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Rabbi Lerner's, (editor of Tikkun magazine and co-founder of Network of Spiritual Progressives ), The Left Hand of God is a visionary challenge to change the world. His objective is bringing together three groups of the Left/Progressive community: a. secular progressives; b. spiritual but not religious folks; and c. religious progressives. This alliance will work to expose the life-damaging consequences arising from the dominant "bottom line" in American economic systems and social structures: what is rational, productive and effective is that which increases profit and power. Beyond critique, the Left Hand of God also provides an articulate hope for what the "New Bottom Line" could look like: our insitutions and policies are judged rational and productive to the extent they increase generosity, care and affirmation of others, ecological sanity, ethical responsibility, and a genuine reverence, awe, wonder and radical amazement towards the earth and the universe.
Essential to Lerner's thesis is the spiritual crisis gripping America. This crisis finds its roots in a economic system of globalized capital that he calls a "globalization of selfishness".
Globalized capitalism has accelerated economic, communicative and eco-logical interdependency. It has also heightened mutual isolation and alienation in social relations.
The focus on the economic bottom line: to value money and power above all else, to see self primarily as rationalizer of self-interest...as created a profound personal, familial, and social spiritual malaise.
Lerner calls it a "spiritual depression":
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This spiritual depression is characterized by a sense of loneliness or alienation, a feeling that we are not really being recognized or dealt with in an authentic way. A feeling that our deepest life energies are being depleted or at best have been put to rest temporarily. A loss of awareness of the beauty and holiness that surrounds us. A sense that rather than expressing our inner being, we and others are going through mechanical motions imposed upon us by an outside force. Pg. 49.
Since the Political Left and Progressive Politics seems deaf to this depression, unable to see how it effects millions of Americans, or the importance it carries in the lives of Americans...they (Progressives/Liberals/Leftists) will not be taken seriously by most Americans.
Americans hunger for a framework of meaning and purpose to their lives that transcends their own individual success, and connects them to community based on transcendent and enduring values. Being bereft of these is a Spiritual Crisis.
People yearn for a purpose-driven life and want to serve something beyond personal goals and economic self-interests. If the Left can't respond to these needs, folks will turn Right. The Left has been unable/unwilling to take seriously this crisis, Lerner argues "because they don't recognize Spiritual needs as a central reality of contemporary life."
Lerner works to organize Progressives around the Left Hand of God worldview. In this sense, God is the force that makes possible transformation from a world based on pain and cruelty to a world based on love and generosity. God is the power that moves humanity to transcend the Freudian notion of the repetition compulsion: simply repeating the abuses suffered in one's life onto others. The Left Hand of God is the force of non-violence, peace and social justice in the world.
It is an alternative to the domination-as-the-path-to-security model of the politics of militarism, xenophobic nationalism, US global hegemony, and religious triumphalism of the Right Hand of God...which is the worldview that mobilizes much of the Religious Right, providing theological support and sanctification for the Political Right.
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