Remembering Michael Lerner, 1943-2024, Jewish Voice of Conscience (original) (raw)
Michael Lerner, the influential author, editor, anti-sectarian rabbi, co-founder of Tikkun magazine, and for decades an indefatigable curator of any and all perspectives that could help heal a broken world, died August 28 in Berkeley, CA. He was 81.
For half his life he had believed that contemporary Jewish life had lost its connection to the sacred, and that that connection could be restored. The mid-80s was “a time when the liberal voices were being increasingly marginalized in the Jewish world,” Lerner told J. The Jewish News of Northern California earlier this year. “And there was no intellectually serious magazine at the time that could provide such a voice.”
Tikkun was one effort to bring about such a restoration. Lerner also wrote close to a dozen books on the connections between the personal and the political as they related to Jewish life, including Jewish Renewal: A Path to Healing and Transformation (1994), The Politics Of Meaning: Restoring Hope And Possibility In An Age Of Cynicism, (1994), 1994; Jews and Blacks: A Dialogue on Race, Religion, and Culture in America (1996); Spirit Matters (2000); The Left Hand of God: Taking Back Our Country from the Religious Right (2006); and Revolutionary Love: A Political Manifesto to Heal and Transform the World (2019).
Michael Lerner was born and raised in an observant conservative Jewish family in Weehawken, NJ. His own account of his education includes an undergraduate degree from Columbia University, after which he headed west and was pursuing a doctorate in philosophy when the vibrant University of California student movement drew his attention to the interactions between social conditions and the state of the soul. He threw himself into political action, chairing the local chapter of Students for a Democratic Society in 1967 and ’68. In 1970, while teaching philosophy at the University of Washington in Seattle, he was one of the organizers of a major protest against the war in Vietnam, for which he spent some time at a federal penitentiary on contempt of court charges.
Lerner, who was radicalized by the New Left in the late 1960s, sought to unite political and spiritual concerns with a new “politics of meaning.”
He returned to Berkeley, where he would remain for the rest of his life, and where he continued to examine the impact of social conditions in general on Jews in particular. It was while he was in that spirit of inquiry that he first encountered Nan Gefen, neé Fink, in a meeting that changed both their lives. A native Californian, Fink was also a psychotherapist at the time, although over the years she would redirect her focus to the spiritual. She converted to Judaism in 1985, and together she and Lerner articulated the hope for social, spiritual, and political transformation that in 1986 became Tikkun. They married in 1987. Eventually, Fink left both Lerner and Tikkun, but to the extent that the magazine was their child, Lerner kept custody of it_._
Lerner remarried, more than once. Tikkun survived and indeed flourished. In 1993, The New York Times referred to Lerner as _“_this year’s prophet,” describing the magazine as _“_a progressive political journal with a distinctly Jewish outlook.” And in 1995, First Lady Hilary Clinton spoke approvingly about Lerner’s “politics of meaning” in a speech about health care. In that same year, Lerner was ordained as a rabbi. And Lerner—and _Tikkun_—resoundingly supported Palestinian self-determination.
But this past April, Lerner, who had co-existed with cancer for most of a decade, announced that he could no longer run the magazine and was closing it down. At his death, he was survived by his estranged wife, Cat Zavis, and his son, Akiba Jeremiah Lerner.
When Lerner died, the Forward, the New York Times of the U.S. Jewish world, wrote at length about how Lerner had “merged spirituality and social justice.” The actual New York Times has yet to publish an obituary.
Now based in Paris, Judith Mahoney Pasternak is a long-time U.S. writer and journalist in the progressive media and an activist for feminism, peace, and Palestinian self-determination. Over the years, Tikkun published a half-dozen of her articles, including her anti-Zionist credo,“Nine Stops on a Long Road.”