I am very honoured to announce that my student Anne Marante will earn her core competency in Deliberative Ethics next week and be admitted as an officer of the Jewish Courts for Social Justice.

I introduced the concept of the Jewish Courts for Social Justice (Bedatz Umi in abbreviated Hebrew) in one of my early posts on Tikkun Daily.

Social justice is oft-called tikkun olam in Hebrew. I can’t think of anyone more influential in making tikkun olam a central Jewish concern than Michael Lerner.

Michael has worked very hard for almost 25 years to see tikkun olam evolve and enfold both Jews and the general community. He did not do this alone, of course, and had many associates and mentors along the way — in itself this is part of the definition of social justice, as we will see below.

Two amazing people with whom we have luckily connected along our journey at Reach And Teach are Len and Libby Traubman. Their dedication to building a more peaceful and just world through dialogue and engagement has inspired us immensely.

Here’s how they describe themselves on their web site:

The Traubman family resides in San Mateo, California. Len is a pediatric dentist, retired after 35 years in his practice of dentistry for children in San Francisco. Libby, a retired clinical social worker, is a trustee of the Foundation for Global Community – formerly Beyond War – which they helped launch in 1982. Libby and Len shepherd the Jewish-Palestinian Living Room Dialogue, established in July 1992, whose principles of living together apply universally to relationships between diverse citizens and with Earth herself.

The Latest News:

We just received an update from the Traubmans with news of the incredible videos that they make available, free of charge, and the learning resources you can download to go along with them.

If you are hoping to learn how to build bridges between people through dialogue and engagement, these videos and learning resources will truly help you along the way.

New on Altmuslimah:

Jurists have created a contradiction that is not in the Qur’an by encouraging divorce and discouraging marriage. In other words, a Muslim woman who wants a divorce must be set free without using force against her, but a Muslim woman who wants to remain married does so under the threat of being beaten. What woman would want to stay married under such circumstances?

Wajahat Ali, playwright and friend of this blog, sent us this press release today. My eye was caught by the phrase “American Muslims thrive because of the Constitution’s protection of religious freedom,” which I am sure Thomas Jefferson would be happy to hear if he could:

American Muslims Call on Chinese Govt’ to Protect Religious Freedom

In response to the outbreak of violence in Xinjiang, China, in early July, 2009, American Muslims across the country will speak out for religious freedom in China during their July 31, 2009 Friday sermon

SAN FRANCISCO – A collection of American Muslim professionals, journalists and community and religious leaders, are calling for American Muslim leaders and religious figures to speak up during their Friday, July 31, sermon for religious freedom in light of the brutal crackdown by the Chinese on Uyghur Muslims in July and a history of repression of religious groups including Christians and the Falun Gong.

Ritual is not a word that we Unitarian Universalists tend to use. We think of it as formal, rigid, hollow of any meaning, coming out of traditions that have prescribed rules and customs that we no longer perceive as valid. Ritual, as I said, is not a word that we UUs tend to use.

Unless we’re pagan UUs. Then the word has very different connotations and meanings. Ritual, for me as a pagan UU, has to do with creating an experience that shapes energy in a particular way with a particular group of people for a particular purpose. It’s will in action, directed energy. Ritual is a participatory experience. And as Margot Adler (another UU pagan) says (in Drawing Down the Moon),

Ritual seems to be one method of reintegrating individuals and groups into the cosmos, and to tie the activities of daily life with their ever present, often forgotten, significance….Just as ecological theory explains how we are interrelated with all other forms of life, rituals allow us to recreate that unity in a non-abstract, gut-level way. Rituals have the power to reset the terms of our universe until we find ourselves suddenly and truly “at home.”

Oy.

We welcome theological discussion on this blog. But I am very aware of how quickly we could become known for a set of ideas that will be offputting to the very people we want to join the discussions with us, as readers and fellow bloggers. Nancy Vedder-Schults and I have both just posted some reflections on death: theological reflections. There was quite a degree of agreement between us. These are not the official views of Tikkun Daily!

You can learn our editor, Rabbi Michael Lerner’s, ideas about God here, and they are very well worth reading, but no one person’s theology is dominant here.

Our identity here is “spiritual progressive”…

The Torah is the very foundation of the world.

Liberals, of course, tend to rely more on science. I won’t say this is a mistake, but I will outline an interesting Torah passage below on conduct disorder, 3500 years before the American Psychiatric Association (APA) defined the criteria for it.

First published on May 1, 2009

Growing up Muslim and female in America was, and remains, a tumultuous process. While Islam generally is under tremendous scrutiny, there is probably no issue in greater contention than that of gender relations in Islam. With the media constantly spewing out images of oppressed Muslim women and angry Muslim men, the world looks on with both fascination and disgust. The Muslim gender dynamic – supposedly a singular, unchanging construct – has become a spectacle for everyone to gawk at, comment on, and ultimately use to ridicule the larger Muslim community.

But it is not just our neighbors who are gawking; Muslims often find themselves feeling awkward as well, especially as the news becomes stranger and more prevalent. Part of this is about Western Muslim women trying to make sense of supposedly religiously motivated gender oppression, but much of this is about reflecting on our individual spiritual cores – the place where we, in our quiet moments, wonder about our identity vis-à-vis the world, the part of us that cowers under the spotlight.

This self-reflection involves quite a bit of confusion, as it is hard to reconcile the heart-wrenching news of oppression with our daily experience of meeting, interacting with, living among – being – strong, confident, successful Muslim women.

Ursula Le Guin. Read on to find out why she's here.

Nancy has gone to the heart of so much anguish in our society in her ‘Death Defying 2′ post..

I had cancer a few years back and was told it had metastasized, so for a few weeks I had a good test of how I would feel about dying (until a PET scan reversed the CAT scan finding and I was OK). I was very unhappy for my family, but to my surprise I was fine about my own after-death prospects, because what I expect is just an end. No more. No Platonic dualism. Just rejoining the rest of life.

Perhaps I lack imagination, or more likely–as a some-time science fiction writer–have too much of it, but I find the prospect of eternal life or reincarnation unappealing.

I teach a course called Deliberative Ethics at the Metivta of Ottawa. Deliberative Ethics has a great deal to do with justice and very little to do with law.

The appointment of judges is among the first matters halakha (Jewish law) covers with respect to judging. There are specific qualifications a judge must meet.

On Monday evenings I have the great pleasure of interviewing one of our Tikkun magazine or web authors on a conference call. After a twenty minute interview the floor is thrown open to anyone on the call to ask a question or make a brief comment. It’s like a call-in radio show. No charge appears on your phone bill — we pay for it as a way of expressing our thanks to all Tikkun subscribers and paid-up members of the Network of Spiritual Progressives. Anyone can join in, but we ask that you do become a subscriber or member if you can possibly afford it.

You can listen to past shows on your computer or by downloading an MP3 audio file from our Phone Forum page. And that page tells you what’s coming up. I have had a bunch of emails from people who love this weekly date, so I hope it may work for you too. Maybe you could get out your laptop or iPod and listen while you’re doing the washing up… or during that hour’s exercise you no doubt do every night like every other overworked activist!

This week’s spiritual wisdom is a poem from Brian Piergrossi‘s book The Big Glow. The poem has been circulating the Web under the name “A Spiritual Conspiracy.” Brian told us its original title and invited us to share it with you here:

Love Is The New Religion

On the surface of the world right now there is war and violence and things
seem dark
But calmly and quietly, at the same time, something else is happening
underground
An inner revolution is taking place and certain individuals are being called
to a higher light
It is a silent revolution
From the inside out
From the ground up

It is time for me to reveal myself
I am an embedded agent of a secret, undercover
Clandestine
Global operation
A spiritual conspiracy
We have sleeper cells in every nation on the planet

It’s easy enough to blame the spineless Congressional Dems for the failure of the health care plan. But their worry about rising costs is not totally irrational.

It’s great to see President Obama finally striking out at the Republicans who want no progress and are trying to block every plan for a reason that is despicable: their desire to have Obama fail so that they can go to the election of 2010 and say: “See, this nice guy accomplished nothing.” And it’s great to see the President starting to talk about the destructive role played by the insurance companies.

Both of these switches in his oratory may be too little, too late. When he had the attention of the country in the Spring he was, instead, teaching the American public that his highest goal was bi-partisanship, and he shaped his economic, environmental and health care programs to achieve that unrealistic and undesirable goal (undesirable, because it meant compromising to the Right and ignoring the people who actually voted for him and their desires).

The fundamental problem for Obama is that the plans he is willing to back are all flawed in precisely the way that the Republicans are saying: they will necessarily cause a significant rise in the cost of the total health care bill.

There are only two ways to deal with that:

As I said yesterday, Wicca (my religion) may take an integrated view of death as a part of life, but I was raised here in the old U.S. of A. And that means that death can be just as hard for me to face as the next American.

If we look at contemporary American culture, it’s clear that we’re a death-denying society. Death is one of our final taboos. For secularists in the US, death no longer has metaphysical implications. It is the end of life and as such has a physical finality that even in the near past would have been hard to imagine. And for the devout, death seems to be writ large for other reasons. A recent study indicates that they feel bound to remain alive as long as they can, something we can see in the struggle among members of Terri Schiavo’s family.

Today at The Immanent Frame, Janet R. Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini argue that one of the few beliefs shared by opponents and supporters of gay rights is the notion that religious and sexual freedoms are opposed, and that this has significant policy implications. An excerpt from their piece is below:

In our 2003 book, Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Freedom, we offer an extensive argument that religious freedom and sexual freedom are actually interdependent rather than oppositional. Unfortunately, the impact of “religious exemptions” like those included in the New Hampshire law is to codify a narrow version of religious freedom in which religious liberty and sexual freedom can only be seen as mutually exclusive. This is not just a loss for sexual freedom; it also significantly narrows the parameters of religious freedom offered by the US Constitution.

If there is a “religion problem” posed by gay marriage, it is not that some religious organizations might be “forced” to provide secular benefits to same-sex couples, such as healthcare or equal access to residential housing; it is rather the entanglement of the state with the business of any couple’s religious marriage. The problem here is that the state legitimates religious marriages, performed by members of the clergy, rather than only civil unions performed by representatives of the state, thus entangling, rather than separating, state and religious practice. When such entanglements are maintained in law, religious practice is not “protected” from the state any more than citizens are “protected” from the imposition of religious convictions they do not share. New Hampshire and other states could actually “protect” both religious practice and those who are not religious (or who are differently religious) by providing civil unions on the basis of equality and letting religious bodies provide for religious marriages. No secular benefits would then flow from religious marriage, and the secular benefits that follow on civil unions would be separated from religious debates over homosexuality.

Read the full piece at The Immanent Frame.

Photo: Elise Amendola, AP

Apparently an anonymous East Coast donor has funded “Recession 101″ billboard signs that have been popping up all over Rhode Island to reduce our anxiety over the current state of the economy ( http://tinyurl.com/recess101 ). One such sign suggests, “Stop obsessing about the economy, you’re scaring the children.” It’s got me thinking whether this might have application in other areas that seem to be currently troubling us as a nation. So I’d like to try using this sign as a template. Maybe you’d like to add to the list.

“Stop obsessing about (fill in the blank), you’re scaring the children.”

1. Sarah Palin
2. whether President Obama is really a US citizen
3. Rush Limbaugh’s idiotic comments
4. diminished support for a public healthcare option
5. Nichola Torbett having not blogged for over a week

Doesn’t this make you feel better and less scared? It does? I’m now truly scared.

Julia Dean photo by Agi Magyari

Seven and a half months ago, professional photographer and educator Julia Dean and English professor A. Jay Adler rented out their apartments, traded in their cars for a motor home, and took to the road to document life on Native American reservations across the country.

“It seems to us that Native Americans don’t get talked about a lot in America unless you live next to a reservation or have anything to do with Native Americans,” Dean says. “As journalists, we are just trying to do a little something about it.”

Dean and Adler’s work depicts the complexities of Native American life from a variety of perspectives, changing with each reservation they visit. Each reservation has its own unique set of obstacles and successes, giving them a wide range of foci.

The photo essay featured in Tikkun Daily’s art gallery, “The American Indian Church,” comes from the San Carlos Apache Reservation in Arizona and depicts an important part of life there: religion.

The sun loves me.
Oh yeah, I know, like the Bible says
the sun shines on good and evil alike
and I like that about old Sol.
But when the sun shines on me
touching my cheek like a lover
turning my heart wild and green
lighting my crown like the 4th of July
grand finale, I know
the sun loves me
and on behalf of the planet
I take it very personally.

– Elizabeth Cunningham, from Small Bird

This was one of the poems my wife, Debi, read at our service in Tilden Park on Sunday.

Note: I have made some changes to this article, which was originally published on July 21, 2009. I have edited the article to include an explanation of criticism of postmodernism and Reconstructionism. And I have added a page break.

“Ethnocracy” appears to be one of those nefarious postmodernist words that sounds good and means nothing whatever. I will, therefore, dispose of two notions directly.

I am a progressive but by no means am I a postmodernist. Furthermore, I detest postmodernism in its academic regalia and disdain it in its Jewish religious conception, that which we call “Reconstructionist“.

My objection to academic postmodernism is the relativistic lens it uses and its general hijacking by Marxist rhetoricians. This is particularly evident in sociology, anthropology and political science.

I do, moreover, know what I disdain with respect to the religious postmodernism of Reconstructionism. I am a former member of a Reconstructionist synagogue. Two friends areReconstructionist rabbis.