[P2P-F] Fwd: News Advisory: Liberal & Progressive Jews Support the Egyptian Uprising

Tue Feb 1 06:31:27 CET 2011

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Rabbi Michael Lerner <rabbilerner at tikkun.org>
Date: Tue, Feb 1, 2011 at 7:30 AM
Subject: News Advisory: Liberal & Progressive Jews Support the Egyptian
Uprising
To: Michelsub2004 at gmail.com

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News Advisory: Release Feb. 1, 2011  For interviews: call Mike Godbe at 510
644 1200 or mike at Tikkun.org

*Why Jews Around the World are Praying for the Victory of the Egyptian
Uprising *

*
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*

* *

* *Rabbi Michael Lerner, editor of Tikkun Magazine and chair of The Tikkun
Community, affirmed today (Feb. 1, 2011) that there is a growing upsurge of
support for the Egyptian Uprising in the Jewish community.

Rabbi Lerner issued the following statement:

Ever since the victory over the dictator of Tunisia and the subsequent
uprising in Egypt, my email has been flooded with messages from Jews around
the world hoping and praying for the victory of the Egyptian people over
their cruel Mubarak regime.

            Though a small segment of Jews have responded to right-wing
voices from Israel that lament the change and fear that a democratic
government would bring to power fundamentalist extremists who wish to
destroy Israel and who would abrogate the hard-earned treaty that has kept
the peace between Egypt and Israel for the last 30 years, the majority of
Jews are more excited and hopeful than worried.

            Of course, the worriers have a point. Israel has allied itself
with repressive regimes in Egypt and used that alliance to ensure that the
borders with Gaza would remain closed while Israel attempted to economically
deprive the Hamas regime there by denying needed food supplies and equipment
to rebuild after Israel’s devastating attack in December 2008 and January
2009. If the Egyptian people take over, they are far more likely to side
with Hamas than with the Israeli blockade of Gaza.

            Yet it is impossible for Jews to forget our heritage as victims
of another Egyptian tyrant—the Pharoah whose reliance on brute force was
overthrown when the Israelite slaves managed to escape from Egypt some 3,000
years ago. That story of freedom retold each year at our Passover “Seder”
celebration, and read in synagogues in the past month, has often predisposed
the majority of Jews to side with those struggling for freedom around the
world.  To watch hundreds of thousands of Egyptians able to throw off the
chains of oppression and the legacy of a totalitarian regime that
consistently jailed, tortured or murdered its opponents so overtly that most
people were cowed into silence, is to remember that the spark of God
continues to flourish no matter how long oppressive regimes manage to keep
themselves in power, and that ultimately the yearning for freedom and
democracy cannot be totally stamped out no matter how cruel and
sophisticated the elites of wealth, power and military might appear to be.

            Many Jews have warned Israel that it is a mistake to ally with
these kinds of regimes, just as we’ve warned the US to learn the lesson from
its failed alliance with the Shah of Iran. We’ve urged Israel to free the
Palestinian people by ending the Occupation of the West Bank and the
blockade of Gaza. Israel’s long-term security will not be secured through
military or economic domination, but only by acting in a generous and caring
way toward the Palestinian people first, and then toward all of  its Arab
neighbors. Similarly, America’s homeland security will best be achieved
through a strategy of generosity and caring, manifested through a new Global
Marshall Plan such as has been introduced into the House of Representatives
by Congressman Keith Ellison.

            In normal times, when the forces of repression seem to be
winning, this kind of thinking is dismissed as “utopian” by the “realists”
who shape public political discourse. But when events like the uprisings in
Tunisia and Egypt occur, for a moment the politicians and media are stunned
enough to allow a different kind of thinking to emerge, the kind of thinking
that acknowledged that underneath all the “business as usual” behavior of
the world’s peoples, the yearning for a world based on solidarity, caring
for each other, freedom, self-determination, justice, non-violence and yes,
even love and generosity, remains a potent and unquenchable thirst that may
be temporarily repressed but never fully extinguished.

            It is this recognition that leads many Jews to join with the
rest of the world’s peoples in celebrating the uprising, in praying that it
does not become manipulated by the old regime into paths that too quickly
divert the hopes for a brand new kind of order into politics and economics
as usual, or into extremist attempts to switch the anger from domestic
elites who have been the source of Egyptian oppression onto Jews or Israel
which have not been responsible for the suffering of the Egyptian people.
Such extremists could easily be marginalized were Israel to take definitive
action to accept the peace terms offered by the Palestinians in 2007-8 and
known to the world through the release of relevant documents by Al-Jazeera,
and were the US in conjunction with Israel to announce a Global Marshall
Plan with first location being the Middle East. Such a plan has been
developed in some detail by the Network of Spiritual Progressives.

            We hope that Egyptians will hear the news that they have strong
support from many in the Jewish world.

Rabbi Michael Lerner is editor of Tikkun www.tikkun.org , chair of the
interfaith Network of Spiritual Progressives, and rabbi of Beyt Tikkun
Synagogue in Berkeley, California.  He can be reached at
RabbiLerner at Tikkun.org  To read details of the Global Marshall Plan, go to
www.spiritualprogressives.org/GMP
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