Dave Belden’s last post “So What’s a Spiritual Progressive to Do?” stuck with me all last night. Dave’s voice rings with urgency, an urgency to which all of us spiritual progressives respond. Who doesn’t know that we have to make change now? At least as quickly as humanly possible?

But those two — now and as quickly as humanly possible — are different animals. Now would have been yesterday for Dave, since he wrote his piece on the 30th. And humanly possible…that’s the rub for us. Humanly possible should be yesterday as well. But there are a lot of us humans, and we spiritual progressives have to educate many before the changes can be made.

All those “others” is what frustrates us, but it’s also our liberation in a paradoxical sense. I know that I can’t do this myself. And I can’t do it all. Each of us has to do what we can. And that means that some of us will work more locally, while others work more nationally. It means that some us will be learning how to more effective, while others are putting that knowledge into action. It means that some of us will take a spiritual retreat to rejuvenate ourselves, while others throw themselves into the middle of change-making.

“Spiritual progressive” as a term is only problematic when we look at it from an individualistic perspective, when we somehow expect everything to come together in each person, rather than in an entire movement. I don’t fault Dave for that understanding. It’s mine, too. I’ve been molded by the most individualistic culture in the world, that of the United States of America.

This article has changed from its original posting. Additional information has been added on the holy days featured.

When I gave my testimony on behalf of Hassan Diab (see the Update at the bottom of this article) the Crown prosecutor asked why a rabbi would pay chaplaincy visits to a Muslim who is known to be entirely secular.

“The secular have spiritual needs also,” I replied.

“I didn’t say they didn’t,” she replied. Actually, that’s precisely what she said. But why quibble?

In his 4 June speech to the Muslim world from Cairo, US President Barack Obama started his discussion of religious freedom by pointing out that “Islam has a proud tradition of tolerance”.

Citing its long history of protecting religious minorities as well as his own experience growing up in overwhelmingly Muslim Indonesia where Christians worshipped freely, he then drew upon the present, turning his attention to those vocal Muslims among whom “there is a disturbing tendency to measure one’s own faith by the rejection of another’s”. He urged his Muslim listeners to continue the spirit of tolerance that is reflected throughout their history.

The rejectionist Muslims whom Obama referred to are but one part of the vast Muslim world. Surveys conducted in 44 countries as part of the Pew Research Center’s Global Attitudes Project show that people in Muslim countries place a high value on free speech, free press, multi-party systems and equal protection under the law. However, while many Muslims desire the type of pluralism that comes with Western-style democracy, those in the Muslim world who push for such ideas can face pressure, and sometimes threats of persecution, by both their governments and rival groups that see no place for religious freedom in Islam.

The term “spiritual progressive” is problematic for various reasons, not least that some think one is claiming to be more spiritual than thou rather than aspiring to bring a deeper sense of life’s meaning into political struggle. Others object that “spiritual” is too, well, spiritual. But that’s on the surface.

The reality is even more problematic. How do we, in practice, put together these two aspects of our lives, the spiritual and political? The vision of something like the Network of Spiritual Progressives is one thing, the reality of what its members do and think, another.

I just posted two items laying out what a mess we are in in our national politics, as if we didn’t know. And I’m writing from California, a state going bankrupt, cutting all kinds of critical programs for the poor, the sick, children and the elderly, while today we hear the Governator has insisted on keeping in the construction of a new death row at San Quentin.

Often the “spiritual” is a response to that kind of news that’s the dead opposite of the “political.” We throw up our hands in disgust at politics.

Still at Open Left, a quote that sums up where we are after seven months of Obama’s administration:

Big business lobbyists, in this case from the health insurance industry, still have more power than the President. The media establishment, for all their lost audience and credibility, still have the ability to drive a negative conventional wisdom story about how change is impossible. And Democratic leaders on Capitol Hill, out of a combination of caution and the fear of these aforementioned lobbyists, still don’t have the ability to deliver transformational change. The kind of change Barack Obama based his campaign around is, so far, nowhere to be seen.

I find myself going to Open Left for a dose of reality. Today: polling shows that Republicans have almost caught up with Democrats in people’s voting plans for the next election, with a strong analysis of why that is so. Ian Welsh, sounding very like Michael Lerner, argues it is because the Republicans pursue conflict with vigor while the Democrats, lacking the courage of their supposed convictions, are doing Bush lite:

Continuation of ineffective Bush policies. Not to put too fine a point on it, but in too many cases Obama and the new Congress are pursuing Bush lite policies.

• Escalate in Afghanistan
• Spend more money on the military
• Get out of Iraq around about the time Bush wanted to anyway
• Continue the Bush/Paulson financial policies
• A stimulus bill which was 40% tax cuts (granted, not tax cuts for the rich, but still tax cuts)

Americans voted for Democrats because they were sick of Bush and Bush era policies. And here Congress is repeatedly voting for Bush era policies.

This week’s spiritual wisdom has been circulating for years as an internet meme, but it’s actually from David M. Bader‘s humorous book Zen Judaism: For You, a Little Enlightenment (Harmony Books, 2002):

Be here now. Be someplace else later. Is that so complicated?

To find the Buddha, look within. Deep inside you are ten thousand flowers. Each flower blossoms ten thousand times. Each blossom has ten thousand petals. You might want to see a specialist.

Accept misfortune as a blessing. Do not wish for perfect health or a life without problems. What would you talk about?

It’s not who you think.

The article is called “Are you a believer?” in the print magazine. On the web it’s first called “Why don’t people believe in climate change?” and then “Why people don’t act on climate change.” Are the folks at New Scientist confused about the difference between belief and action?

And what is the difference?

If you believe something but don’t act on it, do you really believe it?

The article looks at people whose profession is teaching us all about climate change but who still personally take high carbon vacations. The most interesting sentence:

Intriguing as their dissonance may be, what is especially revealing is that each has a career predicated on the assumption that information is sufficient to generate change.

It was bound to happen. Religious “leaders” (the quotes are meant to highlight the fact that the existence of “leaders” depends entirely upon the legitimacy and consent they enjoy or don’t among their so-called followers) from the major religions in India – Hinduism, Islam and Christianity – decried the recent court ruling decriminalizing LGBT sex (article 377, or 377 for short; see my earlier blog). Over the last couple weeks these “leaders” (who are usually busy fighting with each other in India) came together on this platform of opposition to 377 using any or all of four arguments that I am sure many of us have heard before in other spaces, other times. At the heart of each of their objections was the attempt to label LGBT sex-act as:

A) “unnatural” and then offer “cure” it through psychological/ psychiatric/yogic counseling, or

A mitzvah is a Hebrew word for the commandments in Jewish tradition (you thought there were only ten? That’s about 610 short) and so it also became a word for a good deed, a kind act. Could one mitzvah save the planet? Not on its own, but few things that you or I do could have a bigger impact on everything from global warming to water quality to biodiversity loss than going vegetarian.

In my case, I’ve still got a ways to go. But someone emailed me last week:

“I wanted to share the article The Planet Saving Mitzvah: Why Jews Should Consider Vegetarianism by DANIEL BROOK on my Facebook page. I have not eaten meat since I read it.”

We haven’t made the article public on our website yet because we are still hoping you’ll buy the magazine, the thing made of dead trees and ink, which is how we actually keep going here. We will put it and all the current issues’ articles up on the web when the next issue comes out on September 1. Meanwhile, check out my interview and the discussion last night with Dan Brook (scroll down that page and click on the link to listen on your computer or download an MP3), and the PETA videos he writes about which we posted here, and his own website: Eco-Eating, Eating as if the Earth Matters (it does!).

“Can sainthood be redefined in progressive terms? For the past decade, an artist named Mark Dukes has been demonstrating that it can.”

So wrote Phillip Barcio in the May/June 2009 issue of Tikkun, as he introduced our readers to Dukes’s mural The Dancing Saints, which was commissioned by the St. Gregory of Nyssa Church in San Francisco. In the mural, ninety men and women from history dance hand-in-hand in a circle with Jesus. We only had space to print a few images alongside Barcio’s article about the mural, but you can now see more of this inspiring work in Tikkun Daily’s art gallery.

St. Gregory’s holds weekly community food pantry gatherings that bring unity in an age of division and warfare. Every Friday, this free market provides for the countless hungry who show up. In the following video, you can see this in action. And if you look closely, you can see The Dancing Saints watching over this offering to the community. Also, check out St. Gregory’s site for more information about this and other services.

We won a Rockower Award from the American Jewish Press Association for our ‘Israel at 60‘ issue

That issue was published in May/June 2008. It contained a range of perspectives, from those embracing and celebrating Israel at 60 to those who deeply lamented the way that Israel has become a human-rights-violating oppressor to the Palestinian people, a “shanda fur de goyim” (a disgrace among the nations), and an idolatrous worshipper of power instead of trust in YHVH (the God of healing and transformation, the God that calls for a world based on love and generosity and promises to throw the Jews out of their land if they do not embody this different and very anti-”realistic” perspective that is the whole point of being Jewish).

Among the authors in that issue: Rebecca Alpert, Uri Avnery, Theodore Bikel, Chana Bloch, Leon Botstein, Daniel Boyarin, Cherie Brown, Bradley Burston, Harvey Cox, Riane Eisler, Sidra Dekoven Ezrahi, Sander Gilman, Lynn Gottlieb, Joshua Levine Grater, Art Green, Rodger Kamenetz, Irwin Kula, Laura Levitt, Shaul Magid, Vanessa Ochs, Alicia Ostriker, Marge Piercy, Mazin Qumsiyeh, Omid Safi, Rami Shapiro, Zalman Schachter Shalomi, Svi Shapiro, David Shasha, Robert Thurman, Arthur Waskow, Steven Weinberg, C.K.Williams, Jim Winkler and Howard Zinn.

If you wish a copy of that issue of Tikkun, send us a check for a two year subscription to the magazine ($52) to Tikkun, 2342 Shattuck Ave, Suite 1200, Berkeley, Ca. 94704) and with your check put a note asking for a copy of the May/June 2008 issue of the magazine! Or buy a single copy online here.

In 2002, a young Afghan boy named Nasrulah (we called him Narisula) taught me a lesson in government as we sat in the rubble-strewn mess that served as his home. The Afghans were in the midst of holding a Loya Jurga, a gathering of leaders of tribes, villages and cities across the country, who in a huge tent in Kabul would set the new direction for the country. We were there as part of an interfaith peace delegation, organized by Global Exchange.

Months earlier, the Taliban had fled under the onslaught of coalition bombs. Narisula had become the victim of a U.S. cluster-bomblet that had not exploded on impact, and awaited him and his cousin on their way to school. His cousin picked it up, thinking it was one of the dandy yellow food packets that had also been dropped across the country. Same color as a cluster bomblet, much less healthy. Narisula nearly lost both arms and both legs but had been saved by a German doctor who flew his battered body to Germany. Now, Narisula was battered but back, telling us about his dream to one day be president.

“I would pave the streets with gold” he told us. Everybody would have jobs and a place to live and enough to eat. And, everyone would have whatever medication they needed.

Mike Ignatowski makes two interesting assertions about moral documents in this article at Tikkun Daily.

I can accept that the framers of a budget are moral but not that the federal budget is (or ever could be) a moral document: the obvious question becomes “whose morality defines the federal budget?”

The incident between Professor Henry Louis Gates and Sgt James Crowley of the Cambridge police department is an example of our lack of faith in each other, especially the lack of faith that we African-Americans have in the police.

When I was a little girl, one of the first sentences I remember learning to read in my elementary school reader was: “The policeman is my friend.” Pictures of a friendly white police officer with happy white children accompanied the sentence. As time passed and I learned African-American history, had my own experiences with the police, became the mother of a son and a daughter, and read the news of police behavior in the African-American community, I knew that this sentence in the reader was not always true.

Before the Hadron Collider went online a few months ago, some scientists expressed concern that it might cause the implosion of the entire solar system, destroying Earth — the only planet we know that harbors life. Scientists at a recent conference on Monterey Bay in California debated whether there should be limits on robotics and computer systems before humans lose control of them. And in the last few years, several biology professors have objected to the release of exotic species as biocontrols for native pests, noting how a number have proliferated and are now killing the plants they were meant to protect.

You could make a case that all of these problems reflect a “fatal flaw” in humanity’s ability to anticipate the future consequences of its actions. That’s exactly what Van Rensselaer Potter, a retired University of Wisconsin biochemist, suggested in an article he wrote in the early 1990s. According to Potter, humankind has lost — or never acquired — the ability to foresee the effects of our actions.

I disagree with Potter. I don’t think it’s a lack of insight, but hubris when it comes to our long-term decision-making. The directors of the Hadron Collider knew very well that there was a small possibility that throwing the switch might mean switching off all of life. And yet they turned on their particle accelerator. The same type of decision was made when the first atomic bomb was detonated. Some of the Manhattan Project scientists feared that the fission reaction created would burn off Earth’s entire atmosphere, and yet they went ahead with their experiment.

Ray McGovern speaking out against torture

Ray McGovern is one of my biggest heroes. In the crazy lead-up to the Iraq war he was one of the leading voices questioning the “intelligence” the Bush White House was using to justify invasion. He led an organization called “Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity” and his organization was right about virtually everything they said was wrong with the White House’s “evidence” against Iraq.

In the photo to the left, he is holding the infamous “Torture Memos” from the Bush Justice Department, which he urged participants in a recent anti-torture conference to read, after which he assured those assembled, they would need to take a long shower or bath.

McGovern was one of President Ronald Reagan’s intelligence briefers from 1981-85; he was in charge of preparing daily security briefs for Reagan, Vice President George H.W. Bush, the National Security Advisor, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Cabinet. Later, McGovern was one of several senior CIA analysts who prepared the President’s Daily Brief (PDB) during the first Bush administration.

Upon retirement, McGovern was awarded the Intelligence Commendation Medal from Bush (which he later returned) and today works with Tell the World, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington.

McGovern spoke recently at an event I was involved with called “Torture is A Moral Issue.” The following is an edited video of his presentation during that June anti-torture event.

Sunny sent out some links to comments about her book. Here’s a great comment from a blog called Lerterland:

And that’s the core contribution of Dreams from the Monster Factory: it upends the soft-on-crime/tough-on-crime dichotomy and takes a long, hard look at getting results. What can be more tough than putting violent offenders in the same room with crime victims and forcing them to confront the consequences of their actions? Encouraging them to get educated and turn their lives around, so that their communities can live in peace? Ultimately, as Sunny shows, the best way to shake up inmates is to humanize them, not dehumanize them. Dehumanization is what they expect. It ensures continuation of the same patterns. Worse, it teaches them to become even more ruthless and deceitful. 

One of the comments made during the presidential primary debates last year has remained stuck in my memory to this day.   It came from Joe Biden, who was recalling some “folksy wisdom” from his father.   His father had a saying that went something like this:  “Don’t lecture me about the moral values you claim to have, just show me your budget so that I can see what your real moral values are”.   As I recall, Joe Biden was making this comment in reference to our national budget, but I shuddered when I think that this commentary applies equally well to my own personal budget.   If our moral values were to be judged by looking at our personal budgets, how well would any of us fare?