must claim the Jewish tradition as ours. We are its inheritors; we are the link in the chain of the generations; we can pass on what is most positive and powerful in it; we can struggle against the inevitable legacies of cruelty and pain that are within it, even as they are within OPENING PLENARY ADDRESS What Rides the Wind ourselves. This, I believe, is the promise of a new move- ment for Jewish liberation, part of the movement of all peoples for the liberation of the planet, to which we at TzYei?zm are committed. I?m proud to be amongst so many of you who share this struggle with me. Cl Marge Pz'ercy he sad thing about the left as I have experienced it has always been its penchant for in?ghting, for recruiting to one?s own particular passion within the bounds of those already engaged progressively and lashing out with one?s meanest, tightest anger against those who agree on six points out of seven. Ah, but the sin of that seventh point, it drives through the mind like a hot spike. Why? For one thing, in?ghting is in?nitely easier. How much more comfortable it is to quarrel cozily inside the family than to take on strangers. We are all well versed in family jousting, as opposed to taking on the world outside. It is traditionally more secure for a man to come home from the job and attack his wife or his kid than to take on his boss. \We may most keenly resent those who are closest to us, so that we would rather that someone we perceive as a rival be defeated, even though in large measure we may be on the same side. American Jewish literature written by men has often presented the ?hero? as a warrior battling his mother, girlfriend, wife: someone generally smaller and in this society poorer, with far fewer options for surviVal, in- come, sex partners, and position in society. For another, it is easier intellectually, emotionally, on every level, to argue with someone who shares at least a number of your basic assumptions and some of your values. Another ongoing tendency on the left is the split into smaller and smaller, purer and purer splinters of absolute agreement. There appears to be endless satis- faction available in repeating one?s own group rhetoric in public after sanctifying that rhetoric through group purgation; much more satisfaction than in actually lis- tening to other people?s points of View. In politics, as in bad marriages, the time while the other person?s mouth Marge Pz'ercy is a writer living in Massachusetts. Her most recent hook it [be novel Gone to Soldiers (Swarm? Books, 1987). 58 TIKKUN VOL. 4, No. 2 moves is usually spent polishing your own stiletto and admiring your face in it. Purity is a requirement that should be reserved for water and air and foodstuffs, but kept out of political process. Politics is an area realistically and rightfully of mixed motives, mixed responses, mixed audiences, very different needs; the province of coalition and compromise; of sel?shness, anger, pride, passion, altruism jangling together; and sometimes?sometimes?a sense of community. All the most successful political movements?the best and the worst??whether of the right or of the left, have offered a sense of transcendent motion, of shaping and riding history, of being enlarged by possibilities that people can work toward. Jewish self-hatred cannot be neglected as a cause of this in?ghting, for often what we most despise in each other is some subterranean?some repressed, suppressed, or abandoned?aspect of ourselves. Self-hatred is pervasive in our society because the media as a continuous mass for the icons of consumption constantly instruct us of our individual imperfections as we fail to achieve stan- dards of ?nancial success, emotional richness, social acceptance and celebration, sexual grati?cation, physical beauty and strength, total and permanent plastic health available to just about no one. Almost everybody believes herself or himself to be a failure, and the more you move out of the elite, the more thoroughly this sense of failure characterizes ordinary life. In this society, every woman is a failure simply because she grows older, and women are blamed for aging just as they are blamed for being made of flesh. This sense of failure, of being stymied, of being stunted or blocked, of not being good enough and not having enough of what you ought to have to show you are good enough, is suf?ciently powerful to turn this country around. For the most part, the right harnesses it. Through sports metaphors?the collisions of nation? states and economic systems viewed as football games?? and through the identi?cation with military or economic forces as if they were individual heroes and villains engaged in a showdown at high noon on Main Street, the right constantly exploits that loose change of emotion. We are trained to identify with our country as if our nation were a macho street kid, where confrontation and honor (construed in the sense of nobody being able to whop you) Showdowns, and muscle-flexing are all part of the paraded. Since actual war involves the slaughter mostly of civilian populations and the death of a great many children, women, old people, cats, dogs, horses, cattle, birds?the whole attendant ecology of a place?the overlay of imagery drawn from old westerns or gang fighting seems bizarre. This ten- dency to identify powerfully as a spectator is taught by TV [the great baby-sitter) and is polished through adolescence into adulthood, and often intensi?es in old age. Many Americans report their warmest relationships to be with their television set. Many people conceive of the actors, whether they are playing heroes in adventure shows or characters in situation comedies or anchors on the highly structured bits of visual gloss we call the news, as people they know better than their best friends?as their true friends. Therefore the president becomes one more god in the box, one more participant in the TV show of the news. The right has moved the venue of confrontation from the streets to the tube. Until and unless we are able to create a liberal drama that can match and eclipse the drama of the right, with rhetoric to match, we will not win. One of the reasons that the left won hearts and minds during the sixties was because we were livelier, brighter; we had the good songs and the fascinating action. We seemed sexier. 'We were a brighter toothpaste. Jews on .the left have hardly been immune to the desire to be somebody else, sometimes anybody else. Few of the red-diaper babies I have met were given much of a sense of Jewish culture, and usually they had no knowledge at all of the Jewish religion. Just as the Jewish man typically offers his sexual homage to, and reserves his effervescent lust for, the blonde the much-salivated-over, much-whacked-off?on, much- vituperated ?gure of the shiksa?so often have Jews longed to be acceptable and accepted either in the larger society or in a smaller subgroup where the hierarchy of glamor or political correctness or lovability seldom seems to feature the Jew. For a while the ?other? was the Israeli. He?and it was usually a young male that Americans were thinking Of?was not the stooped, Yiddish-speaking uncle bent over his machine in the garment trade, not a too-loud cousin running a shoe store in the Bronx, but somebody almost as good as the young John Wayne. He was lean, tanned and mean, able, rooted in the land, armed, taking no shit. He provided vicarious pride, just as sometimes it seemed that the Holocaust had provided vicarious shame. If: ften in America the left has been imported along with immigrants and has frequently run a sometimes parallel sometimes tangential sometimes collision course with movements that origi- nated here. Internationalisrn has always been a com- fortable mode for most Diaspora Jews, as well as a fact of life for many families whose individual members survived World War II in whatever country they could manage to wriggle into, legally or illegally. But in the recent left in the United States, the desire to ?nd simple answers abroad that could be applied here has led to a lot of romanticism, to brutal, simple- minded dogmatism, and sometimes to outright lunacy. You take somebody else?s formula, which did or some- times even did not work in Bolivia or Albania or China, and you set out to make our violently multicolored reality ?t into a two-dimensional monochrome grid. A sense of political reality must not lead either to despair (the corporations are all-powerful Molochs, we cannot oppose what they do, we shall inevitably perish of nuclear war so why borher?) or to infatuation with whatever left regime is currently fashionable, so that all one's efforts are spent extolling Fidel or Mao or whom- ever. I shall always hold in my soul as an example of the purist wrongheadedness that has often characterized the American left a devout group of comrades handing out pamphlets to workers pouring out of the subway in Central Square in Cambridge a few years ago with the banner headline: sorrow CLOSELY THE FOOTSTEPS or COMRADE ENVER HOXHA. Central Square is a stone working-class racially mixed neighborhood still resisting gentri?cation. Its residents have fought successful battles against MIT and for rent control. Here is a neighbor- hood with many problems, many energetic potential activisrs, and what is offered them? What sounds like a bad translaticin from the Albaniancase of what Indians call Wannabees? whites who want to be what they think Indians, or Blacks, or Nicaraguans, or Cubans, or Chinese are, or anything at all but themselves having to ?gure out how to conduct a life that is useful and righteous as a live American citizen. Figuring out how to change the United States often feels like such a large task that unconsciously we seek to solve the problem by simplifying reality. But be- ware any commitment undertaken with less than your full intelligence. Whether you are contemplating entering a relationship, a marriage, a contract, a new career; whether you are making a religious commitment or a ?nancial one; whether you are deciding what agenda to follow WHAT RIDES THE WIND 59 or what platform to endorse; anything that requires you to turn off some of what you know is a mistake. Often in my life when I have been most passionately involved politically it has sometimes felt to me as if my companions always demanded that I see life simply in terms of whatever we were committed to at the time. I sometimes think of the pro-Socratic philosophers who searched for the underlying reality of matter: all things are really made of ?re or water or air or flux. Similarly, We have to survive our own bad news in order to Zeave nnyt/aing to our grandcniidren besides bad genes, bad at); bad waiter; and a world nip-deep in radioactive ninzninmn cans and pinsth tampon inserters. at a given time we are told all things are made of racism or sexism or Marxism according to Zilch. Every per- spective, every discipline we master, every new set of ideas provides simply a grid that organizes reality so that some aspects of experience become visible as others drop out of view. When we con?ne ourselves to one grid, we make ourselves stupider than we can afford to be in a dangerous world that changes faster than we can focus. Trying to apply the politics of the past mechanically? whether that past is 1948, 1958, or 1968?makes us stupid also; but we have thrown away the past too many times with a great whoop of relief to believe it goes away because we ignore it. Most of us are the grandchildren or children of im- migrants who were extremely careful not to teach us Yiddish or Ladino. My family was unusual in that my morher and my grandmother were both storytellers, and thus a certain amount of family history, family and tribal and legend, was given to me??along with a hunger for more. But many Jews I know have been al- lowed to understand as little as possible. They may know only that their mother?s or father?s family came from Poland, or even more blandly, ?from Eastern Europe.? In this case, the place where the map gives out and the dragons reign is only a couple of generations back and a couple of thousand miles east of here. In America, where official history is Disney World, our parents often considered all the received history and wisdom and stories of their families as so much peasant trash to be dumped and forgotten. Often we have lost not only the names of the villages where our ancestors lived but any knowledge of what they did for 60 TIKKUN VOL. 4, No. 2 a living, what they believed, why they left and came here; often we have lost the history of labor and religious struggles they may have bled for. What we do know may seem immeasurably distant to us, quaint troubles to people whose problems may be more along the lines of paying for a private school education for their children than staying alive. But empowerment stretches into the past as well as into an imagined future striven for. \Ve create our own lineage as we decide who we are. If you live in New York City, you may believe Jews are no longer marginal; however, this is a society where the religious right is ?ghting to make Christianity official. Similarly, we are always making and unmaking the mythical future. If we cannot imagine alternate futures? new and multitudinously exciting and soothing ways to give birth, care for and socialize our young, educate each other, heal each other, marry, separate, grow old, mourn, die and be buried, communicate with fellow humans and other beings, grow food, eat, dispose of our wastes, deal with disagreements, amuse ourselves?then we shall be stuck in boredom or the types of romanticism disguised as political doctrine I was mocking just now. We shall want only more and more of a share of the same, or wish to be one of those people we imagine as more real than ourselves, whether they are Chinese or in the TV set in ?Dynasty.? Imagination is powerful, whether it is working to make us envision our inner and the vast energy and resources locked into ordinary people and capable of shining out in crisis, capable of breaking out into great good or great evil; or whether it is showing us utopias, dystopias, or merely societies in which some variable is changed-such as a society in which certain women act as incubators for the babies of the upper echelons. Then we can better understand ourselves by seeing what we are not, in order to better grasp what we are. It can also help us better understand what we want to move toward and what we want to prevent in the worlds our children must inhabit. One of the ways in which Jewish self-hatred and the ongoing patrimony of the Haskala, the discovery of secular rationalism by Jews, have impoverished our re- sponses has taken the form of a shudder of disgust at Judaism itself by many American Jewish progressives. In all the time I have been active in the movements of the last thirty years, most of theJews I have met were cultural Jews. Usually they were anti-Zionist, which always caused me trouble. I often disagree with particular Israeli policies, but I never, never doubt Israel?s right to exist and to be a nation. I do not want to live in a world where Israel does not exist. I believe aside from the economic self-interest of Jews who feel they have made it in the goidene/J medinrz (the golden land), the drift of Jews toward the right has intensi?ed because only the right has a place for religion and for Israel?s right to exist as any other country exists?as a mixed blessing and corrupted by power. But the need to af?rm existence is not the same thing as endorsing wrongheaded, wrong- hearted policies that bash the possibility of a peaceful settlement in the Middle East into bloody rubble. The religious right in Israel is no less nutty and no less dangerous than the religious right here, and the military solutions worshiped there can kill us all as surely-as our own nuclear arscnal can. 11 some ways our relationship to Israel is no more realistic a political agenda than the concern of Italian Americans for what is happening in Sicily or the concern many Greek Americans felt during the years of the junta. Often, because of anti-Semitism, we, as Jews living in Detroit or Seattle, are held responsible for what members of the Israeli army do in Lebanon or on the West Bank. However, because American money is vitally important to Israel, and American politics involves covert and overt support for regimes in the Middle East, we are inevitably required to assume a posi- tion. As aJew in the United States, you may ?nd all or only some of your political energies consumed by Israel, but either way there is always something dangerous and loud going on that can at any moment flare into one or another disaster. Zionism is forbidden on one side of the debate, as the Palestinian homeland is on the other. No ethics or politics can sensibly endorse one and ban the other. The left has little patience with Judaism. Most politi- cally engaged Jews tend to be far more tolerant of the Christianity of the Catholic left, of the religiosity of the Quakers, of Buddhism, than of Judaism. As a religion, it seems to embarrass many. Many progressive people cannot see a. revival of interest in Judaism or an attempt to renew it as anything other than a lapse into mental childishness. The Holocaust usually ?gures as a basis for comparisons to something any government is doing that is wrong, bloody, genocidal. I ?nd that I cannot imagine a world that contains both the Holocaust and a personal omnipotent G-d. I cannot, in times of fear of danger, pray to someone powerful to deliver me. I pray in order to align myself in tradition, in history, in my own community, in my own consciousness. I pray to clear my mind of petty greed and distractions and meanness. I pray in an attempt to abrade false consciousness. I pray to feel a unity with all beings. I pray to feel my oneness with the earth. I pray in order to cleanse and correct myself. But I cannot pray for something to happen or not to happen, not even when my life seems to, or does in fact, depend on it. I simply cannot imagine that any petition of mine rising would have any impact on something that would not be moved by the anguish of several million pious and fervid Jews or by the cries of babies thrown living into the ?re. I leave it to those more theologically gifted than myself to craft explanations, or to those athletes of faith who can believe because it is impossible. I can?t. I am nervous about people using the Holocaust freely as a basis for comparison or as a metaphor. It seems to me to go with a desire to deny the extent of the horror and the loss. But genocide is an old habit of our species, and the Holocaust is an extreme of something many societies, including our own, resort to when dealing with minorities experienced as in the way, unassimilable, dangerous in some real or invented manner, turned into devil people. When I read accounts of the massacre of Indian tribes, like the Sand Creek Massacre where even the babies were bayonetted, I recognized the scene on a small scale that Hitler had his willing bureaucracy carry out in the millions with assembly-line efficiency. We as a species are capable of such Us/Them dichotomizing, such civilized savagery, such organized sadism. But I also believe in people?s enormous ability to open up, to give, to grow, to shine and stretch and make incredible beauty in the world we inherit and often abuse. The moral and ultimate issues are pressing in on us as we write, as we think, as we acr. But we have to survive our own bad news in order to leave anything to our grandchildren besides bad genes, bad air, bad water, and a world hip-deep in radio- active aluminum cans and plastic tampon inserters. Our casual and profound sexism debilitates us culturally. We are forever thinking in dichotomies that exclude most possibilities?dangerous Us/Them constructions of a reality that is a continuum. I recommend a vision of the good life that is based on autonomy, not on domination. Ecofeminism places the speaker and other humans roundly inside nature rather than squarely on top or outside of nature to be mastered or manipulated. It assumes that the intelligence functions, but that the other powers of the brain are also operating; and it does not assume everything is entirely knowable. What I call feminism involves, in its essence, replacing a habitual and permeating way of dividing the world into dualities with a different way of looking at things, which is unity underlying diversity. Instead of a series of patriarchal divisions into Men and Others, Whites and Others, Humans and Others, Man and Nature, Mind (Me) and Body Us (People Like Me) and Them (People \Who Are Not Like Me), you look at yourself as part of a whole, as people, as nature. You ?nd the underlying ground, intuitively in part. Unity is a nonrational experience in many of its strongest aspects, experienced rather than analyzed into being. But in WHAT RIDES THE WIND 61 recognizing the unity of the ground of being, the sense of being part, you also recognize how diverse and varied and peculiar and particular are the flowers upon that ground. You don?t expect all divisions to fall neatly into two. Many colors blend into one another, many ways of making a living on this planet, many ecological niches, many ways of making love, many kinds of love to be made, many choices of emphasis. Praise the dung beetle as well as the honeybee. Dividing the society into those socialized to do and those socialized to feel has just about ?nished us as a species. You can?t go mountain climbing with a grand piano on your back; and we may not be able to survive our own technology of killing until every person is responsible for nurturing the young, until each of us is socialized to care and feel every public choice and to ask of every decision, in the words of an Iroquois activist, what does this mean to the seventh generation? ISRAEL PLENARY ADDRESS Negotiations Now If we do not identify with each Other, it will be raztve qui peat, and since we are all on this blue-green egg together, saving oneself alone means polluting the nest. We must be taught, we must teach each other, to see and feel the connections. Without that sense of being part of a web?a social network of labor and society, a total community of rock and lizard and bird and coyote and person, a maze of past from which we issue and the future which issues from us?we necessarily do more injury than good to ourselves and to others. Sel?shness is ?nally fatal to all of us, if only because there is no away in throwing away and no away in running away, anymore if ever there was. If the progressive forces in this country cannot offer a compelling and imaginative vision that moves people, we will not move people. And we will probably not survive- It is that simple and that imperative. El Abba Eben am happy to see so many people at the Tikktm conference. After so many years in Knesset it?s unusual to be in a setting where people say nice things about each other. Let?s start with the good and bad news. The good news is the vitality shown by Tat/em: maga- zine. Not only has it survived?but it has ?ourished, as evidenced by this exciting conference. The bad news is that my party, Labor, has decided to join Mr. Shamir?s cabinet. This was not my advice. But my experience in recent years has been that it is quite suf?cient for me to support a cause to ensure that that cause will suffer immediate and crushing defeat. It was a wrong decision. The main thing Israel needs today is a party that can present an alternative?not just a restraining force on Shamir, but an alternative vision that can return Israel to its roots in prophetic Judaism and classical Zionism. . It is a mistake for the Labor party to try today to build a consensus with Likud. I like the de?nition of Abba Eben is a former foreign mim'ster of the State of Israel and former chair of the Foreign A?airs Committee of Knesset. His most recent book is Heritage: Civilization and the Jews (Summit, 1986). 62 TIKKUN VOL. 4, No. 2 consensus put forward by the Oxford Booka opr/Jorismr: ?consensus is achieved when everyone says collectively what no one believes individually.? It can only be achieved by a kind of homogenizing semantic in which real differences are concealed. After several years of identi?cation with Likud policies it is going to be hard for the Labor party to reemerge as the standard-bearer of an alternative?after so many years in which it has been willing to bear collective responsibility for Likud?s decisions. One of the consequences of this close relationship between Labor and Likud is that the tradition of criticism that had normally been a function of the parliamentary system has now been replaced by a kind of docility in which criticism itself becomes suspect. Those who criti- cize are sometimes termed disloyal. There is, of course, a View of patriotism which requires that one must always defend one?s country?s interests. But the highest patrio- tism is one that also defends one?s country?s values. But for the dramatic events since December of 1987, we in Israel would have spent this past year immersed in considering the signi?cance of our fortieth anniversary. Those of you who have been to Israel this past year would surely have noted a somber note which arose