PAPERS FROM THE TIKKUN CONFERENCE 

In the last two issues we have printed several papers and addresses from the Tikkun Conference, which was held in
December 1988. Our presentation of conference material is concluded with this special section. We regret that we do
not have the space in the future to print more of the many interesting and important ideas that were presented

at the conference.

PAPER: LIBERALISM AND ITS CRITICS

'Tikkun and Progressive Liberalism

 

Gary Peller

ne of Tihhun?s real as a magazine, and

as a center for progressive Jewish thought, is

its openness to a wide range of political Views
and sensibilities. Civil libertarians, feminists, socialists,
Marxists, social democrats, and Democratic party liberals
are all heard in Tihhun. There is no ?of?cial? Tihhun
dogma of the correct way to look at the world.

At the same time, amidst the diversity of views, Tihhun
has introduced and encouraged a very particular kind of
progressive politics, an approach re?ected most strongly
in its editorial pages, but also seen in many outside
contributions. This new political thinking is character-
ized by attention paid to people?s emotional needs, to
family relations, to the relevance of religious belief and
spiritual insight for political life, to the 
of power underlying social alienation and passivity, to
the loss of con?rmation and meaning people feel in
their everyday lives, and to the need for progressives to
respond to authentic aspirations people have for a moral
vision in which they can feel part of a community
collectively re-creating social life. The position has
been called ?neocompassionism? or the ?politics of
transcendence.? For simplicity?s sake, I will just refer to
it as Tikkun politics.?

Now this new approach has caused uneasiness among
some, and fellow progressives and liberals rather than
right-wingers have often been the ones who have reacted
most sharply. For example, when Betty Mensch and
Alan Freeman wrote about the limiting effects of the
public/private dichotomy in liberal ideology, Paul Starr
saw ?an image of collective tyranny rarely seen this side
of Jonestown? (thun, March/April 1988). When Peter
Gabel, Mensch and Freeman, and I criticized what we

 

Gary Peller is a professor of law at Georgetown University
Law Center.

saw as the colonizing power that scienti?c discourse
exercises in the debate between creationism and evolu-
tion (Ti/ehun, Nov/Dec. 1987), letters to the editor
accused us of engaging in the same kind of irrationality
that characterized fascism, the nazism, and other
reactionary movements (Tzhhun, May/June 1988). And
when Edward Rothstein wrote about the New York
Tih/eun conference in the New Republic, it was Michael
Lerner?s intermingling of Judaism and politics that he
f0und most troubling: ?[T]he claim of any intrinsic
connection between politics and religion can only lead
to a distortion of both? (New Republic, March 6,1989).

These reactions, though sometimes extreme, should
not be surprising. Critics are correct when they sense
that this new discourse is fundamentally different from
the ways that liberals and progressives have usually
understood politics. Tihhnn politics is not traditional
progressive liberalism with new topics, such as the
family and spirituality, sprinkled in to keep up with the
times. While we support the progressive agenda for
welfare, better housing, child care, antidiscrimination
efforts, and strong protection of human rights, we are
simultaneously engaged in an effort to get liberals and
progressives to rethink their most vital assumptions
about politics, power, and the meaning of social reform.

We believe that the traditional progressive politics has
failed to comprehend the central importance of people?s
widespread feelings of powerlessness and alienation as
an obstacle to the possibilities for meaningful social
change. The progressive liberal agenda has not inspired
popular passion because it conceives of politics in too
narrow a way, as concerned solely with the distribution
of government bene?ts and the protection of individual
rights, and thus it fails to present a vision that enlivens
progressive proposals with a sense of shared purpose
and community by connecting them to people?s everyday

77

lives and experiences.

The overarching liberal vision is that progress means
enforcing various borders?borders between reason and
passion, objective scienti?c knowledge and subjective
personal intuition, public politics and private religion,
the liberty of the individual and the coercive power of
the community. Within this tradition, justice consists of
people?s being treated neutrally in public affairs, as
citizens, while being free to be particular and subjective
in private life, as individuals. Religion is banished from
the public realm because its knowledge is subjective
and particular, and therefore its presence in the public
realm would constitute a tyranny of a part over the
whole; science is elevated in the public world because
its knowledge is objective and universal. Racial and
sexual discrimination are fought against because they
represent irrational prejudice; neutral procedures of
selection are elevated because they are supposed to
treat individuals on their own merits. And thus, when
writers in Tz'kkun argue for the relevance of religious
intuition and spiritual insight to public life, or assert
that science has itself become an ideology of hierarchy
and power, or contend that the emotional breakdown
of family life and friendships has a social, political
dimension, liberals see a violation of deeply assumed
borders between politics on the one hand and objective
truth and private liberty on the other.

his sense of patrolling borders is also evident

on the philosophical level, in the shared dualities

that mark each liberal category of knowledge. I
am going to be ridiculously simplistic here, but I want
to draw attention simply to the basic outlines. First of
all, this worldview is characterized by a particular
ontology which conceives of individual subjects existing
in meaningful form prior to social groups. Similar to
this ontological separation of the individual from the
group is the epistemological separation of objectivity
and subjectivity: true knowledge is not the particular
intuition of people, but the universalizable proof of
reason. Associated with this ontology and epistemology
is a liberal genre of social theory that explains how
groups come into being and relate to one another. The
shared assumption here is that groups are secondary
to individuals, so that various social groups (ranging
from the state to marriage) are formed on the basis of
the consent of formerly separate individuals who express
their desire to join with others. And, ?nally, the liberal
tradition has an associated political theory of freedom,
focused on the preservation of individual liberty from
the demands of the collectivity and holding that the best
way to accomplish this goal is to prevent the state from
imposing contingent values, such as religious beliefs,
on individuals.

78 TIKKUN VOL. 4, No. 4

Those of us seeking to transcend the limits of the
liberal worldview start with a perception that the prob-
lems of our current social reality are more profound
than simply the lack of appropriate government programs
or the insuf?cient protection of particular individual
rights. Rather, we take as a primary task the need to
respond to the alienation, disengagement, and power-
lessness of people?s day-to-day experience of social life;
to the way that we experience our jobs, our friendships,
our families, and ourselves; to the loss of the sense that
liberalism initially promised that the world is not ?xed
and necessary but contingent and open to change?that
we can make and remake the world by working together.

In our contemporary society, the typical experience
of work, say, is not one of engagement and choice,
where we feel a part in the creation of our structures of
social relations, but rather one of playing out some role
that has been written for us by someone else, we know
not whom, to which we adapt ourselves to ?t the external
demands of whatever our job description is. And the
formal democracy of unionism has not, in most places,
changed this basic lack of meaning in our work lives. In
the same way, the common experience of politics is not
an engaged sense that we are part of the day-to-day
collective construction of the terms of social life. Rather
it is the episodic, alienating isolation of standing in
solitary voting booths in order to guarantee the privat-
ization of the political moment, standing outside any
actual participation like voyeurs in a closet, punching
holes in pieces of paper for candidates we don?t really
like?as far as we can tell, since they are presented to
us through the mediation of professional image produc-
tion. The problems of our polity are poverty, home-
lessness, and the continued domination of racism and
sexism, but what seems to hinder attempts to transform
our world is a deeper sense that things can?t change
because we aren?t even connected to them, that our
ways of relating to each other are external to us, that
there is a core necessity to our basic terms of social
life?otherwise our rights will be threatened or the
trash won?t get picked up. This is the general sense of dis-
engagement and resignation that needs to be transcended
if our social life is to be meaningfully transformed.

Liberalism, at its birth, represented many of the same
truths that we hold most central. As a rhetoric of critique
against status-based feudal life, liberal ideology was a
revolutionary and powerful assertion of the contingency
of social life?of the idea that the forms of human
association can be radically different and, conversely,
that human relations are not objective and ?xed, with
an immanent order ?owing from nature, but instead
are rooted in social choice and thus can be remade by
human will. As a political theory and an intellectual
tradition, liberalism was ?rst and foremost a critique

of existing social power, a historic assertion that power
has no Divine authority but must answer at the citadel
of reason. And in more contemporary contexts, this
tradition has had heroic moments when people stood
up during the McCarthy period for freedom of speech
and thought, and during the civil rights struggles of the
fifties and sixties when liberals powerfully articulated
the injustice of racism and the virtues of equality.

he problem is that, today, this tradition no longer

inspires or demands reform and resistance. The

?aw of the liberal agenda is not only that it
ignores a particularly important dimension of our social
lives by failing to address the powerlessness and aliena-
tion that has come to characterize our public roles. The
difficulty is deeper than that. Today liberalism has
become part of an American cultural ideology that
legitimates as neutral the basic terms of our social
relations and therefore contributes to a sense of neces-
sity about existing ways of being together, even as it
suggests reforms for exceptional deviations re?ected in
?discrimination? against particular groups. The feudal
invocation of Divine authority has been replaced by the
enlightened authority of Reason and Science, but they
play the same roles?to justify as necessary and impartial
what is really social and contingent.

Tikkun politics is threatening to people who are used
to thinking of social justice according to the traditional
categories because our approach denies the virtues of
maintaining the borders of liberal ideology. First of all,
we are critical of the universalizing notion that it is
possible to have a public life that would be simply
neutral to particular groups or interests. The constant
tendency is to treat as objective and uncontroversial, as
free from the marks of power and will, aspects of our
public lives that we think are inevitably political and
socially constructed?like the idea that, but for race or
gender discrimination, people are treated ?on their own
merits? in work life; or that, once religious explanations
for genesis are excluded, the remaining evolutionary
account is neutral or objective; or that, so long as the
government has been kept out, our social relations are
the result of our private choice. In each of its central
oppositions, the liberal ideology is oriented toward a
place that would be universal, free from the particularity
of politics and history, rational as opposed to intuitive,
neutral instead of biased, objective instead of partial,
scienti?c and secular rather than intuitive and religious.
But this point of view beyond point of View, this universe
of reason beyond the particularities of time and place,
simply does not exist.

This is not merely an academic issue about the intel-
lectual possibility of an Archimedean vantage point.
The epistemology of liberalism takes on a lived form

in particular institutions, as the discourse of rational
impersonality becomes the actual voices of those in
authority: the voice of the ?expert? educational admin-
istrators in school board meetings, of the ?neutral?
judge in court, of professional doctors relating to lay
patients and corporate executives to workers, and, ?nally,
of a widespread cultural neutrality ultimately symbolized
by the accentless and disembodied network news anchor
speaking with the authority of impersonality. But every
time such a point is presented, the claimed universality
and objectivity are really the creation of particular people
with particular interests and histories and ideologies.

 

Tbe progressive liberal agenda bas
not inspired popular passion
because it conceives of politics as
concerned solely witb tbe
distribution of government bene?ts
and tbe protection of individual
rigbts, and fails to connect to peoples
everyday lives and experiences.

 

By orienting itself toward this vantage point of neutrality,
the liberal worldview obscures the ways that our social
lives are inevitably political and contestable, precisely
because they are created by us and therefore can be
created differently. For example, the idea that combating
racial domination consists simply of removing irrational
discrimination against people of color misunderstands
what is at stake. It is not simply unequal treatment that
constitutes the ideology of white supremacy, but, on a
deeper level, the arrogance that once such invidious dis-
crimination has been removed the remaining distribution
of jobs or other bene?ts would truly re?ect some objec-
tive, acultural, neutral standard of ?merit.? To the extent
that the traditional liberal approaches understand in-
justice as consisting only in treating clearly identified
groups with bias, they uncritically legitimate the more
general ways that American institutional life is unfairly
structured in hierarchies that elevate some people and
marginalize others under the guise of a neutral rationality
that is presented as beyond politics and free from the
marks of social power. To recover the possibility of mass
engagement and interest, we must begin to recognize
that social relations are contingent across the board?not
simply in the possibility of subjective discrimination,
but more profoundly in the way that ?objective? criteria
of merit and reward are constructed.

The distortions of the liberal ideology go beyond
this tendency to legitimate particular social relations as

TIKKUN AND PROGRESSIVE LIBERALISM 79

neutral and objective. The liberal outlook also misses
the everyday politics of our social lives by ?ltering
understanding through a sharp dichotomy between a
private, individual realm where we are supposed to be
free from power and a public, social realm where we
are subject to necessary social force. Within the terms
of liberal political ideology, the alienation people feel is
systematically misperceived as either a ?private? matter
or a ?neutral? public necessity, and thus the politics of
everyday life is made invisible, and the politics of public
life is put out of reach.

iberalism?s border between the individual and

the group forms the ideological infrastructure

within everyday consciousness for the experience
of alienation I described earlier. In its most important
dimension liberalism is neither an ontology nor a political
or philosophical theory; rather, it is a lived ideology
about how to be in the world, about how to understand
the self in relation to others. In this everyday dimension,
liberalism exists as the set of categories we use for
experiencing and making sense of the world.

The central notion is that, as individuals, we are
separate from the groups in which we ?nd ourselves,
and that our public lives are sharply distinguished from
our private lives. Group life, viewed through this ?lter,
is at ?rst alien to us, threatening to rob us of our
identities, of our freedom to make what we want of
ourselves. So we come into group life distrusting others
and seeking protection through ?rights? that mark the
boundaries between self and other. In making this quali-
tative distinction between public and private, the indi-
vidual and the group, the subject and the object, we
take the public, social roles we play as normally objective,
external to us, part of the demand of the other, precisely
because we know we did not choose them. We already
knew what the role ?manager? or ?worker? meant before
we began playing it. Conversely, we think of our private
time as subjective, as free from social power. The trade-
off for playing out our public roles without any sense
of real meaning or engagement is that when we go
home, into our private realm, we are supposed to be
free to be ourselves, to act on our individual desires in
the realms of sexuality, family life, religious experience,
friendship, and play.

One consequence of shaping our understanding of
social life in this way is a constrained view of the
borders of politics, of the regions of social life appro-
priate for social struggle. By translating our ?private?
lives as based on individual choice and autonomy, the
liberal ideology tells us that these issues are not political
at all because they should have nothing to do with the
exercise of social power. To make private choices the
subject of public politics is to engage in moralism, and

80 TIKKUN VOL. 4, N0. 4

that?s what conservatives do.

But this translation of our experience is false. Just as
our public relations can never be neutral and objective,
so too are our so-called private lives inevitably consti-
tuted by social power. This is true in one sense because
our public roles directly influence our private lives. To
the extent that we experience public life as the need to
shape ourselves to be acceptable to demands rooted
outside, in the objective, out-there forces of the market
or some bureaucracy, we begin to form ourselves with
an to how others will see us and we lose touch with
our?authentic feelings separate from this process. Part
of our dif?culty in forming friendships and long-term
intimate relationships in our ?private? lives is rooted in
the effect of our public roles on our core identities.

The in?uence of the social in our ?private? world goes
deeper than this spillover from the public world. Social
power, re?ected in the very terms we inevitably use for
understanding ourselves and each other, is constitutive
to our private roles themselves. We approach each other,
even in the private realm, according to a public language
for perceiving each other?as friend, lover, neighbor,
parent, child, stranger, and so on. Our freedom simply
to be ourselves is constrained by how others see us and
by our need for their acceptance and con?rmation.
And each of these private roles carries with it a social
meaning about the appropriate boundaries, bearing the
terms upon which acceptance has been institutionalized.

This is not to say that there is nothing to the individual
that ever distinguishes her from the group?only that
there is no way to mark off this distinction either in
theory or in day-to-day experience. The attempt to
separate it out?the animating concern of liberal political
thought~inevitably misrepresents what is socially con-
structed and political as individual and private. Not-
withstanding the role liberal ideology played in building
resistance to the oppression of feudal life, in today?s
world the category of ?private liberty? can just as easily
mean the misrepresentation of social power as mere
individual choice and the tendency to blame ourselves
for unhappiness that is in fact rooted in social structures.

Of course, progressive liberalism now recognizes as
public and political certain economic relations that
nineteenth-century liberals saw as private. According
to the classical liberal ideology, if a worker and an
employer ?chose? a particular wage and working condi-
tions, the state had no business interfering with their
?rights? because the wage was too low, the working
conditions too unsafe or oppressive, or the resulting
distribution of wealth t00 lopsided. The New Deal
re?ected the widespread rejection of this apologetic
ideology. It marked the recognition that economic life
is not privately chosen but publicly constituted by the
distribution of property and entitlements flowing from

the state itself, and that one?s economic status is the
result not of a natural market meritocracy, but of politics.
Today?s liberals are progressive in their view of the state
as an active participant in the achievement of social
welfare. Thus progressives attempt to get the government
to make economic life more egalitarian even while they
maintain traditional liberal vigilance in keeping the state
out of areas of individual liberty and private choice.

The problem is that, despite its progressive economic
policy, contemporary liberalism retains the traditional
idea that justice consists in the separation of the pub-
lic and the private. Progressive reform has meant the
transfer of economic issues to the political arena, but
also the preservation of the underlying liberal metaphysic
of individualism.

he contemporary feminist movement, where the

slogan ?the personal is political? originated,

has powerfully revealed the social politics of
?private? life. Here the attack on the ideology of the
public/private metaphysic has been deeper and more
subversive to the liberal worldview because the focus
has been on the way the very paradigms of privacy?the
family, home life, sexuality, and personal fantasy?are
the products of the social power of patriarchal assump-
tions. We do not join in family life and sexual relations
as autonomous, freely choosing monads acting on our
individual, presocial desires. Our family roles and our
sexuality, like it or not, are infused with social under-
standings of what it means to be a man or a woman, a
parent or a child, gay or straight, a mother or a father,
a ?housewife? or a wage earner. Even what we find
erotic is socially constructed by what the social world
has told us about ourselves and our partners, about the
normalcy of domination and hierarchy. Whatever one
thinks of the particular reform proposals of the feminist
antipornography movement, there is no denying that
its proponents have powerfully articulated the consti-
tutive nature of social power in what many of us take
to be our very most private relations, and have demon-
strated that the liberal vision of government neutrality,
the attempt to keep the state out of our ?private? realm
of liberty, is therefore not really neutral but is instead a
stance that simply pays deference to the status quo
power structure of gender and sexuality.

The liberal ideology fails to recognize that politics is
at stake not simply in who will be elected or how state
power will be exercised, but more fundamentally in
how our everyday social roles are constructed and repro-
duced. Both sides of the liberal dualisms?that every-
thing can be understood fundamentally as public or
private, subjective or objective, individual or social?-
exclude the possibility that social relations are never
either ?chosen? or neutral, but rather are socially con-

structed and thus bear the marks of a history of struggle
and the contingencies of a future that could be different.
Liberalism began as a critique of power, but in both its
intellectual and everyday ideology its vision of where
power is exercised has been limited to the formalized
state. But power is at stake across existential space: in
sexuality, in workplaces, in schools, in hallways and
on street corners, and in the myriad social hierarchies
within which we ?nd ourselves. Instead of responding to
the widespread and unfulfilled need people have to feel
a part of their social lives, contemporary liberal discourse
understands reform only in the sense of remedying the
exceptional discrimination, and therefore it fails to con-
nect the domination of the victims of ?discrimination?
to the widespread powerlessness people feel that their
social lives are beyond their control or influence. A
new, transformative politics must recognize this broader
agenda and thereby connect .the widely experienced
pain and estrangement of masses of Americans to the
particular struggles on behalf of the poor, minorities,
and women.

To some, crossing the borders of liberal ideology
means ?collective tyranny,? where the state will regulate
every aspect of our private and public lives according
to the whim of the majority. Tikkun politics thus seems
to threaten whatever freedom our liberal culture has
achieved. But we recognize that the liberal tradition
has helped institutionalize important freedoms. We don?t
think that people should be thrown in jail for expressing
their views or that kids in school should be forced to
pray to others? deities. But we also don?t think that it is
desirable to render public schools, and the public world
generally, antiseptic, impersonal, and alienating to who
we are and where we come from. Each attempt to
achieve a neutral public life has actually produced new
castes separating the secular, the reasonable, the cos-
mopolitan, and the enlightened from the religious, the
redneck, the uneducated, and the parochial. 

In short, the fear of ?collective tyranny? ignores the
ways that our social relations are already collectivized
according to the liberal discourse of power that poses
as objectivity itself. Our freedom cannot depend on
enforcing borders between the public and the private,
because drawing the borders is itself a political decision
to regulate with one form of social power rather than
another. Protecting ?private? economic rights in tradi-
tional liberalism meant exposing ordinary working
people to the ?collective tyranny? of the economically
powerful; protecting the privacy of family relations means
exposing women to the tyranny of patriarchal power.
Moreover, seeing ?collective tyranny? in attempts to
uncover the suppressed politics of everyday life betrays
a narrow attitude toward politics?a vision of politics
in which the only means of exercising social choice is

TIKKUN AND PROGRESSIVE LIBERALISM 81

by voting for one candidate or another. But politics
could mean more than voters choosing a central govern-
ment out there. It could mean being engaged, all of us,
together, in the construction of our social roles as we
live them day to day in the institutions in which we ?nd
ourselves.

We want to help articulate a politics that responds to
the powerlessness that people feel in their everyday
lives, that comprehends all the places where power is at
stake, and that reinspires us to believe that we can
remake the world. We want to resist the liberal border
patrol that tells us that our subjective and particular
values are inappropriate for public discourse and that
our personal lives are simply the result of autonomous
choice. Part of this project means articulating progressive

PAPER: RELIGIOUS FUNDAMENTALISM

legislative proposals and engaging in electoral campaigns.
But such activities can also con?rm the alienating sense
people have of the world?s being ruled by alien forces
unless these activities are connected with a transforma-
tive vision of a shared social struggle to recover power
and meaning in everyday life.

We want to overcome the sense that the public world
of politics stands outside ourselves as some abstract
and distant community. Thus we reject the arti?cial
association of the spiritual and the moral with the private
sphere. We want to spiritualize the political world and
politicize the private one. It is time to recognize that
the liberal borders themselves enforce a colonization of
everyday life. 

An earlier version of this paper was given at the Tikhun conference.

The Real Issue Behind Who-Is-a-Jew

 

David Biale

ith the formation of a new national unity

coalition between Likud and Labor, the

Who-Is-a-Jew issue has once again been
relegated to the political back burner, a development
that American Jewish organizations will no doubt
regard as a great victory. But this immediate achieve-
ment should not obscure the fact that more profound
underlying issues remain unsolved and that what appears
on the surface to be a victory may conceal cancerous
self-delusion.

There was a striking irony in the rush of American
Jewish leaders to criticize Israel publicly and even to
mobilize non-Jewish members of Congress to pressure
Israeli leaders over the issue of Who-Is-a-Jew. In many
cases, the very same leaders who viciously condemned
those who had raised questions about the occupation
of the territories and the handling of the Palestinian
uprising were among the most vocal about Who-Isa-
Jew. When a symbol of their ostensible self-interest was
at stake, they had no compunction about ?Israel-bashing?
(to use their favorite pejorative), but when it is Palestinian
children who are being beaten, beatings that can scarcely

 

David Biale is director of the Center for Jewish Studies and a
professor of Jewish history at the Graduate Theological Union
in Berkeley, California. His latest hook is Power and Power-
lessness in Jewish History (Schoeken, 1986). A Hebrew version
of this article appeared in the Israeli journal Politika.

82 TIKKUN VOL. 4, N0. 4

be called symbolic, their moral sensibility fails them.
Who-Is-a-Jew was much more important to them than
the real question: What is a Jewish state?

But moral issues aside, American Jewish leaders got it
wrong, even from the point of View of pure self-interest.
Judging from the concern that these leaders evince over
Reform and Conservative conversions, one would think
that tens of thousands of American Jews were immi-
grating to Israel every year. In truth, no more than a
handful of converts would be affected by a change in
the Law of Return. Of course, it could be argued that
a change in the law might affect Diaspora Jews in the
event that anti-Semitism were to create the need for a
mass exodus to Israel. But such a claim is the last thing
that American Jews wish to advance in public, nor is it,
in any case, likely.

The intifada, on the other hand, has the potential to
affect quite vitally the self-interest of American Jews.
One might imagine a scenario in which Israel adopts
more and more extreme policies to suppress the Pales-
tinians, including mass expulsions. At the same time,
the PLO continues to develop its political initiative,
calling for a two?state solution. The United States, which
has now ?nally begun contacts with the PLO, becomes
thoroughly fed up with Israeli intransigence and begins
to apply serious pressure. American Jews, in such an
event, w0uld ?nd themselves politically isolated and