I made a point of seeing Rabbi Lerner twice in his recent sojourn to New York. Last Sunday evening, he was part of a panel discussion of religious leaders and academics at Riverside Church, called “Occupy the Mind: Progressive Moral Agenda for the 21st Century.” It was organized by James Vrettos, a professor of sociology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice of the City University of New York, who began the discussion with an impassioned recitation of progressive concerns.

Dr. Cornel West

Dr. Cornel West contributed his usual brilliant oratory: witty, entertaining and challenging. In a mutual exchange, he pointed out that fellow panelist Dr. Serene Jones, president of the nearby Union Theological Seminary, will be his “boss” when he moves from Princeton to Union Theological in July, where he began his academic career in the late 1970s. He mentioned that he’s returning to New York to enjoy the cultural richness and social vitality of the Big Apple and especially to be near Harlem, to again experience its energy and its music.

Michael Lerner connected well with the audience, getting us to stand and stretch, after sitting over an hour listening to speeches, and to sing with him a couple of Biblically-inspired songs for peace. His talk was about promoting a politics of love, hope and generosity versus right-wing themes of fear and “power over.” To this end, he touched upon the Global Marshall Plan initiative, and the Environmental & Social Responsibility Amendment. He pointed out that the latter would overturn “Citizens United” by ending the corporate funding of elections and would subject large corporations of over $100 million in gross income to having to prove their environmental and social responsibility every five years to be recertified with a public charter. I don’t know how “practical” these ideas are in every detail and in their implementation, but hopefully they will promote constructive public discourse on what we are about as a society and as citizens of the world. Moreover, Michael urges us not to be “practical.” This runs somewhat counter to my nature, but I have enough experience in this world to know that we can undermine ourselves as individuals and collectively when we too readily define things as impossible or impractical.

I also caught him the next evening at Romemu, a Jewish Renewal congregation in my neighborhood in Manhattan,

    

Image by Chisda Magid, 1/27/2012

“How would a Republican administration help bring peace to Palestine and Israel when most candidates barely recognize the existence of Palestine or its people? As a Palestinian American Republican, I’m here to tell you we do exist.”

Abraham Hassan, a self identified Palestinian-American Republican, asked a question in Thursday night’s Republican debate, raising an interesting issue of Republican credibility in the Palestinian community domestically and abroad. Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich in typical fashion characterized the Palestinian population as “Hamas and others who think like Hamas,” as Romney said. Both candidates were emphatic that American and Israeli interests, especially when it comes to the Palestinians, are the exactly same. Gingrich attempted to defend past suggestions that Palestinians are an “invented people” by arguing that “an invention of the late 1970s…prior to that they were Arabs.”

In his book, Palestinian Identity, Columbia University professor of history Rashid Khalidi extensively chronicles the emergence of a Palestinian national consciousness as early as the late 19^th century, like modern Zionism, belies Gingrich’s proposition (ironically, Gingrich fashions himself a professional historian yet seems unaware of Khalidi’s historical work). All national movements are imagined communities, to use Benedict Anderson phrase, but that does not mean they are meaningless, as the word “invented” seems to suggest. By denying the origins of Palestinian peoplehood, and hence much of its history, Gingrich is rejecting precisely what it means to be a Palestinian. Hassan’s statement that Republicans “barely recognize” the Palestinian identity appears to be a gross understatement.

    

Perhaps one of the most widespread claims by the New Atheists is that religion is harmful. For Richard Dawkins it is a virus that spreads and infects the mind and is comparable to child abuse. For the late Christopher Hitchens religion “poisons everything” and is a “menace to society.” Greta Christina claims that the belief in supernatural entities makes people “more vulnerable to oppression, fraud and abuse.” Sam Harris likens religion to mental illness. One could go on and on with examples like these.

Given that the New Atheists ground their arguments in science, reason and logic it behooves us to hold these conclusions to very high standards when analyzing them. It goes without saying that truth or knowledge claims should be supported by data, cross-cultural research and empirical evidence whenever possible. This should be measurable and certain principles of reasoning should be employed. Claims of this nature should also be scrutinized amongst a community of experts to try and reach a consensus before drawing conclusions. Unfortunately, the New Atheists fail tremendously in this regard.

    

The old frog leaps

Into the silent pool

Splash!

-Basho

Everyone from childhood is familiar with the story line of the Ten Plagues. We are familiar with them from childhood because they are almost amusing. God smites the fierce Egyptian people not with Godzilla and King Kong, but with bugs, hail, and frogs. Frogs! At any rate, it is hard to envision just what kind of ‘plague’ throwing frogs around might be. Other than some minor damage to agriculture, they aren’t particularly pesky little fellas. So our goal is to discover what other meanings may be inherent in this plague of frogs.

Before thinking about the relationship between animals and plagues, perhaps it might be valuable to the relationship between animals and us, or the concept of animality, in general. The initial impulse would be to try find the Freudian frog, situate frog symbolism in some sort of psychoanalytic way. The frog would follow the the horse in the manner of Freud’s Little Hans case; the reaction of the child to the mistreatment and death of the horse would be understood as ‘really’ referring to underlying drives. Or the wolf, in the Wolfman case, which wasn’t about wolves at all but about castration. Thus we would have to find some neurotic process which could be adequately symbolized by a frog. In the classical psychoanalytic viewpoint, then, interpreting the frog would be interpreting some signified process or drive in man, but would have very little to do with the actual frog or ‘frogness’.

Deleuze and Guattari offer an alternative reading in these cases. They argue that there is a more immediate relation to animality that is more than just a signifier for an unconscious drive. Here is their dissension from Freud:

‘The horses blinders are the father’s eyeglasses, the black around its mouth is his moustache, its kicks are the parents’ ‘lovemaking’. Not one word about Hans’s relation to the street, on how the street was forbidden to him, on what it is for a child to see the spectacle ‘a horse is proud, a blinded horse pulls, a horse falls, a horse is whipped” Psychoanalysis has no feeling for unnatural participations’

Deleuze and Guattari postulate that the relationship to animals is that of an ‘assemblage’, that is, a structuralist construct whereby aspects of animal behaviour are abstracted and incorporated into the individuals being. Their language is wonderful and thus hard to summarize, a summary would sound something like: the individual’s abstract machine (abstract here being a verb, that is, the person unconstructs the actual thing observed and takes from it certain structures and relations) reconstructing for themselves a Body Without Organs, these new behaviours would become lines of flight, deterritorializations. This appropriation they call the ‘becoming-animal’. When an actor barks like a dog, he is not metamorphosizing into a dog, or trying to, rather, he is taking on to himself an abstracted characteristic of dogs. This process is identical to other becomings, such as the ‘becoming-woman’. Images and stereotypes of what woman means are what are assumed by the individual who ‘becomes-woman’. Becoming woman is not imitating this entity or even transforming oneself into it… The child does not become the adult any more than the girl becomes a woman; the girl is the becoming-woman of each sex, just at the child is the becoming-young of every age…

This analysis leads in several interesting directions, for example, they point out that these becomings tend to be of minorities, there is less becoming-man than there is becoming-woman, or becoming-Black or becoming-Jew. These becomings, since they are by nature acts of reterritorialization, tend to relate to ‘minoritarian’ processes. Thus:

    

NY Times Magazine cover, Jan. 29, 2012

The New York Times Magazine’s Jan. 29 cover story, “Will Israel Attack Iran?” frighteningly argues that Israel is nearing a decision to make an all-out military effort against Iran’s nuclear program. What may prompt an imminent go-ahead is the calculation that Iran’s facilities will soon be hardened and dispersed beyond Israel’s capacity to cripple its program.

I’m very much against an Israeli attack on Iran and I agree with Prof. Shibley Telhami that moving toward regional nuclear disarmament may facilitate a solution. But I take Iran’s nuclear program seriously as a security threat to the region.

The crisis would likely end once Iran reverses course: quickly opening its facilities to international inspection and stopping its constant “death to Israel” rhetoric and other overt expressions of hostility toward Jews (Holocaust denial being one); Iranian officials usually do not even mention Israel by name, referring instead to the “Zionist regime” or some such. When coupled with its ongoing support for Hezbollah and Hamas, it’s no wonder that many Israelis and Jews believe they face an existential threat from Iran. (It would not be enough for Iran to invite renewed negotiations, such as Pres. Ahmadinejad claims to have just done in a rather belligerent way; negotiations can be used as a delaying tactic, and Iran has backed away from solutions proposed in previous discussions.)

Yet, aside from inviting a catastrophic war, an Israeli attack would not deter Iran’s nuclear ambitions (quite the opposite). Part of the problem is the already hardened and dispersed nature of Iran’s nuclear facilities; another is Israel’s limited military capability. Over five years ago, I blogged about the widespread myth that Israel is a military superpower (with the supposed implication that it’s invulnerable) beginning as follows:

    

Illustration by Arthur Rackham, 1909

Children have been told horror stories for as long as storytelling has existed. Should a child become traumatized hearing a story like Hansel and Gretel, where the witch plans to throw the children into the oven to make a nice meal, parents can tell the child not to worry, “That’s just a fairy tale. Things like that don’t really happen.” But they do.

    

Outside of my apartment is a small, crowded neighborhood called Qaddura. Mostly refugees live here. It’s not officially recognized as a refugee camp by the United Nations – which means it doesn’t receive direct financial support from the organization – but it still feels like one.

The streets are narrow and the walls of buildings are covered in graffiti. There are paintings of machine guns and flags.

Nationalist slogans have been spray painted in Arabic and English. “Free Palestine,” someone has scrawled in Arabic and “All forms of resistance are patriotism.”

There are around 4,500 residents here and 500 families. Almost half of the people who live here are under 18 and the unemployment rate is at 80%. This is a relatively small refugee camp — nothing compared to the other crowded, sprawling West Bank camps of Balata, Tulkarem, Jenin or Dheisheh.

    

Tim Wise has done it again. As America’s leading anti-racist educator and writer he’s identified the next greatest threat to racial justice. It’s a new group of people, that according to Wise, enable a similar world-view as that of the legendary racist and Nazi David Duke. He believes they are “are empowering the reactionary, white supremacist, Social Darwinists of this culture.” For even the most timid members of this group ­- the ones who utter a few words of support – Wise offers no sympathy. Who, according to Wise, would fit into this group?

Cornel West.

Wait, who?

Cornel West.

You mean the most prominent black intellectual in the country? That Cornel West? Yep. The one who Wise has shared the stage with in the past? Yep.

He must have said something pretty terrible to deserve placement in such a category from Mr. Wise. Right?

Cover your ears.

    

I confess that it is incongruous for a peace theorist to recommend that people go to see a flag-waving war movie. The contradictions of this notwithstanding, I hope that people will go to see Red Tails, the movie about the Tuskegee Airmen produced by George Lucas and directed by Anthony Hemingway. I urge people to see the movie so that it will make money and thereby take away one Hollywood excuse for why it does not make more movies about African-American heroes and sheroes. If this movie makes money, perhaps it will be easier to get big-screen movies or television movies or mini-series made about people such as African-American diplomat Ralph Bunch or activist and educator Mary McLeod Bethune and others.

George Lucas spoke with Jon Stewart about the difficulty in getting Red Tails made. African-Americans are supporting the movie; however, this is an important movie for everyone to support.

First, I say and say again that war is the worst crime that humanity perpetuates against itself. Mahatma Gandhi was correct when he called war organized murder. Former French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin was also right when he said “war is always the sanction of failure.” When the first projectile flies, we see a failure of imagination, communication and diplomacy. Just peace theory hopes to make the principles of just peace accepted universal principles that will guide the moral thinking and political commitments of people across the globe.

When people ask me the wolf at the door question – what does the world do with people such as Hitler and regimes such as the National Socialists in Germany when they threaten the world’s security? – I say that peacemaking is a day to day work and that the logic of peace ought to make the logic of war unthinkable. We stop the wolf before he gets to the door. The world is not there yet.

    

Several hundred participants turned up as early as 6:00 AM this morning to participate in San Francisco’s Occupy the Courts action. The event was part of a nationwide protest to mark the two-year anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling, which granted corporations unlimited spending power via political action committees. As South Carolina prepares to vote in the 2012 Republican primary, the topic is a timely one.

I spoke with a longstanding member of Occupy San Francisco, an elderly woman who lived in the city’s first encampments. We stood in line as volunteers handed out hot meals to protestors, the site cleverly situated in front of Market Street’s (Food) Bank of America.” When asked about the next steps for the Occupy movement, she emphasized that the focus needs to shift toward communities. “We have to occupy our neighborhoods,” she explained, “breaking into smaller groups and fighting for local issues.” Occupy activists, she argued, are probably already experts at local politics, but they need to be take more control over their communities.

Whether this approach would work is difficult to say. As Ira Katznelson revealed in City Trenches, decentralization may lend the appearance of community empowerment, but its goal is often a placatory one. One of Occupy’s strengths has been its relentless attack on corporate greed and federal incompetence; a shift to local politics would fail to address these systemic issues.

The two of us – the woman preferred to remain anonymous – also discussed criticism by the media. “The media has a twentieth-century understanding of protest,” she remarked. “I don’t think anyone knows yet what modern protest looks like.”

    

In the case of some terms, people might have doubts as to whether they’re names or descriptions; like “God”—does it describe God as the unique divine being or is it a name of God? (Saul A Kripke, Naming and Necessity, p. 27)

Our text seems to be preoccupied with names. Moshe (Moses) went to Pharoah as instructed, and instead of freeing the slave people, Pharoah makes their life even more miserable. Moshe complains to God about the suffering of the people and the failure of his mission, but God wants to talk about names. The text relates (Shemot 2:6):

And God spoke to Moshe, saying: I am ADNY. I have revealed myself to Avraham, Yitzhak, and Yaakov as El Shaddai, but with the name ADNY I had not revealed myself to them.

Moshe wants to know how the people will be freed, and God answers with a seemingly irrelevant discourse on names. Why does it matter with which name revelation was conducted in the past? In attempting to find meaning in this emphasis upon ancient names, we will find ourselves confronting very contemporary issues regarding faith and science.

Even as we focus upon the centrality of names in the current verse, we can’t help noticing the preoccupation with names in the early part of the book of Shemot (Exodus). This book begins with an enumeration of the names of the tribes, then Moshe names his children, then Moshe is concerned in his first dialogue with God that the Israelites will ask of him what God’s name is, and here again, in this speech announcing the deliverance from Egypt, God begins by announcing a new previously undisclosed name. It is fitting, I suppose, that this book, called Exodus in Greek, is traditionally known as Sefer Shemot, the Book of Names, in Hebrew. What’s all this business about names?

    

Self Portrait

Sometimes in the midst of the mundane or the profane of the day, I find myself musing about the meaning of it all. My friend Rev. Jim Burklo just sent along his latest musing, and while it doesn’t answer all the questions about life, the universe, and everything, it did bring a smile to my face and some peace to my morning. May it do some of the same for you too. Read on!

    

I’m fairly certain that, as you read this sentence, you match a certain demographic. In fact, I can say with 100 percent confidence that you do. You are an Internet user and, by virtue of this fact, should be filled with tremendous outrage at the legislation that is set to pass in Congress.

The “Stop Online Piracy Act” (HR 3261), introduced in October, empowers copyright holders to seek punitive action when their material is reproduced online. Fair enough. But like much of the cleverly-worded legislation presented to Congress, this bill’s title is hardly reflective of its likely pernicious effect. (Remember Bush’s “Clean Air Act”?) What SOPA really amounts to is a destabilization of the Internet by corporate entities.

    

As a member of the self-identified “slash profession” – writer/organizer/educator/whatever pays the rent that month – I have learned how to wear multiple hats. How to move between different worlds and code-switch my headgear to meet a particular place and community. Alright, I got this big event coming up tonight…should I wear the Kangol, the fitted, or the yarmulke? (Correct answer: all three.) Sometimes, though, it’s a struggle figuring out which slash to bring out in which situation. Take Occupy.

I got back in Oakland full-time last month, and immediately jumped into the beautiful chaos that is Occupy Oakland. I joined the big West Coast port shutdown on December 12, started attending the alternatively powerful and painful General Assemblies, and connected with the two committees I’ve begun organizing with, Occupy the Hood and Labor Solidarity. It’s been great, and I’ve gotten to stretch some of activist muscles that I hadn’t used in years. (Sometimes literally – holding one side of a 30″ banner with that wind whipping off the bay is harder than it looks.) But while I’ve been bringing my organizing and education experience to the table, sometimes I leave behind the thing I do that I’m doing right now on this laptop. Writing. Telling stories. Creating culture.

    

In the story we heard today from the Hebrew scriptures, Eli the priest is not the hero. Samuel is. At one level, the story’s message belongs to a genre beloved around the world, wherein a youth is able to discern the truth which age and experience cannot see or hear. By means of such stories, the keepers of tradition remind themselves that they are passing on – that our ways are not always. But this story has a twist to send us into a channel deeper than the ordinary legend of its kind. Here we are told that “the word of the LORD was rare in those days.” As the story opens, the priest is no longer able to see. Both he and young Samuel are trying to sleep.

Blindness and sleep are figures for ignorance and denial in all the people. A group who cannot face their crisis is sleeping; most of its members are blind. The word of the LORD is rare – not because the Eternal ever ceases from communicating, but because so few are awake and able to discern the word. Now, when Samuel awakes, it is a figure for a whole people preparing to wake from their indifference to action. It can happen in a whole nation. What is the Arab Spring if not whole peoples preparing to wake? It can happen in a church, as the people grow restless with their old ways and evil habits and yearn for transforming meaning and effective action.

Of course, waking comes to individuals, too. Yet on this day of honor for our prophet Martin Luther King, it is well that we remember that no individual, no matter how skilled or gifted, ever simply leads a people out of the valley of the shadow of sleep. No, the rising of a people is a work far more complex. It resists all science and prediction. But this much is sure. The greatness of a leader hangs on the people’s awareness of the severity of their crisis. If most of the people are sleeping, no matter how their heedless practices oppress, there exists no severity in which great skill and wisdom can find expression. But sometimes, something changes in a people. A critical mass of energy arises in the consciousness of enough of them, and they turn in their beds and rise and stand. You know this is how it happened with Martin Luther King. We know from his own words that, fresh from doctoral studies at Boston University, installed in his Montgomery, Alabama pulpit, he anticipated nothing of the public life that unfolded through him. The waking began when the bus riders had awakened and begun their boycott, when they asked him – how shall we put it? – asked him to become great for them.

    

The thing wrong with America is white racism. White folks are not right…It’s time for America to have an intensified study on what’s wrong with white folks. - Dr. King

There may be periods where segregation may be a temporary waystation to a truly integrated society…We don’t want to be integrated out of power; we want to be integrated into power. – Dr. King

I am inclined to think that they [white moderates] are more of a stumbling block to the Negro’s progress than the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner. – Dr. King

The “Decent White Majority”

The standard narrative regarding Dr. King’s approach to racial issues says that he was simply an integrationist who believed that with persuasion, nonviolence and love the conscience of the white majority could be won over and racial justice would be achieved. Racism, as he understood it was mainly psychological. This popular interpretation – the one the mainstream media loves – fails, however, to embrace a holistic view of his mature thinking on white people, institutional racism and white supremacy culture. While for much of his career he optimistically believed the “great decent majority” of whites could be transformed, he began, in 1965, to understand just how deeply embedded racism was and how unwilling white people were to give up privilege and power for the sake of racial justice. Whereas he had once described America in the highest democratic ideals, he began to see it as “a confused…sick, neurotic nation.”

    

In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue, it was a courageous thing to do, but someone was already here... Something you'd know, unless you live in Tucson in 2012

It’s Martin Luther King Day and we should all be thinking about progress we’ve made on King’s dream. Well… this morning I woke up to more of a bit of a sad vision of at least one part of America. My friend Nancy Schimmel sent me a note this morning to let me know that Tucson, Arizona, in order to avoid losing lots of money in state school funding, has ordered certain books to be banned from classrooms in order to be in compliance with the state’s new “ethnic cleansing” rules (my phrase for what they refer to as the elimination of ethnic studies).

According to Bill Bigelow of Rethinking Schools (at Salon.com), “By ordering teachers to remove ‘Rethinking Columbus,’ the Tucson school district has shown tremendous disrespect for teachers and students.” “This is a book that has sold over 300,000 copies and is used in school districts from Anchorage to Atlanta, and from Portland, Oregon to Portland, Maine. It offers teaching strategies and readings that teachers can use to help students think about the perspectives that are too often silenced in the traditional curriculum.”

My company, Reach And Teach, has sold many copies of Rethinking Columbus. The thought that this book, and Shakespeare’s “The Tempest,” are being banned from Tucson schools boggles my mind.

    

“God does not call us to be successful. God calls us to be faithful.” Prathia Hall

I learned this wisdom from Prathia Hall, an African-American preacher/teacher/civil rights activist/scholar friend. She was my predecessor in Christian Ethics at United Theological Seminary in Dayton, OH. I was also privileged to spend time with her at the end of her life in 2002 when I moved to the Boston area to teach at Andover Newton Theological School. Again, I was arriving as she was leaving.

It was Prathia Hall’s “I Have a Dream” prayer that was the inspiration for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s ” I Have a Dream” speech. Prathia Hall was of the generation that cleared away much of the conceptual resistance to the idea of black-woman-as-scholar that made my way in the world easier. She knew from her experience as a trailblazer that the path of progress is long and hard, and that we would have to fight the same battles over and over again. She constantly reminded me that our duty is to keep on keeping on, to be faithful in our love and in our work even though it may not seem at the time that we are having success. The goal is justice, including economic and social justice.

Faithfulness is the steadfast, immovable, determined, loyal, conscientious, commitment to a standard, an ideal, or goal. Many of us who believe in God believe that God, transcendence, Divine Love, compels us to a particular work. We feel an irresistible mystery urging us on. The question for many of us is whether this “call” is from something outside of us, or rather an expression of something within, a deep desire that is also a mystery. That divine command, the imperative placed on our lives, could be a combination of both.

    

The world is abuzz with the ongoing fallout of the Arab Spring, while the Occupy movement still reverberates in the US. But what endures from Israel’s less-noted summer months of street protest for social justice? I’m going to review what I’ve learned in recent months and project forward.

Protest leader, Daphni Leef

First of all, street protests continue, including a clash in recent days with police over the removal of protest tents; but these activists are in the hundreds rather than the tens and hundreds of thousands who rallied peaceably during the summer. Still, the structure I reported on for In These Times magazine, continues to operate, with the movement attempting “to carry itself beyond the streets”:

…. Alongside “general assembly” meetings in parks, neighborhood committees have been formed around the country, as well as advisory committees comprised of prominent personalities from Israel’s diverse ethnic and religious communities.

By any estimation, Israel’s summer of protest was an impressive display of progressive social activism, rallying nearly half a million protesters (out of Israel’s seven million population) into the streets at its high-water mark on September 3rd. More than one hundred tent encampments for social justice dotted the entire country. It united Arabs in Jaffa (at least rhetorically) with traditional working class Likud and Shas supporters in the Tel Aviv neighborhood of Hatikva. (See this YouTube video of the great liberal Orthodox activist, Leah Shakdiel, speaking on this unifying theme at the Yerucham protest.)

    

Vodun practitioners from all over the African Diaspora traveled to Benin (formerly Dahomey), the birthplace of the religion, this week to participate in what is known as International Voodoo Day. This January 10 festival of prayers, libations, sacrifices and other rituals is the most important Vodun gathering in the world.

As a Haitian-American, I can’t help reflect on this most African part of our heritage in the New World especially as it is continually maligned by those whose knowledge is restricted to popular images that favor the macabre. Those of us who recognize and respect Vodou’s complexity know we must defend it because the religion remains trapped in stereotypes making it extremely difficult to dispel geopolitically driven myths too entrenched in the spectacular.

Growing up as a child in Haiti, I had no concept of what is referred to as “Voodoo” in the U.S. In fact, the more appropriate word, Vodou, was not part of my vocabulary. The tradition that some members of my family followed was known as “serving the spirits.” Even that phrase was not something we actively used, since our actual engagement was rooted more in daily practice than naming. Serving meant living in a world where the sacred and secular were blurred. So it was commonplace to see adults pour libations of water and coffee three times onto the ground upon awakening in the morning before even speaking to one another. Or sometimes they rushed to the outhouse, I would learn later, to expunge bad dreams that should not be spoken in order to deflect their mal-intention and prevent entry into the home. These and other very conscious acts of psychic repulsion taught me that serving the spirits was foremost about communion and protection.