. Swing your fist.

The Creator:

We are all dead in the gutter. But some of us were looking at the stars when we were run over by a police wagon.

Well, fucking Bloomie, eh?

op:

one hopes plans for this juncture were well worked out ahead of time

foley square for a muster point seems precarious unless numbers arriving on foot mount rapidly into the tens of thousands

clog the area completely

Anonymous:

Drunk Pundit: I've read that. Krishna was a manipulative bastard.

MJS: Therefore, the fewer minutes spent being beaten, chained, or otherwise abused, the better, right?

The Creator: The victims in Zucotti Park chose to make targets of themselves. Is there no better place for stargazing?

I just don't get it. The meaning of all your words seems clear enough, but it can't be. If we have just one, brief, meaningless life, then must be so very wrong to waste it deliberately immiserating ourselves, seeking pain (with no possible gain) rather than avoiding it. And yet from the same premise you all arrive at the completely opposite conclusion. WTF? Seriously, WTF am I missing? Sorry to get all emo, but sometimes it feels like the world is made entirely of sadits, masochists, and me, alone. But that's kind of megalomaniacal and can't be correct, either.

If this is the only life a person gets, and others are doing their damnedest to fuck it up, why not fight them, Anonymous?

Why not take some of them with you, if dying is what you have to do?

MJS:

Anon's point is kinda getting past me. "Deliberately immiserating ourselves"? Who's doing that, or advocating it? The self-immiseration, it seems to me, lies in doing what the cops say. The bliss lies in defying them -- even if the nightstick subsequently descends. It doesn't cancel out the bliss, though it hurts like a sonofabitch. But you're going to have the hurt anyway. Might as well have the bliss too.

Mr. Smith,

I think the catch is "no possible gain."

There's plenty to be gained. Even temporary gains leave their trace in memory. And as you say, there's the bliss of the blustered face, purpling apoplectic as the expectation of obedience, and the anticipatory sexual thrill common to that breed, falters and crashes in the face of resistance.

antonello:

From an article on Yahoo News:

"The law that created Zuccotti Park required that it be open for the public to enjoy for passive recreation 24 hours a day," Bloomberg said. "Ever since the occupation began, that law has not been complied with, as the park has been taken over by protesters, making it unavailable to anyone else."

The police commissioner said officers gave the crowd 45 minutes to retrieve their belongings before starting to dismantle tents and let people leave voluntarily until around 3:30 a.m., when they moved in to make mass arrests.

"Arresting people is not easy," he said, adding that he thought the officers showed great restraint in the face of "an awful lot of taunting, people getting in police officers' faces, calling them names."

Full article here: http://news.yahoo.com/crackdowns-reach-epicenter-wall-street-protests-235327049.html

How maudlin are the mighty when defied. How tender their concern for the public, denied passive recreation. How tender their compassion for themselves: taunted officers, called names.

Is there any limit to the self-pity of the powerful? They are truly convinced, I believe, that no one else has suffered so much. And they endure all for our sakes, these boddhisattwas of the law, but with so little of heartfelt gratitude in return.

They haven't been nailed to their crosses; why don't they step down? This possibility, however, occurs to them all too seldom.

"Drunk Pundit: I've read that. Krishna was a manipulative bastard."

And you're not?

Spare me.

"Anon's point is kinda getting past me."

Anonymous went to see Waiting for Godot and came away inspired to live that way.

Al Schumann:

"Passive recreation" sounds appalling. Somewhere in the dank recesses of the mighty minds, the concept of taking it easy and relaxing got turned into a pathological condition.

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