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Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb is one of the first women to become a rabbi in Jewish history. She’s a storyteller, artist and community educator. Listen in as she takes us on an inner pilgrimage of revolutionary nonviolence.
Rabbi Lynn’s experiences paint a picture of a world where diverse identities intersect, find and strengthen one another. Her vision and experiences call toward a world of unity-in-diversity, a shared World House, as Martin Luther King Jr. called it, where we all need one another to be who we are; a house of creativity, of love, compassion and peace that we actively build across our divides — and is one where our hearts rejoice in healing.
Her chapbook, “Shomeret Shalom: Replanting the Seeds of Jewish Revolutionary Nonviolence after October 7” is for anyone who wants to help live into this more realistic and necessary vision of the world as it can be.
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Stephanie: Greetings, everybody, and welcome to another episode of Nonviolence Radio. I’m your host, Stephanie Van Hook, and I’m here with my co-host and news anchor of the Nonviolence Report, Michael Nagler, and we’re from the Metta Center for Nonviolence in Petaluma, California.
We have an excellent program for you today. First part of this show, we speak with Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb. She’s one of the first women to become a rabbi in Jewish history. She’s a pioneer Jewish feminist, human rights activist, writer, visual artist, ceremonialist, community educator, and master storyteller. Rabbi Lynn is a wonderful person, and I invited her on to Nonviolence Radio just for the pleasure of being able to talk with her.
She has a new chapbook, “Shomeret Shalom: Replanting the Seeds of Jewish Revolutionary Nonviolence after October 7.” It’s an honor to have her here, and let’s turn to that conversation.
It’s always interesting just to start conversations which I know will develop into something quite interesting. So, welcome, today, to Nonviolence Radio.
Rabbi Lynn: Thank you so much. It’s really good to be here on Nonviolence Radio. Yes.
Well, first, I want to center what’s happening to Palestinians because there is a war against children happening. I never want to lose my focus. In the war against children, I feel compelled to understand a lot in terms of what are the tactics of solidarity that are being asked, and what is required in this moment.
I don’t spend a lot of time, honestly, worrying about how people might react, only when I’m trying to wage a shift in gaze within my community. So that the question that Jews have to ask ourselves is, what actually does anti-Semitism look like?
What it does not look like is encampments, student encampments. Those are liberation zones. Those are zones where all of the kinds of struggles that have taken place with Black Lives Matter and antiwar struggles, we see encampment zones being led primarily by people of color. Many international students studying here, as well as students from here, and a large number of Jewish students who are calling to their larger community: do not commit genocide in our name.
And there is a big difference between the anti-Semitism of white supremacy and people who are waging a freedom struggle for their very lives. To the degree that we weaponize anti-Semitism as a form of repression against speech of students demanding that we divest from war, means that Jewish people have to take a cold, hard look at the root causes of how we arrived at a situation where rabbis can tell me to my face that saying the word “ceasefire” is anti-Semitic. I find that astounding, given our history, given our recent history.
And in honor of Reverend James Lawson, who was a mentor from whom I learned how to begin thinking about waging nonviolence, and through the art piece which comes from my family, and from Rabbi Everett Gendler, who was my mentor and teacher, a close friend of King, who was on the front lines, I have learned that where people are waging and organizing for freedom, that is where we should put our attention.
If we are supporting institutions of tremendous state violence that robbed people of everything, and we find ourselves justifying that due to our own history, we have a crisis. And we see this crisis. There is a huge crisis within the Jewish community, and whether we will rise to the occasion of divesting ourselves from an acceptance of militarism and profound bigotry toward Palestinians, this is the nonviolent struggle that we’re waging in this moment.
I think it’s important to find allies – and, oh my goodness, I found so many allies and so many amazing people who feel the same way I do, across so many different communities. I’ve had the privilege of learning what anti-racism means and reflecting on that in my own life; the privilege of struggling for women’s rights within culturally sensitive contexts; the privilege of divesting myself from the colonial settlers that was pervasive in the United States and, unfortunately, in Israel.
And so, this nonviolence is a process of de-occupying your mind so that human dignity, and your heart, and divesting yourself of a lot of fear, so that human dignity becomes tantamount. And I have to say, this is what our tradition teaches. I mean, it also teaches some pretty terrible things. But when you ask the rabbis of the Talmud, “Hey, can you sum up the tradition standing on one foot, please?” It’s “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Every person is sacred across all borders, bars, and boundaries. Everything else has to come from that.
So of course, a ceasefire is critical to waging peace.
Stephanie: There could be an interesting poem made with words that you found have become charged with anti-Semitism in some way, like “ceasefire.” And that could be quite powerful. And I wonder if there are other words like that.
Rabbi Lynn: Well, I am a storyteller and my book, “Shomeret Shalom: Replanting the Seeds of Jewish Revolutionary Nonviolence after October 7,” is filled with stories and poems and paintings, as well as personal experiences as a devotee of justice and peace, I guess you could say.
And I think another word for me that has had tremendous significance is “pilgrimage.” Pilgrimage is a spiritual and physical journey to where “woundedness happened,” to places of great devastation that are happening. And so, one could include pilgrimages to inside prison, for people who are privileged enough not to even have to think about it, that’s due to racism. Pilgrimage to Palestine – I’ve led many, many pilgrimages to Palestine because I believe that more people who have on the ground experience at the front line have a deeper understanding.
And that journey cannot just be for vicarious understanding, like, oh, now I get it. But actually, to go on such a pilgrimage is also a commitment of accountability to remain engaged until the harm ends. This is a lifelong spiritual practice that becomes part of one’s – my daily staff. And many other people, many of my friends among the Myohoji Buddhist Order, which has been so inspirational in helping me institutionalize ways for people to join the movement, to ramp on to a lifetime of spiritual, educational and active commitment to waging peace. So, pilgrimage is a big word, and a big activity.
Stephanie: Ties into that idea, too, that you mentioned earlier of decolonizing your mind so that the pilgrimage is also in your spirit, in your mind. Going to the places that you don’t want to see about yourself, or you might not want to see about your own mind.
How do you incorporate pilgrimage as a spiritual practice of this mind decolonization?
Rabbi Lynn: It’s in the spirit of Thich Nhat Hanh, and in the spirit of the [unintelligible], too, who said the main important thing is to keep walking. So, there’s literally the daily walk of mindfulness. And then there are pilgrimages, like I’ve gone on many this year. One was to the Inland Empire, or so-called Inland Empire of the State of California, which is what Reverend James Lawson called where plantation capitalism lives in the United States. It lives in many places, but one place that plantation capitalism lives is in the Inland Empire.
The Interfaith Movement for Human Integrity, which is a people of color led organization where I serve on the board, had organized 50 directly impacted people. That’s a linguistic term that people use to mean people who experience systemic violence directly because they are the targets of the violence. They are the disposable people in that system of capitalist violence.
So, people who are living with the threat of deportation, people who have been detained in terrible, terrible ways through the carceral system. This is a pilgrimage where people across the spectrum of US state violence go to places where this violence is taking place and narrate the stories that are happening there.
I was so lucky to go on that pilgrimage. And also, not just narrate the stories, but our activists as well. These are frontline activists who are organizing for change. And so, this kind of pilgrimage brings activists together from across different spectrums, fighting for abolition and waging nonviolence. And because of social media, this story is amplified. And also, it just builds a tremendous community.
The community of that pilgrimage is ongoing. And I’ve seen people also become more aware of the intersectionality of US militarism, Israeli militarism, and how that impacts their own lives around building walls, the use of drones, the use of tear gas, skunk gas, police repression, building these enormous disposable encampments where people are warehousing encampments, taking away people’s access to the environment, poisoning the environment. I mean, all of these patterns are witnessed on these kinds of pilgrimage. And that is why I spent a lot of years, from 1998 through 2017, taking people to Palestine.
So, the wall – is what you were talking about, the wall, an apartheid wall is a wall of denial. It’s a literal physical wall where you create geographies of oppression, where privileged people literally don’t have to see what’s happening. It takes place on the other side of the wall, and yet they derive pleasure and profit.
So, these are not hard concepts to understand. What is hard is how you wage transformation, social transformation, in ways that operationalize freedom, operationalize liberation, and the harm, creates structures that prevent harm. And we know this is a task of every generation. It’s not something that you do and done.
It just doesn’t work that way. So that is where a religious tradition can come in handy. If Shomeret Shalom, for instance, which is a creation of, you might say, an order of people, who practice, who wage the Torah of nonviolence so that it can be waged from generation to generation.
Because all the information that we’ve learned in the last 200 years from people who are waging nonviolence collectively can be a source of education and growth and resource. As Gandhi said, you know, it’s experimental, it’s creative. It has to be effective. It has to be useful to people who are experiencing the most harm.
Stephanie: I think that’s really powerful. That the vision that you’re holding and in describing is – and that’s the interesting thing of having the creative side of yourself too. To say, okay, how do I bring people into this space where they can see what I see here? And also feel courageous to be in this space with me.
I think that religion and spiritual practice are quite interesting in that way. I think as ways that we wall ourselves off from one another. But it seems like when we really discover the heart of what that practice is, whether it be religious or spiritual or non-spiritual, whatever it is, there’s a clear vision that I’m part of something much bigger than myself.
And there’s these kinds of tests and challenges. And it’s like where all of the teachings kind of come together all of a sudden, that life is not something that is easy at all. And it shouldn’t be. But there are places of ease when we can see what we’re being asked to do.
Rabbi Lynn: I think one of the treasures of this age, for me, is the multi-faith solidarity, the interfaith solidarity, and the cultural solidarities, that are arising in this moment where I’ve had just such a fantastic opportunity to speak to so many. Just since October 7th, to address, usually in partnership with either a Palestinian speaker or another speaker or in a series, but to address the issues of how do we respond to the genocide of Gaza.
In churches, Buddhist temples, a Japanese Remembrance Day, in mosques, and in Muslim organizations, on campuses, and in Buddhist circles, in traumas – people concerned with trauma, in educational – I can literally see how people are trying to weave their struggles together and to really build the movement in this moment.
And because of past struggles, there’s a lot of understanding that we have to do this if we want to be successful and that we have to dissolve and interrupt these massive forces of militarism and state repression, which clearly are on the rise.
People with kind hearts and thoughtfulness about their own traditions, both the beauty and the ugliness parts of it, are trying to, on the one hand, like we are, face the violence within our own tradition and bring the wisdoms that we have cultivated over the millennium that are sources of beauty and resiliency and healing, bring those to the table in ways that bring us together.
And, this is many years back, when I was living in New Mexico, the Hiroshima Flame pilgrimage came through New Mexico, and my congregation, Nahalat Shalom, hosted them on Shabbat, on a Friday night. It just happened to be that way. And because of our activism in Albuquerque, there were 300 people from very diverse traditions sitting on the floor of our synagogue because there wasn’t enough room for chairs.
And the Myohoji Buddhists had put up their altar and the klezmer band played later, and everyone was dancing to this music. At one point, I unfolded my 550-year-old Torah from Czechoslovakia. It’s quite a magnificent scroll, and one just looks at it and sees the beauty of those letters, the faded nature of those letters, and the creativity of this particular scribe, and a sense of reverence washes over people.
Lori [unintelligible] from Laguna tribe, not from Laguna nation, was in the room and came with some corn grown in her territory. And because I had a solidarity relationship around protecting Indigenous sacred sites, not only that, but the nuclear industry is incredibly destructive to Indigenous life in New Mexico. So, there we were, all gathered, the Torres open, and she takes white corn and sprinkles it over 550-year-old Torah from Czechoslovakia and says, our sacred things have been speaking to each other since before the beginning of time. Now it is time for us to listen to them and bring our sacred things together.
That is what we are being called to do. I believe that people with open hearts and open minds are hearing that call and are prepared to withstand the culture of denialism and militarism and impunity, with the force of truth and love and good tactics. Understanding what tactics we have to use in order to let soul force be dominant.
Stephanie: First, I just want to thank you for bringing a sense of that room with you. Beautiful, a beautiful setting, and it’s an experience that you created for all of us right now to be in that room even now. And I can’t imagine many spiritual centers having that kind of openness necessarily.
Like, you’re one of the first women rabbis.
Rabbi Lynn: Yes.
Stephanie: In your chapbook, you also describe that your approach was to reject patriarchal Judaism, and you hold fast to that. And that’s what I see in that room, is just the womb, you know.
And so, talk about that, talk about what is feminist practice mean to you in this what does – how did your journey of feminism and queering Judaism come together in this kind of activism that you’re a part of today, too?
Rabbi Lynn: I believe, and have seen, and witness, the strength of understanding and capacity from people struggling on the frontlines of violence. And those voices and experiences and wisdoms don’t always have a large audience because they’re not welcome. Because they interrupt the dominant narrative, which wants to keep the caste system in a certain context.
And therefore, the principle of hospitality to those voices often interrupts certain codes of behavior that people kind of expect. And I have found that bringing people together and making welcome spaces and bringing story, witness, healing ritual, and – in the context of ceremony, and dance as well, brings things much more to the grassroots and allows everybody to shine and to share their stories.
After 911 happened, Nahalat Shalom invited the Muslim community immediately to our congregation to share, in a respectful – It was like a listening circle. We have very strict protocols. We’re not firing questions at people and making people feel uncomfortable. It’s not an interview, but a place where people can share their story about what their struggles are. And from that and from Hiroshima Flame pilgrimage, we created, with the [unintelligible], the Muslim-Jewish Peace Walk that eventually went on to 22 cities throughout the United States and Canada and created lasting relationships that continued to pursue the Peace Walk, either as a pilgrimage or in other formats.
And that is a sense of hospitality, like creating the mechanisms of hospitality and walking for the purpose of shining a light on suffering. And for the purpose of hearing how people who are experiencing suffering are coping, what they’re doing. And whether we can bring further resources. In order to do that, we have to go through a process of anti-racism.
Those of us who are Ashkenazi White Jews, for instance, even though we carry histories of suffering, in the United States, here on Turtle Island, we assume the identity of whiteness. And so decolonizing is partly coming to terms with and creating a sense of Teshuvah, or reparations for our own participation, whatever that might have looked like or does look like.
So yeah, if I can create ceremonial spaces with other poets and artists and musicians and storytellers and people where you can hear people telling truth, and we’re clear on our mission, I think that’s where transformation happens. It’s sweet.
Stephanie: It seems like the picture that you’re painting for us here is also pointing to, as you mentioned, tactics of nonviolence, and in the Torah of nonviolence. The tactics seem to be pointing to relationship.
Rabbi Lynn: Yes, it’s building relationships, of course. Because one has to build trust, and trust usually means showing up for different kinds of struggles. I realize now that some Jewish people are feeling disappointed somehow, that after October 7th, there wasn’t more showing up for the losses.
I did not experience that personally. My partners did reach out to me. And I believe that it’s also where people were not prepared to distinguish between the tremendous loss and catastrophe that October 7th represented, and the root causes of the conflict that led to October 7th. That people were beginning to understand this as a colonial struggle. And that dissonance in understanding has led many people to a deeper reflection on the question, what is the State of Israel?
What does the State of Israel represent? What has the State of Israel done? And is there any accountability for it? This is where Jewish leadership, especially rabbinic leadership, I believe, failed to confront class and racism in particular. I think there was striving to be accountable to Islamophobia, but that broke down when the majority of the Muslim world understands the struggle of Palestine as a decolonial struggle.
That’s a difficult shift in gaze for the Jewish community. The Jewish community failed to teach the Nakba. To teach the catastrophe of 1948 as a root cause for Palestinian struggle in all of the forms that it has taken. The Jewish community criminalized the nonviolent tactics of struggle, boycott, and divestment, and sanctions. But especially boycott and divestment.
So, the mainstream Jewish elite criminalized Palestinian struggle for nonviolence because they would not acknowledge the harm done by 1948, in a way that even talked about Palestinian right of return under international law.
And the gap just grew and grew. I feel like I’m telling this story to my three-year-old. She loves that when I say, “and it got bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger.” An enormous chasm. And the bigger it got, the more invested organizations like the Anti-Defamation League and organizations of – Presidents of Jewish Organizations in the United States, and APAC, certainly, the lobbying group. All of these groups created “Brand Israel,” which essentially served to create a culture of denialism about Palestinian life and struggle, and criminalize any effort to talk about it, even.
This gap was revealed after October 7th. And therefore, the demonization of Palestinians as a whole group. There’s a lot to say about the history of Hamas. Murdering civilians is a war crime, there’s no question about that. And the vicious and brutal and genocidal attack on Palestinian children, the war on children, the denial of water, the denial of food, of aid, the constant bombardment and surveillance, the ongoing dislocation. All of these have been a normal part of Palestinian life since 1948. We are just seeing the most acute form ever expressed. That is not acceptable.
And unfortunately, these are painful things to come to terms with. We better come to terms with them, or else just get out of the way of people who are waging a ceasefire. Get out of the way because this is not the time to stop, put roadblocks. Children being able to eat food, drink water, get medical assistance and sleep through the night. It’s a complete disaster what’s happening. It’s a complete disaster.
And I just urge every listener to understand the intersectionality, the rise of state repression, the growth in militarism that this is engendering. And to take some action.
Stephanie: In the Torah of nonviolence, as I understand it, on some level, it seems that you’re also pointing to the idea that you don’t have to do spirituality inside of meditation halls or temples, or in hidden in your closet away from the world, that it’s like you might meditate in the morning, you might pray in the morning, or you said you might write a letter.
You might go out and participate in a pilgrimage. I just really enjoyed the freeing aspect. Prayer looks like action to you. That’s how I understand it, in the Torah of nonviolence.
Rabbi Lynn: People love quoting Abraham Joshua Heschel’s famous phrase, “my feet are praying.” He supported Kingian stance, and it was my rabbi, Everett Gendler, zikhrono livrakha, may his memory be forever a blessing, who called Heschel and said, come to Selma. Everett had already been there and in more violent contexts, and also in other places and some rabbis during the Black Freedom Struggle of the 60s, put their bodies on the line and taught those of us growing up that that’s what doing a mitzvah meant. A mitzvah, a religious protocol to love, is preceded in the Torah by, thou shalt not stand idly by the blood of your neighbor.
Don’t hate your neighbor in your heart. Don’t spread rumors or gossip or malicious things about your neighbor. All of these, communicate your concerns directly. All of these pieces lead to finish with the line, love your neighbor as you love yourself. This is what it means to love your neighbor as yourself. So, if you are someone who wants to feel connected to the resources and wisdom of the tradition, then one is required to get out there.
If you look at the founder of Hasidism, the Baal Shem Tov, he was an itinerant storyteller who went to places of great poverty and tried to lift people’s spirit. He did not isolate himself somewhere. Even though he liked to go into the forest and pray at a special place, you know, and light a fire in a certain way. Perhaps that was for the restoration of his own soul, in part to replenish so that he could go out. And we have to look at the people who go out. That is where religion happens.
Stephanie: It’s like developing a relationship with your own self. And it doesn’t matter if somebody told you that you have to pray this morning. You decide what that looks like for you.
Rabbi Lynn: Yes, some people feel that looks like Shacharit, the traditional. There is great joy in a cultural community because you have a language of – for instance, of Torah study. People get together, they open up a text, they debate, they talk, they look at it. We can use midrash as a portal to expand a little piece of story. We have these amazing, amazing, amazing traditions and cultural modalities where we get to cultivate our minds. And that is something we can really enjoy.
And the rabbis, you know, they talk about what’s more important study or action. If study leads to action, that is good. But if it does not, then action. So, action comes out on top. Loving your neighbor as yourself is not a feeling. It’s actions that you take to ensure equity and safety. To ensure equity and safety, it’s helpful to have a community that becomes an encampment of equity and safety. And a mishkan is the open tent of a spiritual encampment.
So yes, we have to draw on those aspects of our cultural heritage that lead us to peace rather than war and fear. It’s up to us to choose those.
Stephanie: People’s spirituality, letting people read the text together, look at the text together and decide what they think. Not reinforce that this is how you ought to think about this. That there’s that respect for the individual striving after the unity.
Rabbi Lynn: There’s a great need for freedom of thought and critical thinking in order to wage peace and nonviolence. The unity is in how we treat each other. Regardless of our different perspectives, we are still obligated to provide safety for each other. And if we’re doing something that leads to harm, we have to stop.
If we can’t stop, if it’s systemic harm that we’re involved in, then we have to think about non-cooperation, as Gandhi so beautifully outlined, and constructing peace. Different zones. And for me, that meant starting my own synagogue, which I’ve been doing since 1975. Mishkan A Shul, in New York City. Well, there’s a picture in the book of it. And there I can invite Palestine – I mean, one evening I looked around and there were [unintelligible] and Palestinians and all kinds of Jewish people sitting, celebrating Sabbath and speaking about what peace means to them.
Just having these conversation, open conversation, also, is quite needed and important. There’s a lot of work to do out there. It’s true. And I’m so glad that the Metta Center for Nonviolence is curating and networking those of us who are in the field of waging nonviolence. It’s a tremendous contribution to the effort to create safety, freedom, and rematriation of land, in our time.
Stephanie: Rabbi Lynn, can you tell us about the chapbook and how and when we can access it?
Rabbi Lynn: You can access the chapbook, which is 87 pages long, and it has photographs from the bird’s-eye view of the action at the Federal Building just in early November, that Jewish Voice for Peace took, to all kinds of and paintings and so forth.
You can – and stories and rituals and personal accounts, is accessible on my website. RabbiLynnGottlieb.com. You’ll find a picture of the chapbook Replanting Seeds, and you can click and order. If you live in Berkeley or the Bay Area, you can just come get one.
Stephanie: I wonder too, as we close this conversation today, if we can come back to the original focus for you, as you were saying at the beginning of the interview, which are the genocide in Gaza and the children and the situation and the heartbreak of it.
And I just want to invite you to say or close or do anything you’d like to help us be together in this, in forefronting these realities.
Rabbi Lynn: Pick a front that’s close to your heart. It could be education, health care workers, through your union, synagogue, your municipal government. There’s lots of campaigns happening right now, including not renewing Israeli bonds and divesting from corporations that are profiting from this genocide.
Divesting from Israeli holdings, especially military holdings. So, get involved by picking your scenario of action and find out what local campaigns are happening in your town and help support that. There’s many things happening in so many towns. Don’t be overwhelmed by the whole task, by the enormity of the task. But neither are you able to desist from trying.
And if not now, when? That’s Rabbi Tarfon, and I think it’s good advice.
Stephanie: Thank you very much. Thanks for your time today and your generosity of sharing your stories and wisdom with us.
Rabbi Lynn: Thank you for the invitation. I appreciate being part of this community.
Stephanie: Hey everybody, you’re here at Nonviolence Radio. And I’m Stephanie Van Hook from the Metta Center for Nonviolence. I was just speaking with Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb about her chapbook, “Shomeret Shalom: Replanting the Seeds of Jewish Revolutionary Nonviolence after October 7.”
With that conversation, let’s turn now to nonviolence taking place all over the world with our Nonviolence Report with Michael Nagler.
Nonviolence Report
Michael: Greetings, everyone. This is Michael Nagler, and this is your Nonviolence Report for the second week of July.
We have July 4th behind us, of course, but I wanted to share a quote with you from Qasim Rashid, who has a program called Let’s Address This. And let me quote directly what Qasim said. “This July 4, remember that our nation was not founded as a perfect Union. It is called to become a more perfect Union. It was not founded on the principle of Kings with divine rights, but upon the principle of a President accountable to the people and rule of law.” So, he calls upon us to strive to recognize this truth, uphold it, “with meaningful action for justice, and build that more perfect Union together.”
Well, I really hope you appreciate that quote as much as I did and have been thinking in the back of your mind, as I have been, that meaningful action for justice has to be nonviolent action.
Well, I’m going across the world now to a Himalayan region called Ladakh, which is kind of bordering China and India, which is technically a part of India, but really has more of a Tibetan culture and heritage.
And it has often been in the news because there was a woman named Helena Norberg-Hodge, who spent a year there and came back reporting on some unusual practices that people have. You know it sticks in my mind right now, for example, is one villager who’s had a big satchel of rice stolen by someone and this is very important for their substance up there. It’s hard to grow.
And so, Helena said, gosh, I hope we can find out who it is. And the man said, oh, I know who it is. And she said, “Well, are you going to do something about it?” He said, “No, because a community is more important than food.” It’s a very interesting approach. I’m not saying that it’s completely nonviolent, unhyphenated. It’s non-violent. And it shows that there are some regions which are absolutely dependent on that in order to maintain their community, their continuity.
But there’s more difficulty now going on in Ladakh. The Chinese have been encroaching, taking away agricultural land. And the Modi, Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India, is boasting that not one inch of land has been lost, though actually, a significant amount of land has been lost.
So, the Ladakhis find themselves in a struggle between China, on the one hand, and their own central government of India, on the other. And it is very reassuring to listen to the following quote from a man named Wangchuk, who is a leader of the resistance movement there. And he says, knowing that violence would give the government an opportunity to stop the movement by force from means, we are united in following the footsteps and nonviolent principles of India’s founding father, Mahatma Gandhi.
So, this is perhaps, again, a kind of strategic nonviolence in that they’re not doing violence because they know it wouldn’t work. But gosh, I mean, that’s so much better than nothing and so much better than violence.
And again, in April, Wangchuk said he was inspired by Gandhi’s historic Salt March, and they decided to call for Pashmina March. If you’re familiar with the beautiful shawls, a peaceful Pashmina March towards the Line of Control in eastern Ladakh, that is the line between India and China.
And that was a way to draw attention to the grabbing of grazing land. Now, while all this is going on, Ladakh has also launched, under Wangchuk’s leadership, what he calls a climate fast. And he says that this climate fast activism is not a spontaneous reaction. So that is the second kind of nonviolent point I wanted to make here.
Quoting him again, “It is the hard work of the last four years, during which we educated the local tribal population about the lobbies of industrial players coming to build huge infrastructures in Ladakh.”
And now for my third point, he reiterated that the people of Ladakh are not against the development of the country. You might remember Gandhi was accused of being a Luddite, going backwards in time, and he absolutely was not. He did not want development. He was happy with development. But it had to be an environmentally and socially sustainable development.
So Wangchuk says the people of Ladakh are not against the development. He wants the industrialists that come in, who are trying to set up solar energy plants and other mining plants, to be sensitive to the climate and the environment. Quoting him, “Their unbridled initiatives to take over the grazing lands will snatch livelihood from tribals and deteriorate the fragile ecosystem of the region.”
Now, we should be aware here that the Himalayan region is sometimes called the third pole. You know, we have the North Pole, the South Pole, with their big ice deposits, ice sheets. And this is sometimes called the third pole because it is the source of ten major rivers in Asia and the greatest mass of snow outside the North and the South Pole.
But it’s melting and, due to global warming, is a very serious problem there. And once again, it’s a problem that people could get together and concentrate on. And it would do two things would be a win-win. You would stop quarreling, and you would rescue the climate, which has often been touted as the issue which is going to unite us all because it affects absolutely everyone.
You know on Nonviolence News, how we focus on unarmed civilian peacekeeping. We talked about Mel Duncan’s document, which really puts us further down the road in developing unarmed civilian peacekeeping. Here’s a bit of history that we might ponder.
Thirty years ago, Ken Butigan, who is a member of Pace e Bene, and a member of the Catholic Nonviolence Initiative, that’s about the time when I first met Ken, he took part in a week-long gathering. There were 20 Latin American and 20 North American changemakers. I myself was in meetings like that.
Now, Ken was struck by the testimony of two of the Chilean activists who – they played a part in removing dictator Augusto Pinochet from power, and they described how nonviolent people power had been successful in ending this dictatorship.
And they also shared carrying on further with our idea of training, they also shared how this episode, this nonviolent resistance insurrection, led to regime change. It, again, was not spontaneous. It was rooted in a decade of nonviolence training across the country. Eventually, 30,000 people a year were being taught the techniques of civil resistance. And these people served as the backbone for the movement for democracy. When the time finally came to act.
Now I’m emphasizing this because I think this is a wonderful model for many of the issues that we’ll be facing and the movements that will be arising going forward. And that is to say, we really cannot expect much success if we simply react to injustice or any other kind of issue that has to be addressed, we have to prepare.
And that’s not such a terrible thing because nonviolence is really a wonderful way to live. I’m now quoting George Lakey, a friend of ours from Philadelphia we’ve interviewed.
So, this is another environmental struggle I’d like to talk about briefly. It’s in Peru and there’s a group of Indigenous women there, like the Chipko movement that arose in Himalaya years ago.
And once again, they are not breaking the law. They are upholding a law very much like what we see in Brazil with the movement from landless workers. In this case, there’s a river, the Maranon River. It’s a sacred waterway. It flows from the Andes to the Amazon. They have recently managed to achieve a legal victory in protecting that river.
It’s a big step forward in the fight against climate change and elevating the concept of the rights of nature. And both these things were debated recently at the Pan-Amazonian Social Forum in Bolivia.
Well, friends, I am running very short on time. I just want to mention that there is a rising xenophobia in Europe and left-center groups have been finally uniting against this form of neo-fascism.
And I’m reminded of something I overheard in a train and the UK when an announcement came over the loudspeaker telling us what the next stop was or something. This person giving the announcement was obviously Indian, and a woman sitting across from me said, you don’t feel at home anymore, even in your own country. So, this is where xenophobia starts.
And how is it going to stop? Here again, I’d like to mention a resource, an experiment that was carried out in Princeton by two women called Wheeler and Fiske, who were able to bypass the reaction of otherness, when you see someone from a different race, by getting people to think about simple things, like, what kind of peanut butter does this person like, the person whose picture you’re looking at?
And so, until we can establish unity in diversity, that’s our basic window onto the world. I think little techniques like this that help us draw attention to our human identity will be the way to overcome xenophobia, and by extension, just about all forms of violence. So, thank you very much for listening, and I hope to be speaking with you again in our next episode.