Moreover, when the oppressive regimes of the past are overthrown, the innocent in those societies often suffer as much as the perpetrators of evil. Read the book of Lamentations written in the wake of Jerusalem being conquered by the ancient Babylonians and read this week on Monday night when many religious Jews begin the one day of fasting and mourning called Tisha B'av, and you can hear the same kind of stories that we hear 2500 years later from the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki--that it is innocents who often take the brunt of the suffering even when an oppressive regimen is being overthrown.
That same story will play out on a massive level unless global capitalism is quickly replaced by global economic arrangements that gives priority to preserving the global environment and building a society that gives primacy to love and generosity over corporate and individual greed. Just as the Torah predicted some 2500 years ago (or more), there will be an environmental catastrophe unless there is the kind of revolutionary changes sought by Torah (including the massive redistribution of wealth every fifty years during the Jubilee--Yovel, the cessation of work every seventh year for the entire society--the Sabbatical Year observed by everyone on the same year, the weekly cessation of all work and all dealing with money or domination or "power over"--the Jewish Shabbat--plus the forgiving of all loans; and of course, the implementation of the Torah laws calling on us to love the stranger--the Other---and love our neighbors). But here again, those who suffer will not only be those who fought to keep corporate power and capitalist materialism and selfishness in place, but everyone in the entire society.
Perhaps the point here is that there is no possibility of people thinking that if they personally live good and just lives they will be rewarded with health, happiness, and the benefits of life on earth. That fantasy is a product of capitalist distortion that encourages us to think of ourselves as "lone rangers" whose fate depends on ourselves. The reality, Torah and Judaism teach, is that we are intrinsically part of a larger society and world, and that our fate is intrinsically bound up with the fate of everyone else on the planet and the fate of the planet itself.
So where is God's beneficence in all this? That S/He/It conveyed to us that this is how the world was set up, and gave us the insights on what we needed to do to preserve the planet. Exercising stewardship over the earth, acknowledging that we don't ever have a "right" to the land but only an obligation to use it in ways that are environmentally sustainable and socially just, to be loving and caring toward each other, to respond to the natural world with awe and wonder and radical amazement. Sometimes I wish that God were actually the big man in heaven who intervenes in human history that appears in the imagination of many and that gets called upon in some of our prayers. But that God doesn't exist, or, at best, is in hiding and can't be expected to respond to our prayers calling for immediate interventions into history. Except through us, created in God's image and now partners with God in the healing and transformation of the world (and the word tikkun refers precisely to that process which we must carry out in this world and at this time).
So, no, there will be no justice for Trayvon Martin, of for the hundreds of thousands of minorities that fill our prisons, or for the hundred of millions of people who are now suffering malnutrition and living in conditions of extreme poverty. But there will be a price to be paid, and it will be paid, perhaps by those of us still alive in the next ten to twenty years, certainly by the whole human race within the next fifty years.
And there will be a come-uppance for the Jewish people for having allowed Israel to present itself as "the state of the Jewish people" even while it was engaged in oppressive policies toward its own Arab citizens, toward the Palestinian people as a whole, and toward the Bedouins upon whom the Knesset is now seeking to deny rights. For those of us, including myself, who love Israel and wish it to survive and flourish, the continuing tragic path it chooses, largely a result of the still-dominant Post Traumatic Stress Disorder which I describe in my book Embracing Israel/Palestine and which operates equally self-destructively among Palestinians, the self-inflicted wounds of the Jewish people today raise more sorrow than anger, more wishes to assist in healing than desire to see punishment, more deep sadness for our people which once again, in power, is doing precisely the kind of distorted activity that led to the last two Jewish exiles from our land.
But this time it will be different, because the fate of Israel is intrinsically tied to the fate of the rest of the planet. And that fate is growing more and more disastrous every day we continue to allow the environment to be poisoned and the minds of ordinary people filled with the common sense of capitalist ideology: that are all alone, that we are powerless to change anything big beyond our personal lives, that we can't trust others except if we have power over them, that domination rather than generosity is the path to homeland security, and that we shouldn't worry because everything will work out fine. It is this twin focus, mourning for the mis-direction of Israel and the destructive impact of global capitalism on the life support system for the planet, that is my focus for Tisha B'av.
So this is all part of what I'm mourning as I start my fasting for Tisha B'av. Monday night, July 15 .
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