Tikkun Recommends   

Tikkun Magazine, July/August 2010

Tikkun Recommends

To the End of the Land
David Grossman
Knopf, 2010

Hold Love Strong
Matthew Aaron Goodman
Touchstone, 2009

The genre of the novel has a unique capacity to unpack social reality as it manifests in the consciousness of ordinary human beings living through horrendous times. David Grossman and Matthew Aaron Goodman are magnificent craftsmen, pulling us into worlds that we thought we'd be better not to know about, and yet doing it in a way that enlightens, surprises, and makes accessible the pain and joy that human beings experience in the intricacies of daily life.

David Grossman will have difficulty surpassing his 2002 book See Under: Love, the powerful story of a young child making sense of the Holocaust. But his new work, To The End of the Land, is certainly a strong complement, focused on the pain of a mother whose son has now extended his service in the Israeli army for one more month in a war that neither believe in and against people whom they do not wish to oppress. Having lost his own son in the last week of Israel's counterproductive (not to mention immoral) assault on Lebanon in 2007, Grossman writes with the deepest understanding of the way that the struggle with their neighbors distorts and permeates the consciousness of Israelis.

Matthew Aaron Goodman tells the amazing story of a young boy, born into poverty to a thirteen-year-old mother and thirty-year-old grandmother. Growing up in "the projects" of New York City, he struggles to make sense of his life and to move beyond the hurt and pain that surround him. Reading this story makes clear the utter wrongheadedness of those who describe African American life in poverty as pathology or who attempt to demonize the "culture of poverty." Nuanced, complex, at moments painful, but ultimately redemptive, this is a novel that should be required reading for every high school student in America (and for the rest of us as well).

Eyes Wide Open: Cultivating Discernment on the Spiritual Path
Mariana Caplan
Sounds True, 2009

Mariana Caplan, who teaches at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco, has gone through a long journey of spiritual growth. In this remarkable book she shares much wisdom about the pitfalls facing serious spiritual seekers. Teaching us to cultivate discernment, to understand the foibles and distortions we are likely to encounter in spiritual teachers, she urges both a gentle firmness and compassion for others and ourselves on this path. She is alert to the dangers of what she calls "spiritually transmitted disease" -- a disease involving the negation of women and dismissal of feminine wisdom; the sexual or financial corruption of some spiritual teachers; fast-food spirituality; the confusions of ego and how it gets protected by spiritual forms that supposedly lead to transcending of ego; group mind thinking; and much else.

Though framed as a warning to keep our eyes wide open, Caplan's book is actually a deep rethinking of contemporary spirituality that will be as useful for those with a long history of spiritual practice as for those who have kept away from the spiritual world on the assumption that it was flaky or intellectually and psychologically unsophisticated. Though written in an accessible almost "self-help" kind of way, Caplan's book offers profound spiritual wisdom.

 

The Vegetarian Shabbat Cookbook
Roberta Kalechofsky and Roberta Schiff
Micah Publications, 2010

Here's a vegan cookbook that starts off by teaching that "the institution of the Sabbath is the most successful social revolution in human history." The authors skillfully link this revolution to the (we hope) soon-to-come vegetarian revolution, based not only on human sympathy for animals but also on an argument now endorsed by the Sierra Club and the Union of Concerned Scientists: that livestock does enormous damage to the environment, so meat-based diets are environmentally unsustainable. Beyond all this, this cookbook is an excellent introduction to vegan cooking. You don't have to be Jewish to delight in the dishes it teaches the reader to make.

 

American Insurgents, American Patriots: The Revolution of the People
T.H. Breen
Hill and Wang, 2010

The American Revolution: A Grand Mistake
Leland G. Stauber
Prometheus Books, 2009

T. H. Breen retells the story of the birth of America, highlighting the important role of "ordinary people in support of other Americans" that "marked the end of an imperial order." The Americans "were not unlike so many oppressed people throughout the world who have taken up arms in defense of what they regard as their just rights." Breen regrets that in the contemporary world so many Americans have begun to adopt the point of view of the imperial officials, forgetting that our U.S. history began in challenging the legitimacy of the occupying regime.

Leland Stauber is more intent on seeing the story from the standpoint of its outcome, which was far from that envisioned by the insurgents who, according to Breen, "imagined the creation of a new, more equitable national government that would work for the common good." Stauber emphasizes the importance of those who were trying to avoid a war at the time or to curtail it through negotiations, and who might, had they prevailed, have obtained a very different outcome: an America that remained part of Britain and emerged as an independent country decades later, not through an overt war but through the kind of diplomatic process that led to the creation of Canada. The Canadian model proves a striking alternative for Stauber, who imagines that slavery could have been less violently uprooted had the United States remained part of the British empire while Britain itself was nonviolently rejecting slavery and imposing anti-slavery regimes elsewhere. A parliamentary system and a government empowered to actually solve national problems and less easily subordinated to corporate capitalist power might have been one of the consequences of this pat