Oct 12-14, 2007
If you’re one of the many people who look at what is happening to our society and our planet and wonders, “When and how will sanity prevail?” please come to this retreat.
In last year’s best-seller The Left Hand of God, Rabbi Michael Lerner outlined a strategy for social healing and a new direction for progressive social transformation. He calls for A New Bottom Line, in which economic and political institutions are no longer wedded exclusively to the goals of increasing money and power. They also need to be linked to, and judged by, the extent to which they maximize caring for others, kindness, generosity, love, ethical and ecological responsibility, wonder at the grandeur of the universe, and recognizing living beings as embodiments of the sacred.
How can this play out in practical politics in the next twenty years? What does it have to do with ending the war in Iraq, saving the planet from ecological destruction, and influencing the outcome of the 2008 elections? Everything. Dr. Lerner believes people have deeply shared values and aspirations, that they yearn to move away from the ethos of selfishness and materialism and toward an ethos of love and caring. This weekend will provide training in how to articulate a spiritually progressive worldview.
This strategy is not just theory or abstract knowledge. Lerner has created a Network of Spiritual Progressives (NSP) with over 80 chapters around the US and over 5,000 members. The NSP has developed A Spiritual and Ethical Strategy to End the War in Iraq and Transform America’s Relationship to the World.
Lerner will intersperse his teachings and trainings with the spiritual richness of the traditional spiritual practices and prayers of the Jewish Sabbath, which he will share with all who come to this inspired and inspiring retreat.
Michael Lerner is editor of Tikkun Magazine and author of eleven books, including The Politics of Meaning, Spirit Matters, Jewish Renewal, The Socialism of Fools: Anti-Semitism on the Left, Healing Israel/Palestine, and co-author, with Cornel West, of Blacks and Jews: Let the Healing Begin. He received an Oakland PEN Award for his courage in supporting reconciliation between Israelis and Palestinians, received The Martin Luther King, Jr., Gandhi Award from Morehouse College in Atlanta, and was named one of America’s most significant visionaries by Utne Reader. Both the N.Y. Times and Jim Wallis called him “a prophetic voice,” and J. Edgar Hoover said he was “one of the most dangerous criminals in America” (for his leadership in the peace movement in the 1960s). He is rabbi of Beyt Tikkun synagogue in San Francisco, and we welcome his return to Rowe.
"America desperately needs a revitalization of spirit to lend wisdom and compassion to our economic and political life. Rabbi Michael Lerner's proposal is a visionary response to this urgent need, but it is one based on an incisive understanding of the struggle between fear and hope." -- Richard Gere, actor and Buddhist activist