CLAL Special Features
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Jewish Public Forum Seminar:
“What Is Religion For?”
November 19, 2001
Pre-Seminar Response to the Question:
“What Is Religion For?”
By Tsvi Blanchard
For me,
the challenge, I would even say the temptation of September 11 was social despair. I saw a
world locked into an endless round of violent hatred and destruction. I had two responses. On the one hand, I turned to
religion—especially the utopian imagination found in religion—in order to mobilize my capacity
for hope. I wanted to feel deeply the human capacity to imagine a better world in which
the pain of the existing economic, political and cultural arrangements is overcome. I wanted to experience ideas and images that in
part express socially transformative visions.
On the
other hand, September 11 also reminded that one religion’s utopia is another
religion’s nightmare. I saw how effectively a particular religion could mobilize
resources for social change when it imagines its perfected world as the ultimate total
triumph of its own doctrines, codes and institutions.
I saw a religion that understands the social struggle to realize its utopian vision
in terms of coercion, domination and power—human and Divine. As a result, I am now
considering the following questions.
1.
In the present North American situation, can
religion still articulate a vision of an ideal world that Americans could/would find
engaging? Is there any real power left in the utopian element of religion?
2.
Can that vision be one that animates us to lessen or
at least question forms of social coercion and interpersonal? Can religion use its vision
to undermine the destructive inequalities and hierarchies that result from its role as an
ideological support for class, gender, national, ethnic or particular institutional
interests?
3.
Can religion articulate the vision of a society in
which love, mutuality and solidarity replace personal satisfaction, social status and
individual achievement as central animating values in the moral and spiritual realms? Can
religion get us past a world of autonomous individuals bound only by mutually satisfactory
contractual relations?
4.
How would religion connect the values of its utopian
visions to the social policies and methods needed to a work effectively for their
realization? Can religion help our means become informed by our ends?
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