Felt red square, via Free Education Montreal

My friends at Waging Nonviolence have been putting together some amazing articles about successful nonviolent movements from the past and present, with a hope that today’s activists can learn from history and current actions. I was intrigued when I was sent this article about the “Red Square” movement in Canada.

Started because of increases in tuition, the movement is rapidly growing and judging from reports of mass arrests, beatings, and pepper spraying, it is starting to really annoy the powers that be. While our friends to the north are complaining about “staggering” student debts of nearly $30,000, US students are facing debts of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Both sides of the border are feeling the pain and more and more young people are starting to stand up. Read more to get an on-the-ground perspective from recent actions in Montreal.

    

An Israeli mob in Tel Aviv burns garbage and sings, "The people want the Africans to be burned."

Southern Tel Aviv is home to a number of blighted and struggling neighborhoods – areas where Israel’s income inequalities and economic disparities are acutely on display in the shadow of the city’s high rises. And it is here – in the neighborhood of Shapira – where large numbers of African refugees and asylum seekers from Sudan and Eritrea have sought shelter from forces much more dire than poverty.

On Wednesday evening, that shelter was shattered by a 1,000-strong protest which turned violent and, ultimately, into a race riot targeting those seeking relief from violence.

How did this happen?

    

I have just been notified that my mother has passed away, so I am reposting an essay I wrote previously as is. Interesting that the subject matter is appropriate.

I. Come In Under the Shadow of This Red Rock (or, Shelter in the Wasteland)

Bamidbar 1:1- And Gd spoke to Moshe in the Sinai Desert within the Ohel Moed (the Appointed Tent) on the First of the Second Month in the Second year from the Exodus from Egypt saying…

This week we begin the fourth of the books which comprise the Torah. This book, known most commonly as “Bamidbar”, “In the desert”, is also known as “Homesh Hapequdim” or as it is conveniently translated, as “Numbers”. In general, we have a return to the narrative of the wanderings in the desert of the Israelites, as well as some commandments, most of which, as pointed out by Ramban, are not of normative force today, though as usual we will attempt to derive emotive meaning from them as we encounter them. The opening perasha, which concerns us this week, has very little narrative or ritual, it consists almost entirely of the census taken of the people on the first day of the second month of the second year after the exodus from Egypt. I approached this perasha with great trepidation, given the fear I have of numbers since my grade school days; expounding, for example, on actuarial procedures in antiquity did not seem very inviting (OK, I can’t resist. One day the bookkeeper shows up at the office looking completely worn out. “You must have had had some busy evening”, said one of his co-workers. “It isn’t that”, yawned the bookkeeper. “I couldn’t fall asleep, so I started counting sheep. But I made a mistake somewhere, and it took me all night to find it.”).

This perasha consists primarily of this repeat census. The classical commentators wonder why a census is needed at this time. The Ibn Ezra explains that it was necessary in order to best set up the encampment and the flags. Rashi and the Ramban take a different approach. Rashi states that this census represents a counting of love, coming just after the erection of the Mishkan, as the Divine Presence was to rest upon the people. Ramban disagrees, as a census demonstrating love after the Mishkan was built should have been taken one month earlier, when the Mishkan was erected. Ramban’s conclusion, as stated in 1:45, is, well, that he doesn’t really have a good explanation of why these numbers needed to be related to us. Given this hermeneutic opening, the Hassidic commentators felt the liberty to take these passages in an entirely different direction, not being bound by a “normative” earlier traditional reading. I will present the readings of several authors, among them the Noam Elimelech and two of his disciples, the Or Pnei Moshe and the Maor V’Shemesh.

The opening verse, as presented above, is seemingly a trivial restatement of the date the command for the census was issued. To the mystically oriented, however, there is no such thing as a trivial text; if a time is given, it must come to teach something. Deleuze and Guattari name this kind of relation to time, such an individuation of a time experience as an haecceity; as they explain:

“A season, a winter, a summer, and hour, a date have a perfect individuality lacking nothing…concrete individuations that have a status of their own and direct the metamorphosis of things and subjects.”

    

When the living God sends new mercies, when God is ready to do a new thing, it is important that we do not stand as an obstruction because to do so separates us not only from our sisters and brothers, but it separates us from God.

In the current discussion about LGBTQIA rights in general and same-sex marriage in particular, the questions for believers are: what is God doing? What does God require of me? I am a Bible-believing Baptist. I say: God said it. I believe it. That settles it. It is my reading of the Bible that leads me to support equal rights and respect of LGBTQIA people and their loving committed relationships. I have addressed the primary biblical texts that most people quote to support their opposition to Gay rights in an essay published on-line at the African-American Lectionary: Why I Believe Homosexuality is NOT a Sin

However, the reason I support LGBTQIA rights has to do with my understanding that to love, serve and worship God through a commitment to follow Jesus means that I love with an imperative to love with a radical love. Such love requires me to be wary of traps that would have me love the tradition and its laws rather than to love God with all my heart, mind and soul and my neighbor as myself.

    

Those who know the Reach And Teach story know that a significant reason we do what we do today is because of the experience we had in Afghanistan in 2002. Having witnessed the horrible destruction from 30 years of civil war coupled with the massive bombing campaign waged by the US and its allies after the September 11th attacks, we knew that the people we met were weary of violence being the only solution to their problems.

Sadly, 10 years later, violence still rages on.

It breaks our hearts when we hear people say that Afghans are simply a violent people. We disagree. Afghans, we believe, are like the vast majority of people, wanting to live in peace, raise families, work with dignity, be treated fairly, and have opportunities for joy. We also know that Afghans have their own history of nonviolence and we were heartened to see this story in the Waging Nonviolence newsletter about groups of Afghans working to find ways to change the situation in their country, through nonviolent means.

We’d like to share the following hopeful story of seeds being planted in Afghanistan, in fields that perhaps have been too long dry, but which nonetheless can bear fruit, with a little water, love and support. Having “Realistic Alternatives” in the title also made us think about Rabbi Michael Lerner’s constant reminder to us all that being “realistic” isn’t necessarily a good thing! So, as you read this, realize that few would have thought it “realistic” for Afghans to gather together to attend a nonviolent workshop. Yet… they did.

Our thanks to Waging Nonviolence for allowing us to repost this story (which you can also read on their web site).

    

When I discovered Nonviolent Communication (NVC) in 1993, I had no concept of the rich world that would open up to me over time. My intellectual and moral lenses were transformed beyond recognition through this encounter with NVC. When I thought of what to write my Ph.D. dissertation about, NVC informed me every step of the way as I critiqued, then offered alternatives to, theories of human nature that we have been handed down through millennia of Western Civilization. I found satisfying ways of articulating a perspective rooted in NVC, which transcended and integrated the age old dichotomy of reason and emotion and offered a theory of human nature grounded in human needs. Unlike just about anyone I ever met, I loved writing my dissertation and was sad to be done. It’s only in the last couple of years, ten years after completing my dissertation, that I have come back to writing.

Immersing myself in NVC also became my calling. Many people don’t know that I used to be a computer programmer in a software house in NY, working on IBM mainframes. I was still doing part-time computer consulting when I stumbled on NVC. Two years later, when I had a deep visceral experience of the transformative power of NVC-based empathy, I decided on the spot to focus my life energy on bringing this gift to others. NVC is my livelihood, it grounds my vision for how the world could be, and affects every thought and interaction that I am conscious of.

At the heart of these massive changes was the transformation of my own thought process, understanding, and style of interacting with others. Early on I took on what I now name the path of vulnerability, my main access to inner and outer transformation. Fewer and fewer things get me off balance as I continue on this path. I can meet more and more people and situations with presence, clear choice, and tenderness. I can open my heart to almost everyone in almost every circumstance, even if not immediately. I can accept almost everything that happens to me (not yet in the world at large). Life hasn’t become less painful, because the gap between vision and reality remains big, both personally and globally, and because I continue to feel lonely despite everything. With, through, and despite the pain I am more at peace, more open to life and to myself, more available. I like who I have become.

    

Baal Shem Tov / Courtesy of Tom Block

While artists do not change the world by merely raising awareness of a social issue, their activist art can mobilize people and resources around a cause.Tom Block, a witty and eloquent artist and writer based in Silver Spring, Maryland, revealed this philosophy to a mixed-faith crowd at the Mishin Fine Arts Gallery in San Francisco from May 4 to May 6. Block uses both his book (Shalom/Salaam: A Story of a Mystical Fraternity) and his artwork to spark conversations between people of various backgrounds interested in “infiltrating and taking over ‘the system.’”

The first ever Amnesty International Human Rights festival, produced by Block in 2010, showcased many of his paintings and furthered several goals of activist art. Congressional sponsors of the festival included Congressmen John Kerry, Bernie Sanders, Olympia Snowe, and Chris Van Hollen, names which helped “inject the work into the worlds of social and political leaders.” More than thirty-five exhibits appeared throughout the US, Canada, and Europe. Dozens of newspaper articles, radio, and television interviews spawned by the festival drastically increased media awareness of the plight of political prisoners like Jose Gallardo, a brigadier general in the Mexican army who spent nine years in jail for publishing an academic paper that exposed the army’s human rights abuses. The festival also helped bring together more than a dozen NGO’s and art sales raised more than $15,000 for Amnesty International.

    

Crossposted from the Rio Arriba Community Health Council Blog.

To the average American working outside of health administration, the anti-Medicare crusade waged during the primary by the always entertaining but rarely sensible crop of Republican presidential wannabes made absolutely no sense. Why would any competent candidate want to campaign against a program beloved by one of America’s most reliable voting blocks?

Why not just amputate your own head?

Apparently, the wing of the Party that uses money and media to manipulate election results has rediscovered the time-worn political maxim (at least, until the general election) that you don’t win elections by loudly proclaiming your intent to rob voters’ of retirement security. Mr. Romney dropped the subject the instant he became the latest Hair Apparent.

But don’t worry. Be happy.

If Republicans and their corporate funders retake the White House and Senate, they’ll load their helicopters and assault rifles once again for Medi-Bear.

    

For most of my years in school, I was ostracized, teased, and tormented by others. More often than not I wasn’t invited to participate in anything social, be it play or, later, parties. This went on for years, with two periods that stand out in particular. Before I was eleven, I was blackmailed by a classmate for three months, and subsequently banned for some weeks by everyone in my class, at which time only one brave girl would sneak to my home to play with me. Then, when I was thirteen and lived with my family in Mexico, I was continually tormented and taunted by others and saw swastikas on the blackboard that were hastily erased when a teacher would come. At one time I was locked out by a group of girls who didn’t want me to be part of their cabin, and I was all alone all night, leaning against a tree and shivering.

Miki at thirteen (front row, second from left) amidst her tormentors and other classmates.

The word “bully” hadn’t existed in my world at the time. I had no context for making sense of the trauma I endured. Like so many people who suffer at the hands of others, I didn’t talk to anyone about it at the time and had no hope of being understood. Today, the phenomenon is widely recognized as a major stressor in children’s lives. The Bully Project-estimates that thirteen million children are going to be bullied this year. One study indicates that 88% of children have observed bullying, and in one poll 42% of those who attended health ed centers admitted to having participated in bullying others. These numbers are staggering.

    

A major step in healing the injustices being challenged by the Occupy Movement is to understand that the conceptual roots of today’s injustices can be traced to the long tradition of mis-education that has dominated the West since the rise of the Industrial Revolution.

Sustaining life in the face of the major injustices –which range from the growing gap between the super rich and the growing number of poor, the increasing control of corporations and the military in promoting legislation that furthers their special interests, and the efforts to create a global economy that reduces the need for workers while at the same time undermining the government’s safety nets–is especially challenging. The immediate difficulty facing a large percentage of the population is meeting the bare necessities of obtaining shelter, health care, and food.

Added to this scenario of injustice are the people being forced out of the middle class as a result of the market liberal ideology that promotes replacing workers with computer-driven machines, and by the swelling ranks of students who face a huge burden of debt with little prospect for repaying it. In addition to forcing today’s students into, what for many, will become a lifetime of debt, there is also a growing awareness that public schools and universities continue to reinforce the patterns of thinking and values that fail to take account of the cultural roots of the ecological crisis andthe community-centered alternatives to a consumer-dependent lifestyle.

    

When packing for online dating world, be sure to bring along plenty of compassion.

Having chronicled my adventures in online dating in my blog series, I’ve become an object of curiosity to certain readers. They are waiting for my positive orientation toward this curious enterprise to cool off. “Are you still enjoying it?” they ask, and I can see that they don’t entirely believe it when I answer “Yes.”

    

Here we are, at the close of the book of Vayikra, “Leviticus”, the Book of Holiness, concerned primarily with what was intended to be the highest service, that of the Temple, the sacrifices, and the priesthood. However, as the Bet Yaakov points out, this Torah portion does not begin as do most of the others, with a speech act to Moshe, that is, with the usual “And God spoke to Moshe”. Here, the segment begins with Im behklotai tailaichu, “if only you would walk in My ways and keep My commandments and make them happen”.

This “if only” is read by the Bet Yaakov as describing not a command, but a prayer on God’s part. It is not a command that is needed after the presentation of so much holiness, for a command can not actualize holiness; what is needed to make holiness happen is a personal prayer.

This perasha, then, is God’s prayer, in which he prays, if only all people would listen to these words and embark upon the road to holiness. In this perasha God begs us to lead meaningful lives, with the blessings described later in this section serving as inducement, accompanied by curses as warning.

So what are these blessings offered for living a life of spiritual piety? Oddly, very naturalistic rewards – that the rain will fall, the earth will give forth produce, etc. Very natural, seemingly coarse physical rewards. Does that not seem a bit of a let-down, an anti-climax? After all, we have just concluded an entire book narrating a Temple service seemingly concerned with achieving an other-worldly, transcendent holiness. How then to reconcile these seemingly very material rewards for spiritual achievement?

    

On May 6, three young black men were waiting for a ride when Oakland police officers, out responding to another incident, approached the teens with guns drawn alleging that they “believed the young men had a concealed weapon.” When Alan ran for safety, an officer fired four shots, striking Alan and himself. The officer was rushed to the hospital while Alan was left on the street for four hours where he died. The police department would later claim that Alan had fired shots striking the officer, which we now know to be false. The department would also claim to have rushed Alan to the hospital for emergency care, which we now know to be false.

Protesters hold a vigil outside the Oakland Police Headquarters on May 11, 2012, five days after the shooting of Alan Blueford. Credit: Creative Commons/greendoula.

When Alan’s friends were released, they told the family of what happened to Alan. The police never called, claiming he was not carrying an ID. Yet, Alan’s mother said she made certain Alan always carried identification in his wallet. When the family showed up at the station for answers, no one spoke to them for two hours. While the family mourns Alan as a son, cousin, and a Christian, the officer has been placed on paid administrative leave. His name has not been released.

In search of justice, the Blueford family called for a march on Saturday, May 12th, which started at the site of their son’s murder in East Oakland and continued to the offices of his murderers at the Eastmont Police Station. After a prayer we started through the residential neighborhood to Bancroft Ave, where the majority black march took the two north-running lanes. Some young people walked along the south-running lanes talking to those in their cars and passing out fliers describing “What We Know” since the police have changed their story at least three times.

Rallying cries invoked the names of Oscar Grant, Casper Banjo, and Kenneth Harding, Jr. “Jail Killer Cops,” the man on the mic called. “NOW,” we responded. I shouted with as much of myself as I possessed while trying not to cry. Full of conflicted feelings about prison abolition and black genocide at the hands of cops who evade the law in ways far more dangerous and destructive than those of us without the uniform and the skin ever could. How could I entertain thoughts of transformative justice for the police first, when they are accountable to no one? An institution that shoots a teenager, leaves him under a street lamp to die, does not call his family, ignores them when they do show up, and then releases a statement that the officer, who shot himself in his own foot, followed “protocol”? It remains difficult to reconcile.

    

This is reprinted with permission from the Micah’s Paradigm Shift blog.

A poke, a tweet and a click-through and @DavidBenGurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister and diminutive giant of pre and post Jewish Statehood arrives at Micah’s Paradigm Shift. Nakba Day approaches, the Palestinians are commemorating the 64th year of the ‘catastrophe’ and the ‘Old Man’ of Israeli politics is in the mood for a robust chat. In his hand he holds a small scroll, it is Israel’s Declaration of Independence signed 14th May 1948. The conversation goes like this:

    

Philosopher and theologian Martin Buber characterized the kibbutz as “an experiment that did not fail.” It’s important to see the kibbutz as an experiment that is still in progress, and this, I believe, is what the new documentary movie by Toby Perl Freilich on the history and evolution of the kibbutz movement (“Inventing Our Life: The Kibbutz Experiment”) does.

Rabbi Lerner’s reaction to the original version of my review of this film was a multifaceted challenge:

… the failure of the kibbutz movement [is] not because it was too ideological, but because it was not principled enough:
a) to reject the militarism that came with the 1967 war
b) to honestly evaluate their own role as taking Palestinian land
c) failing to reach out with “caring values” to Sephardim/Mizrachim who came to Israel and were treated poorly, but instead looked only inside their own communities and embraced a wrong Stalinist ideology of “socialism in one kibbutz,” rather than seriously challenging the growth of capitalism within Israeli society, and finally
d) expanding their operations by tying themselves with loans from the large banks in the 1970s and 80s which led to a financial crisis when those banks raised interest rates in ways that the kibbutzim could not pay, during the upsurge of capitalist consciousness after the electoral victory of Likud in ’77. Thus, unlike the dominant ideological explanation of the failure of kibbutzim, it was precisely their unwillingness to take seriously their own socialist roots that was at the heart of the problem. …

My response begins as follows: I do not agree with the notion that the kibbutz was too “ideological.” The kibbutz has engaged in a conscientious effort to marry a utopian vision with practical realities; this project is still ongoing, as it must be. It can be critiqued at times for failing to live up to its principles, but it has succeeded far better in this regard than Marxist-Leninist regimes, and far more humanely. For example, there was never a one-to-one correspondence between being a kibbutznik and being a peacenik, but the kibbutz movement has had a disproportionate presence and influence in the peace camp, as it has in most Israeli institutions, including in the army and in the economy. Still, since it was never more than five percent of the country’s population, and usually much less, it was never capable of being the decisive factor in Israel’s economy, foreign policy or culture.

    

In my last post I wrote about some of the ways that I see Nonviolent Communication (NVC) as being remarkably practical. That piece was set up as a response to the frequent critiques of NVC that come my way, sometimes even from long-time NVC enthusiasts. In this post I want to address this critique from a different angle.

I have, indeed, often seen dialogues that take way longer than I would anticipate, even with support from an experienced NVC mediator or facilitator. I know of people who have given up on certain relationships or groups they were part of, despite making ongoing attempts to connect and reach mutual understanding. I have seen many times decisions about seemingly small items take so long that many wished someone would just dictate the outcome instead of the agonizing attempt to get everyone’s needs on the table. What is going on in all of these situations?

Lack of Trust
Undoubtedly there are many different reasons and issues at play in each situation. My own experience leads me to a strong suspicion that a major contributor to this difficulty is the degree to which so many of us live with a permanent sense of mistrust. Just last week I was present for a situation between two friends and business partners who clearly love each other and nonetheless operate in a mutually antagonistic way about their business. I was astonished by how each of their attempts to protect and guard their own needs resulted in more stress for the other, who then proceeded to guard their own needs even more strongly. Trust, especially the foundational trust that we matter, appears to me to be a sine qua non for the possibility of resolving conflicts, reaching agreements, making collaborative decisions, or any other endeavor that includes within it the possibility of difference and disagreement.

Tuesday evening, during the discussion of my previous blog post that took place as part of my weekly telecourse  on the topics of this blog, I became even more clearly aware of this dynamic as one person after another spoke about the ease with which they lose their emotional balance in difficult situations. That ease, in my view, is rooted in the lack of trust that our needs would matter, and hence an intensity of protectiveness around them. Learning to make NVC more practical, then, is about cultivating inner trust as well as recognizing others’ lack of trust, and aiming to nurture both while engaging in any challenging conversation.

    

Participants work on a team-building activity at an interfaith conference in Malaysia. / Courtesy of United Religious Initiative

“Religion does three things quite effectively: divides people, controls people, deludes people.” – Mary Alice McKinney

Today, if you were to check the top headlines of any publications, you would come across the latest havocs and horrifying events that have occurred in our “progressive” society. Varying from murders, economic instability, and words of pure hatred, newspapers cover and print stories that remind us that there is plenty more work needed to be done in our communities. Many would assume that in the evolving world in which we live, miscommunication and prejudice would naturally lessen with time.

This has not been the case.

Some consider religion to be the ultimate blame for all the negative media surrounding us. Others have blatantly stated that religion is the underlying source behind divergence and strife, the cause of all the wars worldwide. Unfortunately, the spite people feel toward religion and theology has not only enhanced the lack of unity among us, but also created the walls and boundaries that prevent us from ever overcoming this intolerance.

I view life differently. I think religion is beautiful – when viewed in an optimistic light.

    

President Obama’s personal expression of support for same-sex marriage on ABC is sure to galvanize a new wave of gay rights activism across the country. It’s a heady moment — where might it lead?

The vibrant coalitions that developed this year in North Carolina, where activists fought simultaneously against a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage and against anti-immigrant and anti-worker legislation, offer a vision for a more expansive and radically engaged form of LGBT organizing than the narrower struggles for marriage equality that have dominated the activist landscape in recent years. It’s a model that I hope organizers in other states will look to in this moment of renewed energy.

Even though the majority of North Carolina voters cast ballots in favor of the anti-gay amendment, which was worded so broadly that it could threaten domestic partnership protections for all couples, the fight against the measure has offered a sense of the sort of multi-issue coalitions that, if replicated on a national scale, could bring about significant social transformations. Before writing off the North Carolina struggle as a total defeat, it’s worth watching this video of North Carolina activists discussing all that was built and won, despite the loss:

After years of watching Obama make strategic compromises rather than use his influential position to rally mass energy around the idea of health care as a human right or the wrongness of torture, it was heartening to watch him take a principled stand on this issue, despite the political dangers and risky timing. Regardless of whether marriage equality is the right goal for LGBT activists to be focusing on right now (rather than, say, an employment nondiscrimination act), Obama’s announcement feels meaningful on a symbolic level. So often the gay marriage debate seems to stand in for a more basic discussion about whether queer and transgender people deserve the same compassion and respect as heterosexuals and people who identify with the gender they were assigned at birth. In this context, it does feel new and meaningful for a president to refuse to cave to right-wing pressure to paint gay people as somehow monstrous or less than human. Not that we needed his approval, but still…