America: land of the brave and home of the free. Free. One of my favorite words. Yes, equality and rights to freedom are excellent, but what I really enjoy are free giveaways.

Today Starbucks is holding free pastry day – anyone who comes in with a coupon, easily printed off the Internet, and orders a beverage will receive one free pastry of choice. It was the perfect way to start off my morning. I ordered the necessary soy latte and got a complimentary butter croissant on the side.

But after finishing my delicious breakfast, I’ve been reconsidering my pastry choice. Was it the healthiest? Maybe I should have picked a whole grain roll. Would it have made a difference?

I seem to be surrounded by issues concerning death lately. It began a week ago yesterday when Barbara Coombs Lee spoke at First Unitarian Society (my church in Madison) about Compassion and Choices, an organization that advocates for more choice and better care at the end of life. This week a friend told me about the suicide of his best buddy. And even the Sunday newspaper had a comic strip about our fear of death.

There’s probably a second reason for what some might consider my morbid train of thought. Life and death dance together in every moment, so perhaps focusing exclusively on life the week before last meant that I’d need to focus exclusively on death for a while. The week before last, I was fully embedded in life, enjoying my entire family at the beach. The “grands” were there — Aunt Lou, Uncle Bob and my mother, all in their late eighties. The “rents” were there, the parent generation of my sisters, me and our spouses in our fifties and sixties. And the “kids” were there as well — my mother’s grandchildren and their partners, in their teens, twenties and thirties. Twenty-three of us representing (almost) all stages of life (none of the “kids” has given birth yet, but that may be coming soon).

There is a simmering anger in America, embodying what Richard Hofstadter called “the paranoid style in American politics.” This politics does not define itself according to opposition to, say, the president’s health care or climate-change policies, but by a visceral distrust and resentment of the man himself. During the presidential election, rumors floated around that Barack Obama was a Muslim (implying that that was something inherently pejorative), that he was some kind of “Manchurian Candidate,” that he was not, in fact, an American citizen, and was thus a kind of pretender to the throne.

Many rejected these accusations out of hand. Obama was elected; the American Republic did not crumble; we have not been infiltrated by some kind of fifth column.

However, we must admit that this kind of politics–the politics of othering–is alive and well. In fact, it remains a powerful force in American politics, and we are all the worse for it. Watch the video below. It was recorded at a recent post-election “townhall” meeting with Representative Mike Castle (R-DE). How is dialogue possible when incontrovertible facts are dismissed as conspiracy? How do we find common ground when up is wholeheartedly, and repeatedly, asserted as down? For any kind of real understanding to develop between political antagonists, we must first acknowledge that radically different worldviews co-exist in America; that, in fact, we live in very different worlds.

The Politics of Othering

I was startled by a question asked two weeks ago by a friend of mine while sitting over lunch in synagogue. He asked me if Judaism and democracy were compatible.

Before I explore that question I want to provide some background on how the fervently liberal and the fervently Orthodox behave with respect to traditions, especially traditions that don’t make any sense.

Workers confront their boss at the Crystal City Sheraton to demand card check neutrality, March 2009 (Flickrr/Mar is sea Y)

A rabbi and lawyer with a large Union representing health care workers has written us explaining why the latest piece of Democrat feebleness will hurt workers; or to put it less emotively, he explains why the moderate Democrats who oppose “card-check” are wrong in arguing that it is undemocratic because, they say, it gives too much power to unions to “bully” workers and not enough to employers:

I was deeply disappointed to read in the Friday July 17, 2009 edition of the New York Times that the Democrats have decided to drop “card check” from their planned legislation removing barriers from workers exercising freedom of choice for their representatives for workplace governance. As a labor lawyer for the past 28 years I have extensive exposure to the barriers faced by workers in trying to gain the right of representation in workplace governance. As a candidate for public elected office I have seen first hand how the rules for other governance bodies are free of most of the barriers that are placed in the way of workers. As a Rabbi I am saddened that the religious community has not become active on this key question of social justice and that my coreligionists who are employers have not been willing to speak out in favor of basic worker rights.

In my twenties in England I couldn’t not know whenever the Eurovision Song Contest was happening: it was a big deal. I can’t say I have paid any attention to it in recent decades. But a friend just sent me this to post. She wrote:

Some of you music lovers may know that each year, for 53 years, the Eurovision Song Contest has brought thousands of international singers and songs into the limelight.This year, 42 countries participated in the final competition at the Olimpiysky Indoor Arena in Moscow.

The Israeli entry was a beautiful duet, “There Must be Another Way,” performed by a unique Israeli-Palestinian pair: Noa (Achinoam Nini) and Mira Anwar Arad. Noa is an Israel singer-songwriter superstar and Mira is a Palestinian songwriter and actress. The song is a stunning hymn for peace. Check it out on YouTube:

I hope you like it as much as I do. I’m so glad to see that peacemaking is hitting the pop scene! It’s a terrific way to get the word out! Martha Roden

The view east from Tilden Park (Flickrr/MauroPPP)

I came in today to find we had all taken a break over the weekend. That’s fine by me: there is so much to read from last week alone.

I spent a good part of the weekend creating a small open air service for members of the First Unitarian Church of Oakland. We met in Tilden Park, a large wild land that starts at the top of the ridge of hills that provide the eastern boundary of the Bay Area metropolis.

You can stand at one or two places on that ridge and look one way to the Bay, its famous bridges, Alcatraz, the Oakland harbor and East Bay cities like Berkeley, and beyond to San Francisco’s skyscrapers–one of the most beautiful cityscapes in the world– and then turn and look the other way and see not just wild land all the way to Mount Diablo some twenty miles away. There are some roads and houses down there but most are hidden from view. You can imagine it’s not so different from what the original inhabitants of this land saw only 200 years ago, before the illegal immigrants arrived. Illegal, that is, in terms of the spiritual, customary and unwritten laws of the people then.

The Bay Area Fog (courtesy of USGS.gov)

Friday night…… my mother-in-law just arrived from Santa Barbara and the fog is rolling in over the San Bruno mountains. Wow…… mother-in-law. Yes, I’m one of the few in California who got married in that interval while it was legal (gay, you know). So, if she gets sick while here, I can go into the hospital and help take care of her. And, if I get sick, she can help my husband (yep -that’s what I call him now) take care of me.

Oh dear! What will society do?

Get over it.

My husband Mark and I started composting again this week.  I’ve missed it, because giving back to the Earth — in this extremely literal way — is part of my spiritual practice.  In the past, even when Mark wasn’t gardening, I still composted.  We take so much from Gaia, we depend on Her as the very ground of our being, the source of our lives.  The least we can do is compost.

I don’t really feel guilty that for the last six months we haven’t enriched our soil with our kitchen waste. Environmentally-speaking, we’ve been frying bigger fish.  We just completed an energy-efficient, solar-heated, green-built house.  Our main objectives were energy-efficiency, durability, and comfort.

Brittany Huckabee’s The Mosque in Morgantown is, on its face, the story of a battle in the local mosque, but more deeply, the story of a complex and infinitely diverse religious community grappling with its identity in modern-day America. On one side is Asra Nomani, a former Wall Street Journal correspondent who came face-to-face with extremism when her colleague and close friend, Daniel Pearl, was murdered in Pakistan. On the other side are, initially, the members of her local mosque, and eventually, moderate Muslims throughout the country.

Upon Asra’s return from Pakistan to her hometown of Morgantown, West Virginia, she believes she sees in her local mosque hints of the extremism she witnessed in Pakistan. Women are excluded from the main prayer hall and the mosque leader frequently makes statements of intolerance and distrust toward women, non-Muslims, and the West. Asra keeps careful notes of problematic statements made in the mosque sermons, some of which include, “a woman who loses her chastity is worthless,” and “Jews are the descendents of apes and pigs.”

Her campaign against this extremism puts the mosque in the middle of a media storm, a fact the mosque’s moderate contingency is highly irked by. Whereas these and other moderates throughout the country would normally have been her main allies, Asra’s reform methodology pits her against them.

Mine is not the only progressive Jewish voice in Canada. My close friend David Mivasair is an activist and rabbi in Vancouver. David is both Reconstructionist and Jewish Renewal.

There are two Reconstructionist rabbis other than David in Canada, one of whom I know quite well, one of whom I have met; there are two other Jewish Renewal rabbis in Canada — both of whom I know.

So there are six progressive Jewish rabbis in Canada. I’m one of them. I know all the others. (I do not want to slight Elyse Goldstein, who leads Kolel in Toronto, but neither do I know her.)

Since I am “friends” with Mir Hossain Mousavi on Facebook, I receive updates–mostly in Persian–about goings-on in Iran. These photographs, from today’s protests, were just uploaded to the site. I haven’t seen them on any other news outlets. It’s tremendously difficult not to be inspired by the Iranian people. Some pictures, below the fold.

At The Immanent Frame, Nikhil Pal Singh reflects on racism and violence, their past and their presence, noting that “the 2008 election season at times appeared to turn on exorcising the ghosts and demons of a still unfinished civil war.” An excerpt from the piece is below:

Exorcism and reparation: but at what price? As unmistakable as these subtexts are, in my view, Obama’s winning strategy was to accentuate the value of his campaign’s egalitarian racial appeal through disciplined and calculated non-reference. Invisible protective glass in this sense may be a suitable metaphor for the reigning orthodoxy of color-blindness cum post-racialism, whose architecture in politics and law becomes more durable and less assailable with every U.S. Supreme Court decision: a state sanctioned enclosure increasingly hard to perceive or identify between those who are protected from racially differentiated vulnerability and those who continue to bear its marks and suffer its consequences.

Judge Sotomayor has demonstrated to us the power of sticking to scripts. And, she did it in a robustly intellectual manner. The rituals (a term that anthropologists use very seriously and devoid of negative connotations of superficiality) of confirmation do follow a publicly recognized patterned performance that reinforces what and who the group is. Or, as anthropologist Clifford Geertz told us long ago, rituals are like stories that people tell about themselves to themselves. And the story here was of course that established precedence in judging and in confirming was sacrosanct. And Judge Sotomayor came off as Supremely qualified for this kind of action through her application of a beautifully crafted sutra (a rule or aphorism, from Sanskrit): To be the best judge, one must not pre-judge.

I subscribe to HonestReporting.ca, which gives a very different perspective than that offered by Tikkun‘s Michael Lerner.

Michael Lerner and I disagree on more than a few matters with respect to Israel. I am, after all, fundamentally Orthodox. That aside, and it is a small matter, Michael’s prophetic voice sings to me and influences me.

Honest Reporting is, I suppose, a neoconservative Jewish media monitor. There are quite a few “Honest Reporting” wesbites, so they represent a coordinated effort of some type. Whose? I’ve never really been certain. I love a mystery.

In the last few days there has been some low-level chatter about tomorrow’s prayer service at Tehran University, with the New York Times giving the story its semi-official imprimatur today. But its import has been greatly understated. Tomorrow, I would argue, is the single most important day in Iran since the Islamofascist (and I don’t use the term flippantly) ruling clique baldly stole the June 12th presidential election, robbing the regime of any shred of legitimacy it retained, and squashing the only semi-democratic aspect of the Islamic “Republic.” Tomorrow, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, eminence grise, founding father of the current Iranian regime, antagonist of the detestable Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, will speak at Friday prayers. The prayers will be broadcast nationally; losing presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi will be attending, making his first public appearance in weeks. Mehdi Karroubi, another losing candidate, will be there. Former president Mohammed Khatami will be there. In other words, ever major opposition figure in Iran–Ayatollah Montazeri excepted–will be there.

What will Rafsanjani say? Will he call for a new election? Address the issue in a roundabout, subtle fashion? The mere presence of all these figures at Friday prayers is a form of protest, the choice of venue a direct challenge not only to the regime but what it seeks to represent. No, it says: you are no longer the legitimate representatives of the Iranian people; your version of Islam is a perversion; the velayat e faqih has been irrevocably corrupted.

Every revolution must end, and tomorrow one of its principal figures will quietly help suffocate a regime that has suffocated its people. How ironic that Trotsky’s dream of a “permanent revolution” has been taken up wholeheartedly by radical clerics from Qom; what awful, terrible hubris.

Dems spiralling down again. Stairs at the Supreme Court in DC. (Flickr/Seansie)

The Senate Judiciary hearings could provide an opportunity for liberals to present their worldview to the millions of Americans listening in. But once again, they are showing that they have no such worldview except the worldview of not having a worldview! It’s a stark contrast to the Republicans who unashamedly are asking Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor to swear loyalty to their perspectives on major political issues facing the court.

Yes, I know that the candidate has to pretend to think and act like a white upper-class man to get confirmation to the bench, and to have no political views shaping her judicial perspective.

But Democratic Senators could use their time to ask questions and make statements that explain why a liberal or progressive worldview is precisely what is needed on the Supreme Court.

Here’s the message they ought to be conveying if they had even the slightest backbone:

It brings sadness to all of us in the Tikkun/NSP world to find that the accusations made by Gazans about the Israeli human rights violations during Israel’s assault on Gaza (aimed at stopping the shelling of Sderot by Hamas) are once again being corroborated by Israeli soldiers.

Today a group of peace-oriented rabbis have declared a “fast” day to proclaim our distress at the continuing blockade by Israel of Gaza, in violation of international law, but for us, even more importantly, in violation of the ethical standards of the Jewish people as they evolved for the past three thousand years. We are inviting our larger Tikkun Community and Network of Spiritual Progressives to be part of this “fast” day (though water will be allowed) on the third Thursday of each month until the people of Gaza are free.

Meanwhile, please read the account below by Jerry Haber (actually a pseudonym for a religious Jew who lives part of each year in Israel and part in the United States). He is the proprietor of the Magnes Zionist blog and he has agreed to have his pieces re-published on Tikkun Daily:

Note: This article has been changed from its original format. Pictures remain the same but have been moved. Some text has been changed.

Second of two parts

The Different Ways A Hijab Is Worn

Hijabs are quite common in Montreal. My wife, the scholar of religion Dr Susan J Landau-Chark, attended Concordia University for her PhD studies. Concordia is in the middle of probably the single largest community of Muslim students in the city.

Many among the Muslim observant have not yet grappled with the issues called “reasonable accommodation” in Quebec. Until perhaps the last generation Muslims have largely lived in Muslim majority societies.

Asma Uddin’s speculations about how Muslims must recondition themselves for western society is an important contribution. Most observant perspectives, however, irrespective of the cultural or confessional tradition, eventually evolve.

But there will always be the remnant who won’t permit evolution or who, like me, permit it but take what we like and leave the rest. We must be permitted to hold on to what we think our faith tells us.

Wearing the talit over the head. Is this not a type of "hijab"?

I wear my talit (a “prayer shawl”) over my head. This is called in the Jewish tradition “Aravit” (according to the custom of the Arabs). I’ll never forget the first time I covered my head with my talit in a Conservative synagogue: the rabbi was very upset — this was an Orthodox custom!

Alana Price’s beautiful essay reminds us: we do not need to agree. There will always be a call in western society to set aside the difference and assimilate, however, and this must be resisted.

The picture on the left is by no means traditional — a woman in talit and tefilin remains controversial, even though it shouldn’t be.

The Talit I wear -- called a "Rainbow Talit"

A Woman in Talit & Tefilin

The daughters of a noted commentator, Rashi, wore tefilin; halakha (Jewish law) clearly states women can wear talit (and then equivocates by adding “but this is not our custom”).

I’ll add to this in some of next week’s posts, which will look at democracy and free speech: Are these compatible with traditional Jewish perspectives on governance?

It is not possible to be fully cultural in a multicultural society. Should that be a reason not to try to be cultural as possible?

Certainly not… but see how easy it is to fall into the trap Alana warns us about! Peter Marmorek takes me to task for being too general in my assertions about Montreal. He’s right. The politics of language, which in Montreal is a constant narrative, makes it impossible not to regularly encounter racist rhetoric — and it works both ways:

My bigotry gets projected right back: this is no less part of the language debate than asserting the superiority of French over English.

Montreal and Quebec do, however, take many cues from France, and there can be little doubt that multiculturalism there is in serious jeopardy.

M Sarkozy, the French president, suggests that traditional clothing does not belong in France. This is echoed by similar sentiments in Quebec. Both France and Quebec — and we must recall this — were terribly damaged by the Catholic Church.

Our tikkunish ears may be attuned to the liberation theology of some Catholics but liberation theology is well after the reforms of Vatican II.

The Quiet Revolution in Quebec all but disempowered the Church, which finally lost the constitutional entitlement to public confessional schools only in 1998.

All Catholic discourse, no matter how liberated, is now blithely ignored by many in Quebec.

The Quiet Revolution occurred because an ascendant Church in Quebec had a sense of entitlement. I would urge the ascendant religious of every faith to heed the lessons of the Quiet Revolution.

It is possible to be just like everyone else — but different. I’ll explore that tomorrow in my post about being a Jewish progressive in Canada.

Part of what makes this blog such an exciting place to be is my sense of progress in North America for a support of Israel that does not march lockstep with everything Israel’s leaders do. Last week, Obama held a meeting with sixteen top Jewish leaders. Included for the first time were J-Street, and Americans for Peace Now. Not invited: Bnai Brith, and the American Jewish Congress!

The Times has a fine piece exploring the meeting, and Alternet looks at recent Zogby polls of Americans on Israel, and concludes that Obama’s supporters back him if he wants to get tougher with Israel. As the J Street blog says, “When some Jewish leaders argued (as they did in the meeting) that progress toward peace is only made when there is no daylight between Israel and the United States, the President responded correctly that for eight years – when there was no daylight between us and Israel – there was no progress toward peace. The hard decisions weren’t made on either side – and the prospects for peace only diminished.”