Tikkun is best known for our work providing a progressive middle path to Middle East peace that is both pro-Israel and pro-Palestine.  But our Core Vision lends itself to other issues, including encouraging ethical consumption (eco-kashrut), deepening the peace and social justice movements by drawing on the strengths of spiritual consciousness, and challenging the current way education reflects the values of the competitive marketplace. Each TCN chapter decides for itself what parts of this agenda makes the most sense for their own local reality—so feel free to shape this to your own needs.
       

        Progressive Middle Path for Middle East Peace

    Both Israelis and Palestinians are responsible in their own ways for prolonging the conflict.  While we acknowledge the current differences in power and resources between Israelis and Palestinians, we still see that there are actions each side can take that would dramatically alter the current situation and climate.  Palestinians should follow the nonviolent path of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi.  Israel should end the Occupation, share Jerusalem, and lead a global consortium to provide reparations to Palestinian refugees. Both sides could embrace the Geneva Accord—a detailed plan that has been endorsed by peace activists on both sides and which is fair to both sides—or some variant that retains the basic idea that each people has a right to live with dignity, peace and security.  We call upon both sides to approach each other with a spirit of generosity and open-heartedness, rather than trying to prove that one side is right and the other is fundamentally wrong or evil.

Here are some suggestions for education and action:

1.    Create a study group and have the entire group read and discuss Healing Israel/Palestine and The Geneva Accord and Other Strategies for Middle East Peace.  Based on these two texts, try role-playing situations in which you have to face people who disagree with a “Middle Path” perspective.  Get to a point where all members feel confident in effectively countering arguments with clarity and even compassion.
2.    Create on-going dialogue groups between Jews, Christians, Muslims, and other interested parties to explore feelings and understandings of the Middle East conflict. 
3.    Lead campus struggles against anti-Semitism, anti-Islam, anti-Arab, andi-Palestinian and other xenophobic developments.
4.    Teach communication skills and ways to respect differences and yet passionately debate issues without discounting or demeaning the Other.

5.    Show a monthly film about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, perhaps starting with Tikkun’s video on Middle East Peace.  Invite people outside the TCN group and use the film to start discussion and dialogue.

6.    Put on a film festival that includes faculty or other guest speakers to build on the content of the films and facilitate discussion.

7.    Counter Campus Watch (the right-wing “monitor” of campus dissent on Israel) and other forms of direct and indirect intimidation and repression about Israel.  Create a TCN Freedom of Thought Monitor, an document the specific incidents in which students, faculty, and staff have been made to feel restricted in what they can say or think in relation to the Israel, Iraq, and the rest of the Middle East.  Help us create a national Freedom of Though Monitor to collect all this information about the degree of freedom of thought on this issue and any institutional support or opposition.

8.    Create a campus or local teach-in on the current situation as it unfolds in the Spring and Fall of 2005.  Publicize all over campus and invite people from a broad range of religious and social change organizations.  Use the latest e-mails from Tikkun and Tikkun magazine as resources.  Invite professors and guest speakers to participate in the teach-in as panelists, or by giving individual speeches.  Ask your school for financial backing to bring a national Tikkun speaker to be part of this teach-in.  You should also use this as an opportunity to give members of the group practice in presenting and defending the Tikkun perspective.  The briefing book prepared by Charlotte Talberth outlines a way to organize and present information effectively. 

9.    Have public demonstrations to keep the issue of Israel-Palestine in the public consciousness of people on your campus.

10.    Create a campus fund to support victims of violence in both Israel and Palestine.  Get the university to allow students to check off contributions to it when they register for each semster’s classes.

11.    Present Tikkun’s Resolution for Middle East Peace, the Geneva Accord, or other positive plans for peace.  Set up a meeting with your elected officials, including your Congressperson and Senator and/or their staff.  Spread this perspective in your campus newspaper or college radio station as well as local media news sources.  Challenge media news sources that are not providing a balanced perspective.

12.    Recruit people to attend our annual Teach-In to Congress for Middle-East Peace (date tentatively set for the last weekend in April).  Prepare people for the possible need for non-violent, peaceful civil disobedience and arrests if the U.S. doesn’t change its support for the Occupation.

13.    Recruit people to participate in our mission to support the Israeli peace movement (trip to Israel/Palestine October 16-25 2005).
 
14.  Recruit people to go to Israel or Palestine in the event of election   to help support the peace movement efforts around those elections.

Ethical Consumption (Eco-Kashrut)

Tikkun is participating in a growing movement to encourage people to stop purchasing food and consuming goods that are environmentally destructive or have been produced in ways that are insensitive to the social justice needs of the workers and communities in which these goods are produced, distributed, and advertised.  We encourage TCN members to examine their own consumption, raise awareness about globalization and what it means to be kosher today, and challenge their schools to be more sensitive to the impact of consumption on the environment and on the workers and communities who produce goods.

1.    Within your TCN group, hold a discussion about what ethical consumption means from, particularly from a global consciousness perspective.  How can people develop an understanding of the effect their consumption has on others, and how can this understanding be used to implement ethical consumption on your campus, in the wider community, and even on the national and global level?

2.    Organize a meeting of groups on your campus who are interested in issues of ethical consumption.  Members of the TCN group can facilitate a discussion among these groups about what ethical consumption means.  What knowledge and viewpoints do the different groups have to offer each other? 

3.    Consider organizing a school-wide film festival or educational event in which different campus groups present films or speakers that address each group’s specific concerns.  Several films or speakers could be followed by a panel discussion about how the issues relate to each other, and what actions can be taken to increase awareness and promote ethical consumption.

4.    Choose action plans that groups can collaborate on.  You might decide to green your school cafeteria, develop a program for sending left-over cafeteria food to homeless shelters, or confront your school’s administration about the use of sweat-shop produced material in the school gift shop.
    


Progressive Politics of Meaning and New Bottom Line

    A Progressive Politics of Meaning calls for a New Bottom Line in our world.  One in which institutions and social practices are judged "efficient," "rational," or "productive" not only to the extent that they maximize money and power, but also to the extent that they maximize love and caring, ethical and ecological sensitivity, and our capacity to celebrate life. We believe that taking this New Bottom Line seriously would lead to fundamental transformations in our world because we'd quickly recognize that most of our economic, political and social institution are, by this criterion, quite irrational, inefficient, and unproductive.

    Most people want more to their lives than the materialism and selfishness which tends to dominate in the media and which is part of the current "bottom line" consciousness in American society. Most people hope that their lives connect to some higher purpose—a meaning for life that is more than "making it" or being "successful." The Right has spoken to that need with a discourse that talks about spiritual and values concerns, but unfortunately too often links that to a conservative political agenda.

The Right has been able to dominate this discourse because so much of the progressive world avoids these issues. Yet in fact the Right has a contradictory message: while rightwing churches talk about the spiritual crisis of materialism and selfishness, the actual programs advocated by the Right are very committed to keeping values and spiritual sensitivity out of economic, environmental, and social policy. So when it comes to bringing spiritual values into the way most people spend most of their waking hours (namely, in work), the Right suddenly advocates "looking out for number one,” which is precisely at the core of the spiritual problem we face in this society.

Rightwing Politics of Meaning could be effectively challenged by a Progressive Politics of Meaning that insists on rebuilding every institution on the basis of our proposed New Bottom Line.  If we did that, we'd quickly find that progressive politics would experience a powerful revival that would empower it to implement its peace and social justice policies. The best path to building a powerful movement for social transformation is to speak about our agenda in ways that are psychologically and spiritually attuned to people’s "meaning needs” in the context of a progressive politics that does not give in to racism, sexism, and homophobia; upholds environmental sensitivity; and advocates for peace and social justice.

But to do this we need to reclaim the discourse of "moral values" from conservative political and social movements, confront and remedy the failure of many progressive social movements to address spirituality, and implement a New Bottom Line in our social institutions.




A) Below are education and action suggestions to help strengthen the peace and social justice movements by helping them develop a spiritual dimension to their thinking and the way they present themselves:


1.    Create a study group focused on Spirit Matters: Global Healing and the Wisdom of the Soul and The Politics of Meaning. Based on the two texts, do role-playing of situations in which you have to face people who disagree with our politics of meaning because they believe it is too visionary and/or radical, or because they are uncomfortable with the issue of spirituality.

2.    Hold a monthly movie night.  Show a Tikkun video or a documentary that speaks to issues you are concerned about.  Afterwards discuss how a progressive politics of meaning applies to what you viewed.  Monthly movie nights might culminate into a film festival once a semester that shows various documentaries and includes discussion panels.

3.    Set up meetings with representatives from your local Democratic Party, Green Party, etc.  Present the idea of reclaiming the “moral values” discourse and discuss ways of how to speak about and address people’s spiritual needs in connection to much needed social work in areas such as homelessness, hunger, and healthcare.

4.    Organize and facilitate a meeting with other progressive campus groups.  Engage in dialogue about the importance of spiritual politics in progressive social movements.

5.      Seek out leadership in existing anti-war coalitions and present our perspective. Articulate the difference between normal left politics and a Politics of Meaning perspective on social transformation. Organize an anti-war demonstration that focuses on a positive vision of how to achieve homeland security.  Rally around a Global Marshall Plan that calls for advanced industrial countries to donate 5% of their GNP every year for the next thirty years to the world’s poorest and most marginalized countries and their citizens.  Let this Global Marshall plan help eliminate global poverty, homelessness, hunger, inadequate education and inadequate health care, and to do so in ways that are sensitive to cultural difference and ecological sustainability.

6.      Help us build the infrastructure for a National Student Strike Against the War in Iraq.  Our goal is not so much to shut down the campuses as to open them up so that they can become a locus for accurate information and perspectives on the war not normally allowed into mainstream media.

7.       Create a campus fund to support victims of violence, be they in your own community, Iraq, Sudan…find a cause that you are passionate about and can organize around.

8.    Push to get Spirit Matters and The Politics of Meaning included in the curriculum of classes at your school.  Start by dialoguing with professors and departments heads in the fields of politics, religious studies, sociology, philosophy, peace and conflict, social justice, etc.

9.    Encourage students to apply for a one-year internship or summer internship at Tikkun in Berkeley to work either with the magazine or in building the Tikkun Campus Network.


B) Below are education and action suggestions to bring a New Bottom Line to your school:

The current bottom line of our society deems schools successful if they have the biggest endowments and most financially successful and powerful students. A school based on the New Bottom Line would nurture and value its students.  Classes would reflect a commitment to imagining and creating a more compassionate, loving world by challenging the status quo.  Furthermore, this commitment to transformation would be put into practice on the campus itself.  Workers, faculty, and students would be treated with compassion and respect, and the school’s policies would be ecologically sound.

1.    Organize a meeting to hear reports from students in all different academic and professional programs about how their education is preparing them or not preparing them to build a more peace-oriented, loving, and generous world.  How much do the courses assume as “given” the class structure of contemporary society and prepare students to accept it rather than challenge it?  Do courses assume that character traits typical of a competitive market society (i.e. aggression, materialism, competition, selfishness, anti-spiritualism) are “natural” to human beings?
 
2.    Challenge the university administration to convene a public gathering of all students and employees.  At this meeting, discuss both how education could be changed to have a New Bottom Line, and ways that the school itself could operate that would be more in keeping with the New Bottom Line philosophy of compassion and respect for students, employees, and the environment.

3.    Organize a year-end assessment of each course and each professor, based on questionnaires you develop.  These questionnaires should evaluate how much a professor’s assumptions are based on acceptance of the current Bottom Line of selfishness and materialism.

4.    Have an annual retreat, available to all students and employees, that focuses on changing the educational system to create a New Bottom Line.  Your first step might be to set up a website for information exchange and resource-sharing among all colleges, graduate schools, and professional schools.  This website could also publicize courses and textbooks that support a New Bottom Line.


5.    Push to get Spirit Matters and The Politics of Meaning included in the curriculum of classes at your school.  Start by dialoguing with professors and departments heads in the fields of politics, religious studies, sociology, philosophy, peace and conflict, social justice, etc.
6.    Encourage students and faculty to read and write for Tikkun Magazine.


B) Below are education and action suggestions to bring a New Bottom Line to your school:

The current bottom line of our society deems schools successful if they have the biggest endowments and most financially successful and powerful students. A school based on the New Bottom Line would nurture and value its students.  Classes would reflect a commitment to imagining and creating a more compassionate, loving world by challenging the status quo.  Furthermore, this commitment to transformation would be put into practice on the campus itself.  Workers, faculty, and students would be treated with compassion and respect, and the school’s policies would be ecologically sound.

7.    Organize a meeting to hear reports from students in all different academic and professional programs about how their education is preparing them or not preparing them to build a more peace-oriented, loving, and generous world.  How much do the courses assume as “given” the class structure of contemporary society and prepare students to accept it rather than challenge it?  Do courses assume that character traits typical of a competitive market society (i.e. aggression, materialism, competition, selfishness, anti-spiritualism) are “natural” to human beings?
 
8.    Challenge the university administration to convene a public gathering of all students and employees.  At this meeting, discuss both how education could be changed to have a New Bottom Line, and ways that the school itself could operate that would be more in keeping with the New Bottom Line philosophy of compassion and respect for students, employees, and the environment.

9.    Organize a year-end assessment of each course and each professor, based on questionnaires you develop.  These questionnaires should evaluate how much a professor’s assumptions are based on acceptance of the current Bottom Line of selfishness and materialism.

10.    Have an annual retreat, available to all students and employees, that focuses on changing the educational system to create a New Bottom Line.  Your first step might be to set up a website for information exchange and resource-sharing among all colleges, graduate schools, and professional schools.  This website could also publicize courses and textbooks that support a New Bottom Line.


11.    Push to get Spirit Matters and The Politics of Meaning included in the curriculum of classes at your school.  Start by dialoguing with professors and departments heads in the fields of politics, religious studies, sociology, philosophy, peace and conflict, social justice, etc.
Encourage students and faculty to read and write for Tikkun Magazine.