Editing Michael Lerner (rabbi) (section)

===''Tikkun'' magazine===
After serving for five years as dean of the graduate school of psychology at [[New College of California]] (now defunct) in San Francisco,<ref>''Mother Jones'' Magazine May 1985 p. 48 gives New College as a contact address for Lerner.</ref> Lerner and his then-wife Nan Fink created a general-interest intellectual magazine called ''[[Tikkun (magazine)|Tikkun: A Bimonthly Jewish Critique of Politics, Culture and Society]]''. ''Tikkun'' was started with the intention of challenging [[Left-wing politics|the Left]] for its inability to understand the centrality of religious and spiritual concerns in the lives of ordinary Americans.

With his associate editor [[Peter Gabel]], Lerner developed a "politics of meaning": that Americans hunger not only for material security but also for a life that is connected to some higher meaning, and that the failure of the liberal and progressive movements to win a consistent majority support was based on their inability to understand this hunger and to address it by showing Americans and middle income working people in other advanced industrial societies that it was the values of the competitive marketplace and its Bottom Line of money and power that is the fundamental source undermining ethical and spiritual values in the public sphere and then undermining friendships and marriages when these values are brought home into personal life.<ref>(See Lerner's book ''The Politics of Meaning'', Addison Wesley, 1996).</ref>

This was intended to speak to the hunger for meaning that was characteristic of the thousands of people that Lerner and his colleagues were studying at the Institute for Labor and Mental Health. ''Tikkun'' was formed to educate the public about the findings of the Institute and to develop some of the implications of that work. However, because it also had an interest in being an "alternative to the voices of [[Jewish right|Jewish conservatism]]," ''Tikkun'' was criticized by some Jewish groups.

In 1993, [[First Lady of the United States|First Lady]] [[Hillary Clinton]] included the "politics of meaning" in her synthesis of political and social philosophy she was forming.<ref>{{cite news | title=Saint Hillary | author-link=Michael Kelly (editor) | work=[[The New York Times Magazine]] | date=May 23, 1993 | last=Kelly | first=Michael}}</ref><ref>{{cite magazine | url=http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,978625,00.html | archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080216221956/http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,978625,00.html | url-status=dead | archive-date=February 16, 2008 | title=The Politics of What? | first=Priscilla |last=Painton | magazine=[[Time (magazine)|Time]] | date=May 31, 1993 | access-date=October 20, 2007 | author-link=Priscilla Painton}}</ref>

In 2002, Lerner organized a group called the Tikkun Community among readers of ''Tikkun'' magazine and those who share its editorial vision.<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.shiftinaction.com/discover/luminaries/rabbi_michael_lerner |title=Luminary: Rabbi Michael Lerner |website=Shift in Action |year=2005 |publisher=[[Institute of Noetic Sciences]] |access-date=January 3, 2011 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20090222010038/http://www.shiftinaction.com/discover/luminaries/rabbi_michael_lerner |archive-date=February 22, 2009}} {{cite web |title=Rabbi Michael Lerner and Dr. Timothy P. Weber |date=October 5, 2007 |work=Bill Moyers Journal |publisher=Public Affairs Television |url=https://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/10052007/profile2.html}}</ref>