Photo credit: gowish.org

When your life work is focused on projects that one presumably assumes will help make the world a better place, it is nevertheless rare and therefore most precious to actually see or hear directly the positive results of your work. So it was on a project that my partner Craig and I were working on with Coda Alliance while creating an online version of a wonderful game that they had developed exploring end of life issues. In the process of moving the game “Go Wish” to an online environment, we had more than a few opportunities to work with groups of people to facilitate the use of this game.

By way of explanation, Go Wish presents a deck of cards with very specific concerns listed on each card like: “To be free from pain”, “Not being short of breath”, “To have my financial affairs in order”, “To die at home”, etc.

Justice scales superimposed on this image of a Torah parchment symbolises the reliance of the Institute and the Court on social justice principles found in the Torah

The Canadian Beth Din Institute at the Metivta of Ottawa is the parent organisation of the Jewish Court for Social Justice. This all sounds very grand, and it is: the Metivta and all it purports to be is located on a sprawling campus of 400 square feet that stretches between my living room and kitchen.

I’ve had probably ten emails from several correspondents questioning many aspects of the Court. Two questions are being asked repeatedly.

1. What are you doing (and who do you think you are)?

2. Why are you doing it (there is an established order for such things!)?

I’ll address “why” here and speak of “what” below.

I began planning the Jewish Court for Social Justice almost seven years ago. There has been ample time for a credible organisation to evolve before this, an organisation that speaks to Canadian social justice issues from a Jewish faith perspective, and nothing has happened in all that time.

This week I’d like to share with you a passage from my book Spirit Matters:

Everything that has ever happened in the history of the universe is the prelude to each of our lives. Everything that has happened from the beginning of time has become the platform from which we launch our lives.

We are the heirs of the long evolution of Spirit. Each of us is the latest unfolding of the event of Creation. Our bodies are composed of the material that was shaped in the Big Bang. And so, too, our spirits. The loving goodness of the universe breathes us and breathes through us, giving us life and consciousness, and the capacity to recognize and love others.

I have written in earlier blogs about the progressive ruling decriminalizing LGBT sex in India this summer and the backlash from many religious “leaders” in India. It now seems to be the turn of organizations representing the close to 1.5 million Indians in the USA. Here is an “open letter” from a concerned Indian in America about one such organization and its annual India Day Parade celebrations which should celebrate the diversity of Indians but which unfortunately seems to have closed its doors to the LGBT community. Incidentally, the letter writer is also a community activist working on issues of community public health and at the forefront of the South Asians Organizing for Health Care Reform in NYC which is fighting against the vitriolic, racist, and anti-humanist obfuscations that have managed to take-over much of the mainstream media and many town-hall meetings.

“One giant leap backwards for Indian-kind” — An Open Letter

Sapna Pandya

On Thursday, July 2nd, I awoke to very exciting news from my native country of India. A decision was being made 10,000 miles away that would not only impact thousands upon thousands there, but also the community of Indians living in America. After over ten years of intense dedication and advocacy by lawyers, human rights advocates, public health professionals, civil society and many others, the Delhi High Court read down their decision to repeal Indian Penal Code Section 377. This antiquated law, left over from the British Raj, criminalized certain forms of sex that were defined as “against the order of nature,” among which consensual sex among two adults of the same sex was included. In other words, Section 377 made it illegal for gay Indians to have sex, but the Delhi High Court decided what many of us already knew was true: that such a law is unconstitutional and oppressive. This landmark decision, a true victory for human society as a whole and India in particular, was even beautifully linked to the ideals of equality and justice central to India’s freedom movement, as Justice Murlidharan quoted lines from Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru’s ‘Objective Resolution’ from December 13, 1946 in the official Delhi High Court ruling.

Here’s a smart piece by Jeff Cohen that says the netroots and liberal campaigners for health care this summer have made a huge mistake by pushing for a public option instead of going all out for Medicare for All. If everyone who wants universal health care pushed for Medicare for All, maybe we would come out of it at least with a decent public option. If we all just push for a decent public option, maybe we’ll come out of it with a toothless public option or no public option at all.

Had liberal groups sent out millions of emails building a movement that posed an existential threat to the health insurance industry, Senator Baucus and Blue Dog Democrats and their corporate health care patrons might well be on their knees begging for a comprehensive public option – to avert the threat of full-blown Medicare for All.

The article was written two weeks ago but is still totally on the money and is worth highlighting today, the first day of the Netroots Nation conference in Pittsburgh. (My colleague and co-creator of Tikkun Daily, Alana Price, is representing us there) .

So what might Cohen be missing from Tikkun/NSP’s point of view? Only the framing of the whole push.

As I touched upon in a recent post, there is a palpable fear and loathing in certain quarters of America. The din has been getting louder; people are livid, shouting down one another at “townhall” meetings; some are making offensive and incoherent claims about President Obama (that he is, for instance, both a fascist and a communist).

As is often the case, the mainstream media has sensationalized the affair. But their coverage has been simultaneously overbroad and underdetermined. Opposition to Obama’s health care plan is portrayed as being rooted in contending ideologies over government’s proper role, with opposition growing organically out of a disaffected electorate.

I have, for the last five years or so, been working to create a kosher trustmark — a symbol that identifies compliance with known standards that are strictly halakhic (in accord with Jewish tradition) and green (including many rubrics, among them animal welfare, fair labour, and fair trade).

The Jewish Renewal movement created this sensitivity in the 1970s but nobody, even Arthur Waskow and Reb Zalman, really knew what the concept they called “eco-kosher” would become. That there was a strong ethical component to even traditional kashrut was known.

What would happen to food because of food science was not known.

That 47 million people in the United States do not have health insurance, that millions more are underinsured, that millions more live in fear of losing their insurance if they lose their jobs is a sin and a shame.

When I was a little girl and my elders would observe some stupid bad behavior in the family, community, church or world, they would shake their heads and with a “tsk tsk” and say: “that is just a sin and a shame.”

Religion speaks of sin. We sin when we break the laws of God, when we commit an offense that breaks righteous relationship with God, humanity and creation. Sin happens when we become caught in the deception that we exist in an atomistic individuality. Sin does not necessarily derive from selfishness. Selfishness is virtuous when it helps us clarify our values, extend our sense of self and realize that the well being of the Other is necessary to our own. Shame comes when we feel guilt over our wrongdoing. It comes when we experience the disapprobation of others. We feel shame when others perform better than we, and we know that we can do better.

The healthcare system in the United States is a sin and a shame.

Defending Homes Against Foreclosure

After reading several of Dave Belden’s posts about his experiences trying to help save a local family from losing their home to foreclosure, I’d been on the lookout for ways to help. This week, my friends at Making Contact, an international radio program, are focusing on the foreclosure crisis and with their permission I’m pleased to make their broadcast available right here at Tikkun Daily.

I perform weddings as a lay minister at First Unitarian Society in Madison. Frank Lloyd Wright built our original church, so many non-members want to get married there — too many for our professional ministers to handle. As a result, I often have the opportunity to perform interfaith weddings where I put my Unitarian Universalist (UU) principles to work.

UU’s believe in the “inherent worth and dignity of all people,” “acceptance of one another,” and “a free and responsible search for truth and meaning.” Instead of a creed or dogma, what holds us together is a set of seven principles, three of which I just listed for you. What this means in practice is that although I’m a pagan, I accept others’ belief systems as appropriate for them, respecting their inherent dignity and their search for truth and meaning. When I perform a wedding, I respectfully work with the couple who comes to me to create a ceremony that’s right for them.

The Jewish Court for Social Justice, at our first meeting, decided that Israel/Palestine would not be a primary focus of the Court’s attention in this session. The natural outcome of that decision? A discussion of Israel/Palestine dominated our second meeting.

These next few weeks when Congresspeople and Senators are in their home districts is the critical moment.

The Right knows that. They’ve organized their zealots to disrupt Congressional public meetings to give the false impression that there is a populist revolt against extending health care to the poor and against challenging the private insurance companies and pharmaeuticals.

The liberals have disempowered themselves by trying to come up with health care plans that extend coverage but meanwhile protect the insurance companies, pharmaceuticals and hospital/medical profiteers. The only way they can do that is to raise the costs on the Middle Class, either through taxes or through reduction of services or through hidden price increases. Not realizing that whatever they propose is going to be labeled “socialized medicine,” they’ve already weakened their “public option” dramatically, and worse is yet to come in the Fall.

The only rational alternative is Single Payer, as promoted by Bernie Sanders in the Senate and John Conyers in the House HR 676. But this will not have a chance against the tens of millions of dollars being spent by the insurance companies and pharmaceuticals and health-care profiteers — unless

Rabbi David Saperstein represents the national Reform Jewish Movement to Congress and the administration

Dear Rabbi Saperstein, I didn’t mention it in my blog post this morning about the press conference for the religious campaign for health care reform, but you said something I wanted to ask you about. A reporter from Gannett or somewhere mainstream asked if by emphasizing the moral imperative to provide universal healthcare, the campaign was going to judge any Senator or Representative who failed to vote for the final reform package as “immoral.” It was a loaded question, that could have made a nice headline in conservative newspapers: Religious Left Accuses Republicans of Immorality.

Jim Wallis answered first and got fairly close to saying that it would indeed be morally unacceptable to fail to pass some version of universal healthcare, though he didn’t want to specificy which version. He didn’t want to rank various options in terms of how much they might actually embody care for patients’ health. He wanted to leave that to the politicians. (He had a bon mot about how the campaign only needed to say “Let justice roll down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream” and then it could let the politicans do the plumbing from there.)

You then leaped in and made the point strongly that no one was accusing anyone of immorality, and some people might indeed think that universal healthcare was only one among many moral imperatives and not as important as some others and so we would not judge them if they failed to support it.

This seemed to let the air out of the tires of the campaign bus.

A while back I wrote a post about the incredibly wonderful health care my father receives from the VA. I got a lot of comments on that post, including questions about the disease afflicting my father and the medication that caused his condition to worsen. I write this new post with two thoughts in mind.

1. Government health care can be superb and Americans need to know that the United States government can do, and does do, an excellent job caring for our veterans through the VA and for our senior citizens through Medicare. (Yes, I know the VA is far from perfect, but my experience with them has been fantastic.)
2. There’s a disease out there that is often mis-diagnosed and being put on the wrong medication can and does kill people. I want folks to know about this disease so that they can protect themselves and their loved ones from being put on the wrong medication.

From an article in the Washington Times, whose reporter interviewed me about the significant decline in Jewish observance.

The rate of religious observance among American Jews has dropped precipitously over the past two decades, to the point where more than one out of every three Jews is thoroughly secularized, according to a new survey….

“I attribute the shift to a combination of disaffection from Judaism and intermarriage,” said Barry Kosmin, who co-directed the 2008 AJIS survey. “Since 1990, half of all marrying American Jews have married non-Jews, with the result that there are two new mixed households for every homogeneous Jewish one.”

…Some voices in the Jewish community blame the state of American synagogues for the drop in Jewish practice.

“Some of the best energy we get in the Jewish world are non-Jews who encourage their Jewish partners to explore their Jewishness,” said Rabbi Michael Lerner, founder of the magazine Tikkun and the spiritual head of Beyt Tikkun, a San Francisco synagogue with 30 percent intermarried couples.

Just been on a fascinating conference call with Jim Wallis and David Saperstein and others, organized by PICO National Network, Faith in Public Life, Faithful America, Sojourners and Catholics in Alliance for the Common Good. They announced a major step up of their campaign for universal health care, and a coup for this movement: President Obama will join them on a conference call and audio webcast next Wednesday, August 19. You are invited to join the call! Details will be posted at a new website: faithforhealth.org. Details of the rest of the campaign, including first TV ad to be placed by this coalition on health care, many local events etc. are summarized below in today’s leter from PICO, and at their website.

I am in the last hours of getting the Sept/Oct Tikkun to the printer, so I don’t have time to comment much. But first,

Some of you might have been surprised to learn that I wrote about tree divinations in the latest Matrifocus. Actually I’ve been writing an entire book — The World is Your Oracle — in which I compile and create oracular techniques, a volume I trust will prove useful to practitioners of many faiths. Why? Because I believe that divination allows us to get in touch with our own inner wisdom. And because we have reached a point in our history where change is occurring so rapidly that we need to rely on our own know-how and skills, not just those of the “experts.”

In North America most of us associate divination with the occult. We know one or two oracular methods, at most three or four, including popular forms such as tarot cards, the I Ching and the Nordic runes. Stereotypically, the concept of divination conjures up an image of an old gypsy woman using her deck of playing cards to tell someone’s fortune. For most of us, the gypsy’s cards portend events that have yet to occur, a death in the family or the arrival of a new lover.

We don’t have to search far to discover the reason for our dominant notions about divination. The first definition in most English dictionaries states that it’s the practice of attempting to foretell future events or discover hidden knowledge using occult or supernatural means. From my perspective, this is an archaic understanding of divination, one created during a time when we drew sharper distinctions between the everyday and the mysterious, the natural and the supernatural, between rationality and non-rational ways of knowing, and even between the present and the future.

"Supplicant" by Barrie Karp

Hearing about our Phone Forum with psychologist Michael Eigen, the artist Barrie Karp wrote us that she is a regular member of Eigen’s seminar. Her painting “Fear and Hope” appeared in Tikkun last November with the remarkable article “Love in Adversity” by Alix Kates Shulman: the two women are friends. It was a pleasure to hear from her and discover this other connection. She attached this painting, “Supplicant,” which she felt was relevant to Eigen’s themes of shame, humility, vulnerability, despair, and hope.

Thousands gathered at The Rescue in Santa Monica, put on by Invisible Children.

When I first heard of Tikkun and read its core vision, I fell in love: “We are a community of people from many faiths and traditions, called together by Tikkun magazine and its vision of healing and transforming our world.”

I have always felt urgency when it comes to helping others, and I have been fortunate to have friends that share that same burden on their hearts. Too often I have heard that my generation is full of only selfish and lazy kids that only doom our own futures. I hear the expression “diamond in the rough” used about my generation, and I cringe. This is my time to shout back on behalf of the twenty-somethings, to declare that I’m not the only one who cares; rather, we are a generation involved in restoring and changing the world. We live and breathe tikkun.

Before I started blogging for Tikkun Daily, my web publishing consisted of my own website, www.mamasminstrel.net, and articles in Matrifocus, the web magazine by and for Goddess women published four times a year. What I love about Tikkun Daily — the lively interaction that’s beginning to occur — is something I found in embryo in Matrifocus.

Matrifocus always has a wide variety of articles that inform me, entice me, lead me to think a little differently, and most importantly, feed my soul. Often it includes essays by some of he most interesting thinkers in feminist spirituality: Patricia Monaghan, Vicki Noble, Susun Weed, Max Dashu, Johanna Stuckey, and even occasionally Starhawk. It always includes poetry and beautiful art, as well reader-submitted reviews of Goddess books, DVDs, theater, and films.

This quarter the articles range from my description of “Tree Divinations” to two articles on permaculture by Mary Swander and Madelon Wise plus a lovely introduction to fairies and devas by Susun Weed. Vicki Noble, the well-known creator of the Motherpeace Tarot Deck, writes about her experiences at an Italian spring festival that celebrates ancient Goddess traditions just beneath the surface of a Roman Catholic feast day.