[This obituary is re-printed here with the permission of Ms. Kaiser and J. The Jewish News of Northern California]

Rabbi Michael Lerner considered himself a prophet in the tradition of Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel. And like those prophets, he believed his life’s mission was to convince people, especially Jews, that we were on the wrong path, focused too much on individualism and materialism and not enough on revelation and the power of love.

Lerner, who died Wednesday in Berkeley at 81, was a key voice in the Jewish Renewal movement, seeking to create a Judaism centered on the God of liberation, transformation and hope that he found in the Passover story. Regarding Israel, Lerner believed in a Zionism of compassion, with a solution for both Jews and Palestinians. A radical in his youth, Lerner later advocated for a politics of meaning that he believed would bridge the left-right divide and lead to a more just economic system around the world. 

“Michael was a person who was amazingly consistent, the most I have ever known,” said his ex-wife and longtime friend and colleague Nan Fink Gefen. “He had a vision of who he was and what his life was. Forty years ago and just last week, he had the same passion, the same burning desire for the world to become what it can become. He could see a world of fairness, justice, compassion, love.”

Lerner was also a key part of my life. From 1997 to 2006, I served as managing editor, associate publisher and senior editor at Tikkun, the magazine that Lerner co-founded and edited. He mentored me in what was my first real-world job after I left academia. He let me keep a hybrid work schedule so I could be home most of the day with my 4-month-old. Even so, he was a hard man to work for, quickly angered when others couldn’t keep pace with his rapid thoughts or 24/7 commitment to his life’s work. He acknowledged his imperfections but was unable or unwilling to fix them. In that way, too, he was part of the prophetic tradition.

Lerner’s vision was shaped in part by his childhood. He was born on Feb. 11, 1943, in Newark, New Jersey. His father was a municipal court judge and his mother was a Democratic Party organizer. Both were key figures in New York’s Jewish federation, and Lerner grew up in a household surrounded by Jewish thinkers, leaders and doers — among them Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. Heschel embraced a Jewish version of liberation theology that emphasized outspoken activism around social justice issues— quite unlike the assimilationist Reform Judaism that then predominated in America. Lerner called Heschel his teacher and would come to see himself as walking in Heschel’s shoes. 

Lerner graduated from Columbia University and earned a Ph.D. in philosophy from UC Berkeley. Like others at Cal, Lerner was radicalized by the Free Speech Movement and became a leader of Students for a Democratic Society. (At Cal, he roomed with anti-war activist Jerry Rubin.)

His first teaching position was at the University of Washington, where Lerner founded the anti-war Seattle Liberation Front. In 1970, he and six other SLF members who came to be known as the Seattle Seven were indicted for their role in inciting a riot that broke out in front of a federal courthouse. It was around this time that Lerner and a co-leader of the Seattle Movement, Theirrie Cook, had a son, Akiba Lerner.

But American culture was changing, as Sixties radicalism became the Seventies Me decade. Lerner, who had been so energized by the utopian visions of the 1960s, could not understand why the working class had not risen up to fight “the man.” He returned to Berkeley in 1975 to find the answer. There, earning a second Ph.D., this one in psychology at the Wright Institute, Lerner talked to and surveyed working people. He discovered that the economic and political structures that govern daily life not only create material inequality but also loneliness and a loss of meaning. He believed that this sense of isolation and defeat reinforces a feeling of impotence — a phenomenon he labeled “Surplus Powerlessness” in a 1986 book of the same name. 

Lerner’s foundational realization was that the left could never overcome inequality by focusing only on material conditions. To build a better world, progressives would need to address the despair of the working class through a sense of compassion. He saw religion and what Viktor Frankl, a psychologist, philosopher and Holocaust survivor, had called the “search for meaning” as the only pathway to personal and social liberation. In his subsequent writing, he would flesh out both his critique of the left and his vision of what progressivism might look like if it addressed structural change and personal empowerment through the lens of a liberation theology.

Lerner developed these ideas in conversations with his then-wife Nan Fink (a psychotherapist and writer who later became Fink Gefen), legal scholar Peter Gabel, historian David Biale and others. During this time, Lerner returned to Heschel’s teaching — particularly Heschel’s insistence on engaging with the material world and his social justice theology — as a way to pull together his intellectual and activist selves. 

Lerner came to believe that only our trust in something larger than ourselves could overcome Surplus Powerlessness. This understanding became the basis of his founding vision for Tikkun magazine in 1986 and for his most important political work, “The Politics of Meaning,” published in 1996. The word “tikkun” came from the kabbalistic belief about tikkun olam — the concept that the world is broken and that God relies on human beings to put together the pieces. Lerner became the magazine’s founding editor, and Fink Gefen the founding publisher. 

Tikkun energized Jewish thinkers of the 1980s who found in its pages an opportunity to rekindle the politics of the 1960s. For many, the religious element of Tikkun, which was so central to Lerner, was less important than the tradition of Jewish intellectualism that the magazine sought to foster.

“When Tikkun first came out in 1986, an issue somehow found its way to me at my apartment in Chicago and I was thrilled,” said Nadine Epstein, editor of Moment Magazine. “Tikkun embodied a Jewish story that wasn’t being told at the time, a hopeful one, a meaningful one, and it was exciting to a young person like me who didn’t feel connected at that point to the American Jewish world.”

If Lerner had wanted, his magazine could have become the alternative to Commentary, then the leading center-right Jewish magazine. Instead, Lerner dug deeper into what he now saw as his prophetic mission to develop a politics of meaning. As he got older, Lerner would continue to expand and reiterate his basic view that “Americans hunger not only for material security but also for a life that is connected to some higher meaning, and the failure of the liberal and progressive movements to win a consistent majority support is based on their inability to understand this hunger.” 

At first, his insistence on a politics of meaning seemed to pay off. Lerner moved to New York in 1991 to be closer to the intellectuals, publishers and D.C. politicians he sought to sway. The New York Times Magazine mentioned him repeatedly in a 1993 profile of first lady Hillary Clinton, who was a fan of Lerner’s ideas for a short period. But the media quickly tired of what one Baltimore Sun columnist called his “psychobabble.” Other newspapers, put off by his emphasis on spirituality, disparagingly called him the “guru of the White House.”

Lerner tried to leverage his newfound notoriety to launch an activist organization, the Foundation for Ethics and Meaning. While the first summit of the new nonprofit attracted more than a thousand people, Lerner lost money on the endeavor. With bad press proliferating, the Clintons refusing to acknowledge him and an angry staff demanding unpaid wages, Lerner fled back to Berkeley in 1996.

Burned by retail politics, Lerner immersed himself in the kabbalistically influenced Judaism of Rabbi Zalman Schacter-Shalomi, the founder of Jewish Renewal. Receiving his ordination from a rabbinical court organized by Schacter-Shalomi, Lerner devoted his energy to shaping Jewish Renewal into the “Path for Healing and Transformation” that would deliver the meaning he believed the left needed. 

His 1994 book, “Jewish Renewal,” became the voice of the movement and Lerner founded his own congregation called Beyt Tikkun, so that he could practice this renewed Judaism in community. He later would marry Debora Kohn, who herself became a rabbi and a leader of Beyt Tikkun.

Today, Lerner’s most popular book on Amazon is not the “Politics of Meaning” or “Jewish Renewal” but “Embracing Israel/Palestine.” In many circles, Lerner is known mainly for his pro-Palestinian views. Still, he always identified as a Zionist. He wrote about Israel in the same way he wrote about the left — from a hope that if Israelis and Palestinians could only find a sense of meaning beyond their lived circumstances, that they would discover a way to “heal” their political divides. He understood his critiques of Israel as being directly in the line of the prophets. 

With the exception of his take on Israel, few of those in Lerner’s former world of New York Jewish intellectuals appreciated his vision. The writers who had powered Tikkun in its first decade fell off, unsympathetic to a religious perspective. Back in Berkeley, Lerner began keeping company with New Age thinkers like Riane Eisler and Matthew Fox who shared his view that spirituality was a stronger force than any pragmatic political wheeling and dealing. 

“This is what made [my father] a unique figure,” his son, Akiba Lerner, told me. “That he was trying to straddle many different worldviews. He encouraged people to see that self-transformation is linked to larger political transformation, and vice versa.”

Spurred by this vision, Lerner founded a new organization, first called the Tikkun Community and later the Network for Spiritual Progressives, designed to attract the New Age seekers who were drawn to the magazine Tikkun was becoming.

His next books repeated the themes of his earlier ones: “Spirit Matters” in 2000, “The Left Hand of God” in 2006 and finally “Revolutionary Love: A Political Manifesto to Heal and Transform the World” in 2019.

By 2012, most of Tikkun’s most devoted readers were Unitarians and New Agers, not Jews. Over the next five years, Tikkun lost money, becoming an online-only magazine and then closing for good in 2024. During this period, Lerner married his third wife, Cat Zavis, a Jewish activist and organizer who became a rabbi and now heads Beyt Tikkun. 

Lerner, whose papers are part of the Stanford University archives, leaves a lasting legacy. For Ari Bloomekatz, a one-time Tikkun editor and now editor of In These Times, “Rabbi Lerner’s legacy can be found in the resurgence of progressive Jewish publications, in Jewish-led movements for justice against systems of apartheid, death and occupation in Israel, and in so many Jews, like me, who he helped understand that our spirituality is not a political weakness or incongruent with working-class politics, that our spirituality is in fact deeply intertwined with our progressivism and the urgent need for revolution and collective liberation.”

Lerner never lost his prophetic impulse. In the words of his close friend Rabbi Arthur Waskow, he was a “great champion of peace and justice against great odds.”

“He always chose to risk being closer to the precipice than I did,” Waskow said this week. 

Lerner is survived by his son, Akiba, his daughter-in-law, Sunny, and two grandchildren, Ellie and Jeremiah. 

Donations in Lerner’s memory can be made to American Friends of Neve Shalom/Wahat al-Salam (“Oasis of Peace” in Hebrew and Arabic), a nonprofit committed to supporting the Arab-Jewish village in Israel.

Image credits: black-and-white: J. The Jewish News of Northern California / color: B. Hartford and J. Strong via Flickr CC BY 2.0