Goddess of Willendorf, 22,000-24,00 BCE

I’m surprised that almost none of us blogged about the Parliament of World Religions (PWR) in Melbourne, Australia (12/3 – 12/9). I realize that the US Congress was still discussing the health care bill, Obama had just given his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, and the Copenhagen Climate conference was underway. So we all have good excuses.

Here at Tikkun Daily, we heard from Dave Belden, who wrote about Rabbi Michael Lerner’s workshop on the spiritual progressive movement. And Rabbi Lerner also wrote about the great disappointment world spiritual leaders at the PWR felt at Obama’s speech in Oslo. But otherwise, there wasn’t a peep about this important gathering that happens every five years.

For members of my religion — both feminist pagans and members of the Goddess Movement across a variety of faiths — it seems to have been a very exciting experience. From what I’ve read, both the Goddess movement and paganism were well-received, something that has rarely happened before. In fact, Phyllis Curott was quoted on the Women at the Parliament blog site as saying that back in 1993 she had difficulty finding anyone else who would appear on a panel about the Sacred Feminine and very few attended. She went on to say that

Things certainly seem to have changed with this Parliament and the Sacred Feminine was clearly rising!

“I am only too relieved to see my work going to hang on other walls – with its departure I shed my responsibility.”

–Evelyn Williams

So often we dwell on the calamities of our world without imagining a better way forward. The purpose of this Tikkun art gallery is to seek out artwork that presents a hopeful and positive vision of this life while still conveying a sense of intellect and awareness of the ways our world and our nature cause suffering and grief. We are not trying to be quaint. We believe that there is a real possibility the world can be, and is being, transformed for the better, every day, by art.

It is lovely that this, our last post of 2009, examines the work of Evelyn Williams. Evelyn fits in particularly well with our mission statement at Tikkun.

Her painting “I Went to the Garden of Love” (below) speaks to the depth of human tenderness, transcending irrelevant, barbaric notions of gender and sexuality bias and presenting instead an alternative vision of compassion, humility and true love.

(To see more of Evelyn William’s work, visit the Tikkun Art Gallery.)

Says Evelyn,

I don’t believe there are any boundaries to love. This painting was inspired by William Blake. The figures are not confused by the restrictions normally occurring between men and women, but only through a feeling of fondest love where nothing is asked and nothing is expected.

One of the most important legal cases in Israel’s history was just decided in the Israeli High Court. The Court determined that the highly controversial Route 443 could not both be built on land taken from Palestinian towns in the West Bank under the pretenses of eminent domain and benefit for the townspeople and then denied usage by Palestinians.

In and of itself, the case is of incredible importance in that it affirms the rights that Israelis owe to their Palestinian neighbors. But more importantly, and somewhat more behind the scenes, the case demonstrates the effectiveness of one of Israel’s largest human rights organizations, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, which litigated the case. (Full disclosure: my wife worked there last year while we were living in Jerusalem.)

While at first I was skeptical that the ‘Israeli version of the ACLU,’ as several of its staffers have termed it, could be so effective, it seems to have assembled a terrifyingly bright legal team of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Israelis to bring case after case in front of the Israeli High Court. In 2008 alone, it litigated over 60 court petitions. Coupled with growing education and public outreach programs, ACRI is set to become the major player in human rights advocacy in Israel.

So in the midst of more gridlock in the peace process and the building of settlements in East Jerusalem, there is a bright spot — and one that seems to be getting brighter by the year. Perhaps in 2010, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel will make the ACLU proud to be its ‘American version.’

In recent days, in response to the disappointing health care and climate change initiatives, several commentators have described Obama as a “pragmatist.” Ross Douthat, for instance, calls him “a doctrinaire liberal,” but one “who’s always willing to cut a deal and grab for half the loaf.” According to Ryan Lizza, “every stage of his political career has been marked by an eagerness to accommodate himself to existing institutions rather than tear them down or replace them.” For David Axelrod, referring to health care, “The president wasn’t after a Pyrrhic victory — he wasn’t into symbolism. The president is after solving a problem that has bedeviled a country and countless families for generations.”

At first glance these judgments seem indisputable, but there is one exception, one moment in which Obama did not accommodate himself to existing institutions, did not take half a loaf, but rather ventured boldly and imaginatively forth in what he himself called an “improbable” adventure.

I have yet to see Avatar so I can’t offer a review. But as someone interested in the subtleties of how racism and oppression operate in society I found this review “When Will White People Stop Making Movies Like ‘Avatar’?” by Annalee Newitz interesting:

Critics have called alien epic Avatar a version of Dances With Wolves because it’s about a white guy going native and becoming a great leader. But Avatar is just the latest scifi rehash of an old white guilt fantasy. Spoilers…

Whether Avatar is racist is a matter for debate. Regardless of where you come down on that question, it’s undeniable that the film – like alien apartheid flick District 9, released earlier this year – is emphatically a fantasy about race. Specifically, it’s a fantasy about race told from the point of view of white people. Avatar and scifi films like it give us the opportunity to answer the question: What do white people fantasize about when they fantasize about racial identity?

Genesis

Twenty years ago (already!), I belonged to an activist church with a woman minister, gay leaders, and a social justice agenda. I chose it and similar organizations because my life of getting and spending, work and amusement, politics and personal life, felt empty and insufficient. So I took up a two-stranded way, spiritual and political, protests and potlucks, rallies and fund raisers, services and singing, meetings and celebrations. The church became an important community to me, but I needed further growth. Let me illustrate:

Our church owned and rented a tiny house to a woman and her teenaged son who were not parishioners. I lived close by, so they were my neighbors though I didn’t know their names and never introduced myself. At some point, I heard, the woman became ill with cancer, and then she died. Her son held a garage sale to raise funds; I browsed, but saw nothing I wanted and, with a vaguely uneasy feeling, walked away. Some weeks later, he came around selling Ginsu knives. I didn’t need knives, so I didn’t buy any. I don’t remember how many other attempts he made, but eventually he couldn’t make the rent and had to move out. That was the end.

At some point, I came to view this incident with horror, remembering my lack of response, the feeling I had that the situation was too bad but not my concern. I was focused on grand causes, so many ways to change the world that I could not help a neighbor even when he knocked at my door. Did it matter that I didn’t need an old kettle or Ginsu knives? Why couldn’t I have given money? Why couldn’t our whole church have put our heads and resources together to help? I’m sad and disappointed that our bottom line, the rent, prevailed over loving our neighbor and caring for the orphan, a literal neighbor, a literal orphan. It was almost a test case for living by principle, and I failed it. I remained passive (though sympathetic) in the face of need and pain; I often wonder if that struggling son thought, Churches and their ” love”: what a joke.

Big changes came about in both my personal and organizational life. I began to pay more attention. Those were the Reagan years when one effort after another came to heartbreaking failure. I began to ask the question: with all my hours of effort, all my meetings, whom exactly have I helped? Could I name one individual? I couldn’t – outside of family members. I became convinced that I needed to integrate long-term efforts with short-term acts and daily responses to unexpected opportunities, the kind that arise when heart and eyes are open. I wanted my destination and my journey to match. It’s a goal I still pursue.

This and my future posts on Tikkun Daily, then, represent an effort to remind myself and others of what small groups or individuals are doing right now and can do to heal and mend our local worlds, to celebrate the wonderful efforts we imperfect humans are capable of . May it strengthen us to– as the great French socialist, Jean Jaurès, put it –”live every day in a socialist state of grace,” to live now the battle that is “never won and never lost.”

Blessings on the journey!

Spotlight on Immigrant Service Day, August 29, 2009

The World's Largest Chanukah Candle

I was always one of those Jewish kids who disliked Christmas. All of the lights and fuss for a holiday I didn’t celebrate; awkward interactions with people wishing me greetings that didn’t pertain; colors I didn’t resonate to; emblems of an overweight gentleman from the North Pole who didn’t even exist. Probably some of my animosity towards Christmas was fueled by envy at all of the gifts my friends got, compounded by the fact that I only saw the holiday’s material manifestation. But most of my dislike was caused by just how much another religion had taken over the public space, while mine (Judaism) didn’t get much airtime at all. I never made an issue of it (I am not a grinch!), but always felt uncomfortable during the holidays.

Now as a newly minted New Yorker, I feel completely different. Every building houses both Christmas trees and menorahs – some even have candelabras for Kwanza. People in stores wish you “happy holidays,” and new acquaintances have wished me gastronomic joy on a December 25 replete with Chinese food. The Empire State Building even transforms itself into the world’s largest blue and white candle during Chanukah!

Given the ubiquitous tolling of church bells, the public spaces swept by Christmas music, the decorations, the stores open late at night on Christmas Eve, and the “good news” on the Christmas Morning Front Page concerning the Senate’s passing of health care reform, this may be a moment in which it is worth reflecting on what it means to be Jewish and, in particular, what it means to be a Jewish intellectual, recognizing that intellectuality is one of the most pronounced traits of the Jewish people.

To be Jewish means to be in the minority. It means to oppose the overall consensus and to hold on to certain principles against a dominant consensus, the common sense of one’s time, the overwhelming pressure of public opinion, the group. It is interesting that when Jews go to Synagogue or celebrate together they mark such foundational moments of Jewish history as the Covenant between God and Abraham, and the exodus from Egypt, but they neglect another moment, which was of nearly comparable importance, namely the Jewish rejection of Christ’s message.

That rejection was not an easy one. Jesus, after all, was no alien bringing in a foreign religion. He was a Rabbi, preaching not the foundation of a new religion, but the realization of Judaism. Furthermore, the intellectual and emotional, not to mention religious, character of his teaching was not so easy to dismiss. To this day, such arguments as that love and mercy trump justice, or that a truly universal creed must burst the integument of community, retain their force. Any Jew who does not take Christ seriously as one of the greatest of all Jewish thinkers has not reckoned deeply enough with the problem of being Jewish.

Yet the Jews rejected the “good news” that Christ and his followers brought. They did so not for riches or prestige or most forms of emotional satisfaction, for their rejection brought none of that. They did so, because they felt they had a better idea: the individual’s direct, personal, one-to-one, relation to God, not mediated by God’s son-messenger or a Church, and loyalty to an ethically-defined, particularistic community. This rejection, almost as much as the Exodus, gave the Jews their character, often described as stubborn, stiff-necked, and negationist. But it also helped consolidate the great Jewish tradition, which goes back to the ban on graven images, of thinking. When modernity brought the freethinking intellectual to the forefront of social life, the Jews were well prepared to take advantage of that opportunity.

I write this as a Jewish intellectual who has rejected the “good news” of Obama’s coming in general, and of the health care bill in particular. This does not mean that I would have voted against the bill; on the contrary, I would have voted for it. But unlike another Jewish intellectual — one who for years exemplified stiff-necked resistance — namely Paul Krugman, I am not yet ready to celebrate. I prefer to keep thinking. And what I am thinking is that the Obama administration continues the more or less perfect merger of corporate interests and party interests which the Democrats pioneered in the 80s, in good part with the help of Jewish Neo-Cons and New Democrats who see the relation of Judaism and the dominant majority differently than me.

This piece, “Pass the Health Care Bill – Then Improve It,” by Peter Dreier (whose pieces appear in Tikkun from time to time) is worth reading. For those who don’t know, I post occasional articles here and at Current Thinking on the Tikkun home page that I think help us understand what’s going on. The previous article posted at Current Thinking was Jane Hamsher’s “Top 10 Ten Reasons To Kill the Senate Health Care Bill,” so you can see I am not trying to find pieces that agree with each other, nor do they necessarily express my own views.

So we are deep in “Avatar” here. It came out about a week ago and my son, Rowan, home for the holidays from the USC Cinema School, has seen it three times already. Yesterday he took his mother, his aunt and myself, insisting we had to see it on the giant IMAX screen as well as in 3D. He wasn’t sure we would like the total immersion experience. We were enthralled. He and some of his friends (mostly studying video game design, not film) have no doubt it is the movie of the decade, period.

It is surely the most technically advanced movie of the decade–and given Moore’s Law that computing power for the same money doubles about every two years it’s not so ridiculous that that would happen in the last month of the decade. But as with one or two other movies that displayed major leaps forward in technology — like “Star Wars,” “Toy Story” and “Lord of the Rings” — the quality of the movie’s story telling matches its technology. That’s the surprise. Perhaps it should not be, considering the director’s last movie was “Titanic.”

The politics is an even bigger surprise. The story frontally opposes companies driven by quarterly profit reports, war on behalf of corporate interests, and destruction of local cultures and ecosystems. And it does so in a way brilliantly calculated to bring an average American audience along with it.

Kwanzaa is a young celebration rooted in an ancient culture and civilization.  Dr. Maulana Karenga, an Africentric scholar and activist, founded Kwanzaa in 1966.  It is a celebration that is observed from December 26 through January 1.  It is a non-religious celebration that was conceived as a way for African-Americans to remember and to celebrate our history and culture.  Moreover, the intent of the holiday is to emphasize seven moral principles, the Nguzo Saba, that arises from the cultural unity of African peoples.  Kwanzaa is a time of remembrance and of rededication to a struggle for freedom.

My friend, the Rev.  Geoff Browning is a campus minister at Stanford University and a peacemaking advocate in the Presbyterian Church’s San Jose Presbytery. He wrote this essay and has given me permission to share it with Tikkun Daily visitors. The title should give you a guess as to where Geoff is going with this one (don’t fall asleep while reading it or you’ll get three visitors……)

Mimi Silbert checks in on the Delancey Street tree lot in San Francisco, 12/9/09. Photo: Liz Hafalia / The Chronicle

This is a story for Christmas about an extraordinary Jewish woman: Mimi Silbert, who founded the famous Delancey Street self-help drug rehabilitation center.

She lives on the job:

Many of Silbert’s roommates have bottomed out after an average 12 years of drug addiction and four trips to prison. Delancey dwellers spend an average of four years rebuilding their lives, learning values and a trade in one of many Delancey enterprises: the Christmas tree lots, the restaurant, the moving company, or wood furniture making.

My wife and son and I buy our tree each year from the Delancey Street lot in El Cerrito. The service there is something special: you know that everyone has a story and you see the hope in their eyes and their energy.

Over almost four decades, Delancey has grown to a $30 million foundation following an each-one-teach-one philosophy – Silbert has never taken a dime from the government, given herself a salary or hired anyone. The residents do everything – from answering the phones to teaching the academic classes to building the dorms and counseling one another.

Silbert gets business suits as Christmas presents for all her residents.

In the Talmud in the tractate Brachot (Blessings), the rabbis raise the question of what is meant by the mishnaic statement “ha oseh tefilato keva, ain tefilato tachanunim – the one who makes his prayer fixed, his prayer is not one of supplication.”

One explanation given is that our prayer lacks supplication when it is not done “eem dimdumei chama – with the reddening of the sun.” While on a peshat level the rabbis may be referring to the need for one to be earnest in his or her prayer in order for it to be supplicatory, I think there may be another level to their words.

At The Immanent Frame thirteen esteemed scholars and journalists offer their responses to Hanna Rosin’s December 2009 Atlantic article, “Did Christianity Cause the Crash?” Below is an excerpt from Sarah Posner’s comments:

The prosperity gospel is a lot older than derivatives, credit default swaps, and other byzantine Wall Street “products” that leveled the financial markets. Moreover, the fact that humans – not God – dreamed up these contrivances doesn’t poke holes in the prosperity gospel at all, at least from its adherents’ vantage point. If you believe and sow your seed, God will reward you, even as the secular Masters of the Universe greedily orchestrate a global economic collapse.

Surely the prosperity gospel plays a role in persuading its followers to buy into risky financial schemes, including sub-prime mortgages. (You might not be able to afford this thing, but if you have faith and tithe, your mortgage payments will miraculously appear in your checking account.) But to argue that the prosperity gospel, no matter how prevalent it is in America’s mega-churches, brought enough sub-prime borrowers to the table that it “caused the crash” overlooks how our secular institutions can be just as faith-based as prosperity churches.

Read the entire piece at The Immanent Frame.

Photo: Jacob Windham

Thomas Moore, the psychotherapist and author of many books, including Care of the Soul and The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life, wrote this beautiful piece, “The Eternal, Holy Night,” about Christmas for Tikkun in 2003.

It is no accident that the festival of Christmas occurs at the time of year when the darkness has reached its low point and winter light begins to appear. Christmas is the honoring of light and the hope that comes with the end of nature’s and the human soul’s dark night. In the symbolic turning of time, Christmas is that part of the annual cycle that invites us to leave darkness behind and enter a new way of being, to start a new “year,” that is, a new era of enlightened decisions rather than unconscious acts.

The most stirring songs of the season, “O Holy Night” and “Silent Night,” and the popular verse-tale “‘Twas the Night Before Christmas” explore the emotion of night, especially this night on which light once again shows itself. We honor this mythic night full of hopeful appearances–angels with their song, flying reindeer, kings bearing gifts of gold and spices, a lowly stable aflame with the brilliant arrival of the divine child.

I love a column by John Ortberg in last week’s Christian Century about the song of praise that Mary sang when she was told by an angel that she would bear the son of God. I wanted to link to it for this Christmas week, but it’s one of their few articles not online. Then I found this sermon, “That Mary Sure Could Sing,” that quotes Ortberg’s piece and riffs off it. Here are the opening lines from Ortberg’s piece, followed by some quotes from the sermon.

The greatest Christmas carol in history was not written by Irving Berlin or Nat King Cole. The greatest carol is not “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer” or “White Christmas” or even “Silent Night.”

The greatest carol was composed 2,000 years ago by a pregnant teenage girl who was visiting her cousin Elizabeth. After Elizabeth pronounced a blessing, Mary poured out her song.

New Testament scholar Scott McKnight notes that in the 1980s the government of Guatemala banned this song, or prayer, as it’s also called. Unlike “Away in a Manger,” this prayer was apparently considered subversive, politically dangerous. Authorities worried that it might incite the oppressed people to riot.

Mary begins with words of praise and gratitude, then goes on to note that God has brought down rulers from their thrones.

Every year at winter solstice, I perform in a Interfaith Yule celebration at First Unitarian Society in Madison. Every year I tell a story and sing a song. This year I told a T’salagi (Cherokee) tale explaining why some trees are evergreen. In the spirit of the season, I’d like to share it with you.

In order to really understand the Cherokee story, you need to know that the T’salagi or Cherokee people lived in the southern Appalachian mountains until they were forced onto the “Trail of Tears” by white settlers who wanted their land. This part of the world is extremely luxuriant. In fact, there are more plant species in the mountains of Georgia and the Carolinas than in all of Europe. As a result, the T’salagi — living as they did in harmony with the land — knew a lot about the flora of their native territory and respected its medicine. The evergreens were among the most sacred plants and were only harvested by a shaman for healing purposes.

Another fact also brings this story alive. When Cherokee children went through their rite of passage to adulthood, they participated in a vision quest, during which they were to stay awake for seven days and seven nights. Here’s my retelling of the story:

When I told an administrator at a non-profit organization that I was considering collaborating on a project with some colleagues at the United Nations, he responded, “That’s great, but I still can’t figure out what the [expletive] they do.”

Perhaps unfairly, the UN has gained a reputation for being bureaucratic and opaque to outsiders. But its burgeoning Alliance of Civilizations initiative has become renowned for its effective and clear-cut work to promote religious and cultural understanding. What is it doing so right? Here’s an interview with a Senior Advisor to the Alliance of Civilizations, Emmanuel Kattan, who explains how the Alliance got started and where it hopes to go from here.

I recently came across a commentary written by the christian author Brian McLaren about the concept of economic recovery. He brings up some interesting questions about what we mean by the term “recovery”. When a drug addict hits rock bottom and starts on the path to recovery, we usually mean that this person is reforming their ways, learning from their past mistakes and moving forward to a better life without their former addiction. We don’t mean that they are trying to reestablish their more tolerable state of drug dependency similar to what they were experiencing a few months before hitting rock bottom.

Yet when we talk about economic recovery, there is disappointingly little talk in the national media about learning from our past mistakes and moving forward to a better life without the former addiction to the illusory phantom wealth from complex risky financial mechanisms, excessive debt,and unsustainable speculative bubbles. Instead, the goal of economic recovery seems to be to return to how things were a few years ago before the bubble bursts, plus or minus a few minor regulation changes. It has become a call to get back to our former addictive economic high without addressing the root problems with our addictions, with the hope that we won’t end up back in the gutter again next time. Brian McLaren goes on to discuss some of the addictions we need to face and recover from: material greed, weapons, carbon fuels, quick and easy answers, etc. This struck me as an interesting way to frame these discussions in the national debate.