"Blue God I" by Salma Arastu

The Hindu Lord Krishna began to dance his way back into Salma Arastu‘s paintings, years after her conversion to Islam. How and why did it happen?

I wanted to tell this story in “Painting Past Borders,” my article in the July/August issue of Tikkun, but didn’t have the space.

Looking through Arastu’s beautiful art book, I became curious about her “Blue God” series. Like the rest of her work, the lyrical lines in this series echo the flow of Arabic calligraphy, which the artist studied after leaving behind her Hindu past and embracing Islam. But the paintings also hint at the Hindu stories of her childhood, weaving together both of her spiritual lives. How did Lord Krishna dance back into Arastu’s paintings?

Here’s the story she told me:

FlickrCC / David Paul Ohmer

A couple of months back a Canadian rabbi wrote to me objecting, in friendly but strong language, that Tikkun magazine was ignoring Canada. I had no doubt he was right. The U.S. is nothing if not U.S.-centric, and that infects even those of us who are campaigning for a Global Marshall Plan and a U.S. foreign policy based on generosity not domination. We can all use our friends to point out our shortcomings.

So I invited the rabbi to provide a Canadian perspective on our upcoming blog.

Reb Arie has posted frequently and told us surprising things: that “The plot of WALL*E seems to come from Breshit – Genesis 6, the chapter in which Noah is introduced,” or that “Social justice by Jews in Canada is not a well-established activity.” Reb Arie’s voice is passionate and hard to classify: he appears to be truly an independent.

The Canadian perspective shines in some of Reb Arie’s comments on other posts. Of the struggle to get universal health care he writes, “It absolutely astounds me that Americans have been willing to put up with this — this conversation has not changed in all my adult years. I’ll never forget the first time I paid for a physician in my entire life — and also the last (other than for certain incidentals): I was living in Brooklyn…” He finishes, “America, it seems to me, is the land of the free only if you can afford it.”

As he wrote when introducing himself in his first post: “Can one be modern, liberal, and deeply traditional? Stay tuned to my posts at Tikkun Daily and find out. I’ll discuss that, and also other issues as they arise, in particular issues about Canada and Canadian Jews.”

What I would like to know is how a prophetic challenge to recreate the world as a place where people truly care for each other and for all living beings translates in the Canadian context: is all that too utopian for the folks in the True North Strong & Free, or do Canadians not pride themselves on caring more for each other and the poor of the world than their louder neighbors do?

LATER: Had to run home and make the dinner, and didn’t manage to add an important Canadian link for all supporters of Tikkun. This is the Tikkun Toronto site. They include a fascinating sections of their members’ stories about Israel here. They gave us transcripts which we had on our web site as part of our “Israel at 60” issue a year ago, but which were lost in our website meltdown earlier this year. I will try to rescue them but am a little taken up with this blog at the moment.

Everybody wants to talk to someone…
Everybody wants to talk to someone…
My job is to discover the one you want to talk to and become that one.
A U.S. Army interrogator…

Those lines in the song you are about to hear sum up the job of a U.S. Army interrogator. Recognizing that everybody wants to spill their guts to someone, an interrogator has to figure out who that person is, and become that person, so that the detainee/prisoner, talks to the interrogator.

John Crigler, performing his original composition, “A U.S. Army Interrogator.”

We’ll post more segments here which came from an incredible gathering of people that took place in June 2009 that included a former Army interrogator, a former senior CIA analyst, a psychologist compiling powerful oral histories from people who committed torture from WWII until today, an award-winning religious/political columnist who also happens to be a Presbyterian minister, and victims of torture.

We’re editing the videos now and will post new ones as they are ready.

An interfaith group of religious leaders are sharing a statement of support for comprehensive health care reform with members of the Obama administration and Congress at a summit today in Washington, D.C.

My name is on the list of signatories beneath the statement, “A Matter of Health … a Matter of Wholeness,” but I had mixed feelings about signing this very weak statement.

On the one hand, I wanted the Network of Spiritual Progressives to be included in a list of some of the most important religious forces in the United States. I was honored that we had been invited to be among them.

On the other hand, my requests that a stronger statement be floated or that the Religious Summit on Health Care being held today include an endorsement of Single Payer (Medicare for Everyone — not just for people over 65), or at least include a strong public option that could negotiate lower costs for drugs from pharmaceuticals and could force insurance companies to lower their costs in order to compete with the far more efficient public sector possibilities (already demonstrated by Medicare) were met with explanations that the coalition would be narrower should the statement be stronger, and that in any event the “realities” of inside-the-Beltway consciousness already guaranteed that Single Payer was “off the table” and even the “public option” might seem utopian (note the coded message to Congress from Rahm Emanuel yesterday saying that the Obama administration was willing to give up on a public option since that was only one possible way of achieving cost savings, and that “enhanced competition” between insurance companies might achieve the same goal).

An acquaintance of mine, who is Syrian-Palestinian, and does not think himself an anti-Semite (but is, in my opinion) sent an email with the following subject:

What if the entire tale of the Jewish Diaspora is historically wrong?

It has been said that the greatest enemies the Jews have are other Jews. This has long been known historically. The Disputations forced on Jews by Catholics in medieval Europe were oft-arranged by Jewish apostates (sometimes by choice, sometimes under duress). Opponents of Hasidic Judaism in the 18th century would routinely denounce the Hasidim to the authorities, which often resulted in Hasidic leaders being jailed or held for ransom.

And now Shlomo Zand, a professor at the University of Tel-Aviv, has published When And How Was The Jewish People Invented? in which he suggests that most Jews don’t originate from the ancient Land of Israel, never existed as a “nation-race” with a common origin, and are descendants of European, Russian and African groups that at various stages in history adopted the Jewish religion.

If God is not a mystery but rather is another name for mystery, then the command to love God can be understood as simply another way of saying that we must strive to love the mystery around us and in us, rather than to be afraid of all that we cannot understand…

What are you looking for in a Church, and what do you see?

Perhaps it is a common struggle among spiritual progressive types to find themselves at odds with certain teachings of the faith tradition they call their own. When this happens, it can seem that the only tenable option is to leave the Church. But it is true that certain traditions get woven into the fabric of the soul in no small way, and simply leaving a Church is not always a viable option at all when it comes to holistically addressing one’s emotional and spiritual history, needs, and gifts for expression as they develop throughout one’s life.

People’s relationships to churches and Churches are intensely creative, personal, and not always what they seem. With devotion to some honest searching it may be possible to stay within a tradition that speaks your language even if you disagree with some of the pronouncements it makes.

Resources, energy, and luck permitting, it may even be possible to challenge the the church or tradition you love toward changing from within.

A friend forwarded me this recent installment in the New York Times Blog series “Happy Days: The Pursuit of What Matters in Troubled Times”: an essay by Michele Madigan Somerville called “Born Again in Brooklyn“. It beautifully describes Somerville’s emotional and political qualms regarding the Catholic Church, and the process by which she decided not to renounce it, but ended up returning in full force on her terms, as a feminist-progressive born-again radical Catholic. I say Hurrah!

Here’s an excerpt:

Roman Catholic, as it turned out, was the language my spirit already knew. Burning hyssop and frankincense, the stark and heart-charging splendor of Gregorian chant, Marian devotion; the iconography, the Latin Agnus Dei and Litany of the Saints, the Angelus bells, the rapture at the crux of Catholic worship have always held fierce sway with me.

At The Immanent Frame, Romand Coles asks of President Obama’s rhetoric, “What are the implications of framing the virtues for progress as a ‘quiet force’? What is gained and lost by imagining progress singularly as upward movement?” In the following excerpt from Coles’ essay, he proposes a change in our understanding of progress:

The “official” Jewish community in Canada confuses social justice with Jewish advocacy. It is for this reason that the Metivta of Ottawa has formed the Jewish Courts for Social Justice.

The Jewish Courts of Social Justice at The Metivta of Ottawa

Social justice by Jews in Canada is not a well-established activity. Ve’ahavta, run in Toronto by my friend Avrum Rosensweig, has become an important Jewish contribution to social justice. Mazon Canada does a wonderful job. The Recontructionist Synagoge in Montreal undertakes social justice initiatives and has an annual Empty Bowls project. These are all important Jewish contributions.

These are all local Jewish contributions.

Introducing myself as a feminist seems much harder to me than talking about my views on sustainability and my love for the Earth, because feminism just seems like common sense to me. I know that’s not the case for everyone, but after 30 years, it’s a viewpoint that’s become second-nature to me.

When a man recently told me that we in the US were living in a post-feminist era, I wondered which United States he lived in. I told him the fact that Hilary Clinton made a credible run for President doesn’t make this country any more post-feminist than the fact that we elected an African-American President makes it post-racist. Just look at the brouhaha over Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination for Supreme Court Justice, and you can see both sexism and racism operating, as well as reporters sensationalizing soundbites out of context.

My worry regarding Sotomayor is not that she’ll treat women and Puerto Ricans preferentially. When she spoke of her rich Latina experience, she also said in the rest of this supposedly controversial speech:

I am reminded each day that I render decisions that affect people concretely and that I owe them constant and complete vigilance in checking my assumptions, presumptions and perspectives and ensuring that to the extent that my limited abilities and capabilities permit me, that I reevaluate them and change as circumstances and cases before me require. I can and do aspire to be greater than the sum total of my experiences but I accept my limitations. I willingly accept that we who judge must not deny the differences resulting from experience and heritage but attempt, as the Supreme Court suggests, continuously to judge when those opinions, sympathies and prejudices are appropriate.

It’s clear to me that Sotomayor will be as fair as she possibly can. My fear is that she may become the swing vote to overturn Roe v. Wade. According to reports, there’s no way to tell how she’ll vote on this issue. And how can anyone possibly think we live in a post-femininst society when Roe v. Wade could so easily be overturned?

As I (the Russian/Gypsy/Gay/Jew) stood with my Armenian-American friend Julie next to my Asian-American life-partner Derrick, and looked out across the park at boys, girls, men, women, old, young, every color of the rainbow and every hue in between, dancing together, eating together, playing together, laughing together….. I wondered, “Is this heaven?”

Of course the line came to me from the wonderful movie Field of Dreams, where Kevin’s long-dead baseball-loving father comes out of the corn fields onto the baseball field his son has built in the middle of nowhere, and seeing the wonderful field asks “Is this heaven?” “No, it’s Iowa.”

Well I was having my Field of Dreams moment. No, it wasn’t heaven, it was El Cerrito.

Affordable housing, increased funding for public transportation, healthcare for all, gay marriage — we all have our pet issues, but many of us work on our issues because we see them as part of a larger systemic transformation. We are hungry for an alternative way of doing life, a way characterized by mutuality, deep relationships, love for all forms of life, joy, honesty and wonder. In other words, we are hungry for a way of living outside the systems of empire characterized by domination, exploitation, oppression, hoarding, defensiveness, and extreme self-interest.

By focusing on individual pieces of this larger transformation, we miss the interconnections among them. As Pastor Lynice Pinkard likes to say, we are pulling at the individual bootstraps of the boot of imperial domination. In doing that, we not only miss that there is a whole boot there, but we inadvertently work at cross-purposes to each other, competing for media airtime, funding, and the public’s attention.

I was happy to get an email today from David Gibbs saying, “I see that the Kosovo article is being noted on electronic bulletin boards, and was prominently featured today on antiwar.com.” He is referring to his groundbreaking article “Was Kosovo the Good War?” in the new issue of Tikkun. Gibbs wrote there:

Now, a decade later, the Kosovo war is recalled as an exemplary case of humanitarian intervention, and is widely viewed as a model for possible interventions in Darfur and elsewhere. Indeed some of the key figures in the Obama administration, notably Samantha Power, have advocated that “humanitarian intervention” on the model of Kosovo should be a basic theme of U.S. policy.

Given the importance of Kosovo as a model for future military actions, it is important to understand more fully what actually happened in this critical case. New information has become available in recent years from the Milosevic war crimes trial and other basic sources — information that casts the war in a wholly different (and not so positive) light. In what follows, I will review some of these revelations, and how they have discredited widely accepted myths about the “benign” character of the Kosovo intervention.

It’s worth reading if you have any interest in the justifications for the Iraq War or the illusions of the liberal foreign policy world about how America can go to war in a more beneficent way.

I thought the major extinctions of life in Earth’s history had mainly been caused by wildcards like asteroid strikes and massive volcanic eruptions. But it turns out that the biggest wildcards may have been delivered by life itself. I had almost no science education at high school, but I did eventually hear in my thirties, I guess, that our oxygen on this planet was created by photosynthesis. Before living creatures developed that ability this was an oxygen-free world. When the oxygen was first produced by living beings, it was a terrible pollutant, and most creatures then existing died. Things burn in oxygen, with fire or slowly, as in rusting, oxygenation.

But it seems that all but one of the great extinctions of life may have been similarly caused by side effects of new developments in life itself. Check it out in “Gaia’s Evil Twin” by Peter Ward in last week’s New Scientist. Theological reflections after the jump.

Of Independence and Freedom

As U.S. Americans prepare to celebrate the 233^rd anniversary of the nation’s independence from the British, we would do well to remember that political independence does not easily or readily translate into the freedom or dignity of all citizens. Right from the time of the Declaration of Independence to more than two centuries later, Americans are still witness to the struggles of many “minorities” against discriminatory practices in society and in law. The same holds true for a much more recently independent and younger democracy, India, whose constitution-makers drew inspiration from the US American constitution and the French Revolution.

As I write this from Mumbai, all major cities in India concluded the largest ever public demonstrations and celebrations of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (LGBT) community. Lasting for a week and culminating with a pride parade on Sunday, June 28, these celebrations commemorated the events of Stonewall in New York and in solidarity with other LGBT communities around the world.

Protesting Israeli policies, The Yes Men have withdrawn their highly acclaimed new film from the Jerusalem Film Festival where it was scheduled to be shown. They — Andy Bichlbaum & Mike Bonanno — sent me their explanation, which has also appeared on Common Dreams:

Dear Friends at the Jerusalem Film Festival,

We regret to say that we have taken the hard decision to withdraw our film, “The Yes Men Fix the World,” from the Jerusalem Film Festival in solidarity with the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign.

This decision does not come easily, as we realize that the festival opposes the policies of the State of Israel, and we have no wish to punish progressives who deplore the state-sponsored violence committed in their name.

This decision does not come easily, as we feel a strong affinity with many people in Israel, sharing with them our Jewish roots, as well as the trauma of the Holocaust, in which both our grandfathers died. Andy lived in Jerusalem for a year long ago, can still get by in Hebrew, and counts several friends there. And Mike has always wanted to connect with the roots of his culture.

I participated in a fascinating press conference on Tuesday, organized by Faith in Public Life (FPL) to promote a campaign in which “local pastors are taking to the airwaves in five key states over the Independence Day Congressional recess, urging their Senators to support health care reform.” If you are Arkansas, Colorado, Indiana, Louisiana, Nebraska, or North Carolina you may hear ads on Christian and mainstream radio featuring local pastors from each state asking their Senators to support reform.

This is great. The progressive religious folks are stepping up to argue for affordable health care for all. But I wish they would read Michael Lerner’s editorial on health care in our current Tikkun: now that’s prophetic.

The great thing the blogosphere has made possible is the publication of independent voices to a worldwide audience, without having to get through the gatekeepers of the old media. That is music to the ears of all outliers from mainstream thought. Like us.

The downside is that all manner of scurrilous opinion (that is, ones we don’t agree with, but also, ones that don’t have to live up to the usual journalistic fact checking standards) can get aired. The only way to counter factual inaccuracies in this new world is for citizens to pounce on them and correct them, in comments and on their own blogs, and in wonderful Wikipedia and like collective constructs.

That isn’t actually the reason we have started this blog–our goal was not to correct inaccuracies about ourselves but to promote a worldview we share with many others: the view, in my colleague Alana Price’s words, “that in this appalling and beautiful world, love can be embodied and become the basis for social relations.”

But let’s correct some inaccuracies along the way, anyway. Here’s the first:

Not a true picture of Reb Arie on his computer... but very, very close

WALL*E is an abbreviation for Waste Allocation Load Lifter (Earth-Class), a robot designed only to collect, crush, and bale garbage.

WE meet WALL*E in the animated film named for him. He is the last of his kind and has been operating for 700 years.