As I told you a few weeks back, the “Cakes for the Queen of Heaven” curriculum empowers women in remarkable ways. During last night’s class I discovered that it sometimes empowers in different ways at the same time.

Our reading for the evening was a compelling story — the attempted sacrifice of Isaac by his father Abraham (Genesis 22). As told in the Bible, this tale contains no mention of Isaac’s mother Sarah. Instead YHVH tells Abraham to demonstrate his loyalty by making a ritual offering of his one-and-only child. So Abraham dutifully takes fire-making tools, a load of wood, a knife, and his son Isaac to a nearby mountaintop to be slain. Of course, at the last minute an angel stays Abraham’s hand and provides a ram instead. What our class focussed on was the conspicuous lack of information about Sarah in this story.

Sarah is not easily overlooked. More girls have been named for Sarah than for any other woman in the Bible. There are good reasons for this. Sarah was a Chaldean princess and, because royalty and ritual leadership were inextricably tied together in those days, a priestess as well. She’s the only woman whose age is given in the Bible. She was the matriarch of the Jewish people. And Abraham owed his flocks, herds, and status to her.

Before we started to create modern-day midrashim — reinterpreting and commenting on this Biblical tale — we looked at several theories that questioned how this story was told in the Bible. Dancer and liturgist Fanchon Shur deduces from her absence that Sarah was the “hand of God” that stopped the sacrifice. Carol Ochs in Behind the Sex of God concludes that

the sacrifice of Isaac marked the death of the matriarchal tradition personified by Sarah. The meaning of Abraham’s test becomes clear when viewed in the light of the conflict between patriarchy and matriarchy. The first allegiance in matrirarchy is to one’s offspring…In patriarchy, the first obligation is to an abstract moral principle…obedience to God.

I had the good fortune to travel to Washington, DC., and interview Senator Jeff Bingaman on September 18 about Medicare for All, the Baucus Bill and other topics related to health care reform.

Everybody’s favorite diarist, Land of Enchantment, was kind enough to edit my video and post it on YouTube.

Thank you LoE for putting up with me and editing the video which is embedded after the fold. A summary (not a transcript) of Parts One and Two follows the videos for the YouTube impaired.

“With thoughtfulness. And, when relevant, with joy.” — Nancy Katz (on how she hopes viewers respond to her work)

Nancy Katz is a textile artist whose creations hang in museums in Israel, Oakland, and Berkeley. She is famous for her breathtaking chuppot, Ark curtains, and torah covers, and she is a world-renowned maker of tallitot. Visit Tikkun Daily’s art gallery to see some of these beautiful pieces of art.

Tallitot are prayer shawls, traditionally worn on the shoulders or over the head, adorned with 613 knots, a reminder of the 613 commandments making up the code of Jewish law.

“I am aware that several of my tallitot are worn by non-Jews who are drawn to them for reasons they are unable to articulate,” says Katz.”People wear tallitot in settings where nurturing a personal relationship with the Divine is the intention.”

This week’s spiritual wisdom comes from Jonathan Granoff, the author, attorney, and peace activist whose writing we featured earlier this month:

A Flood of Joy

The Earth will ultimately make its claim
The Water lets us know our frailty
The face inside the face of bones
The face we had before the bones
The face we have after the bones
The face of the body of light and limitlessness
beyond claims, beyond frailty
dances across
birthless
deathless
celebration of the eternal essence of life
joyously celebrating our mortality
while we are here
dancing a celebration of the eternal essence of life

We’re nine months into Obama, and perhaps at the end of the first round of his attempt to make peace in the Middle East. That started with his generally well received speech in Cairo, and his attempt to halt any new Israeli settlements on the West Bank, an attempt whose failure was underlined when last week he issued a call for “restraint” rather than a “freeze”. The US notably failed to offer any support to the Goldstone report, a failure that is generally seen in the blogosphere as a necessary step for self-defence: if Israel could be hauled to the Hague for Gaza, so could the US for some of its soldiers’ actions in Iraq or Afghanistan. Reading reactions to the Middle East is a lot like reading tea leaves: you can always find just what you’re looking for. But it is most instructive to see the difference in the perceptions between Israeli and US commentators.

Many faith traditions include the discipline of confession. We come before an omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient God of moral perfection with an attitude of contrition. We know that we have not yet reached the place of complete knowledge of and union with God. We acknowledge our failures. We speak the truth of our own shortcomings. We admit that we have done what we ought not to have done and we have left undone the things we ought to have done. We think, wrongly, that we are telling God something God does not already know. If God is omniscient, we are not telling God anything. In confession our attitude of humility allows us to hear God tell us our faults.

In many faith traditions we make communal confessions: For example: “We acknowledge that we are sinners and we confess our sins — those known to us that burden our hearts and those unknown to us but seen by you. We know that before you nothing remains hidden, and in you everything is revealed. Free us from the slavery of sin; liberate us from the bondage of guilt; work in us that which is pleasing in your sight; for the sake of Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.” (from This Far by Faith: An African American Resource for Worship)

Communal confessions are usually followed by a period of silence where the individual can confess to God her wrongdoing. Both communal and personal confession presuppose guilt.

In ancient Egypt, the believer confessed innocence.

From the NACA website, a bank exec who made $50 M in 2007, but refused to restructure mortgages

Amazing article in my local newspaper about a national phenomenon I had totally missed: a nonprofit out of Massachusetts called NACA (Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America) has been organizing massive mortgage restructuring events across the country.

NACA’s Save the Dream tour has become a nationwide phenomenon, drawing more than 180,000 desperate people this summer to gigs in Cleveland, Chicago, St. Louis and Atlanta – where a 2-mile-long line of people waiting to get in wrapped twice around the Georgia Dome. The pitch: a mobile loan-servicing operation where struggling homeowners can arrive with their paperwork and leave with a more affordable mortgage.

… The NACA events are the largest and most visible sign of how foreclosure activities have become part of the zeitgeist. Just as Hoovervilles and bread lines were emblematic of the Great Depression, foreclosure gatherings may go down in history as the public face of the Great Recession.

They did Los Angeles last weekend and next it’s Phoenix, Vegas and Oakland. Schedule here. If you are having mortgage trouble, don’t miss it. You bring all your paperwork, they scan it in, review it, work out what you can afford and then put you at a table with your mortgage lender rep, who restructures your loan on the spot.

… attendees typically end up with affordable mortgages fixed for 30 years at low interest rates — sometimes as low as 2 percent — and often with a principal balance reduction.

But here’s the most interesting part.

I have been lucky this summer to be a partial witness to an upheaval at a church in Oakland. I have written here before about what this church has meant to me:

For some months this winter I was feeling more emotionally and spiritually depleted than I think at any time since my early twenties … I am an ex-Christian who does not enjoy Christian services. So it’s a great surprise to find myself saying that the experience that has most helped to revive me in recent weeks has been going to First Congregational Church in Oakland. There is an openness about our brokenness and failures at that church, combined with a warmth and joy, that is unlike anything I have experienced before.

The upheaval has happened because the pastor, Rev. Lynice Pinkard, decided to take a sabbatical. Well, it happened because she decided to let her congregation know that her own life depended on doing things differently at the church.

Subject: Body Of The Goddess

Dear Friends,

Today is Vijaya Dashami, the Day of Victory that completes the 9-day Hindu Navaratri celebration of the Goddess in all her aspects and manifestations. In mythology, Vijaya Dashami marks the final triumph of the Goddess, after nine days of battle, over the demon Mahishasur. It also marks the start of the harvest season, and invokes the Divine Mother as all the powers of fertility and the life-giving gifts of the earth.

I stand firmly, fiercely, and unequivocally against the global rise of Hindu fundamentalism, and its appropriation of Hindu traditions for its fascist agenda. And at the same time, I reclaim my Hindu spiritual and cultural heritage as a feminist scholar, radical activist, and artist.

Here’s a poem that Shailja sent to illustrate her opposition to Hindu fundamentalism:

It’s been interesting to hear my readers’ theories about why women have experienced a decline in happiness in the last 40 years. (Go look at the responses to my first post on this topic). As I said, everyone seems to have their own hypothesis why this might be so. But even though I talked about my own conjectures two days ago, I felt that something was a little off. So I went back to the General Social Survey (GSS) study that everybody’s citing. Lo and behold, Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, the authors of the study, make NO claims to know why women’s happiness in the last 40 years seems to be on the decline. And in fact, they suggest that we might want to doubt whether the numbers actually reflect a downswing in women’s personal satisfaction at all.

Stevenson and Wolfers refer to a long-recognized understanding in the social sciences that individuals tend to reply in a manner that will be viewed favorably by others (the so-called “social desirability bias”). Some researchers argue that as a result of the social desirability bias, people in good circumstances may require more to declare themselves content, even though they may actually be happier than people in worse circumstances. Stevenson and Wolfers speculate that women may now feel more comfortable being honest about their true happiness and, as a result, might reduce their previously inflated responses. Or that the increased opportunities available to women may have increased what women require to declare themselves happy. Either way, one indication that we should question the numbers, they say, is the decrease in women’s suicide rates over the last 40 years, while men’s suicide rates have stayed the same! That indicates that at least at the very bottom rung of happiness, women have become happier.

So that’s the first thing I learned: “There are lies, damn lies, and statistics,” as Benjamin Disraeli supposedly said long ago. Beware numbers trying to bolster weak arguments, or maybe any arguments whatsoever.

I had the opportunity to interview New Mexico Congressman Ben Ray Lujan in his Washington office on Thursday September 17. Limited internet access while traveling, unfamiliarity with mp3 files, Rosh Hashanah and the complete failure of our household plumbing conspired to prevent me from posting the interview and transcript until today. I apologize in advance for the poor sound quality.

And I must add the following disclaimer: I am not a hard-nosed professional reporter, but rather a constituent of Congressman Lujan. I like the policies he supports. What follows is a friendly dialogue about health care between a Congressman and a constituent.

Several main points of interest emerged.

1) Over the recess, despite the hysteria about death panels and birth certificates and forced government circumcision, five new co-sponsors signed on to HR 676, the Single Payer Bill. Congressman Conyers’ office confirmed that five had signed on during the recess. I was told that they had become supporters of Medicare for All as a result of public pressure from constituents. I looked up the Library of Congress list of co-sponsors and could not find anyone who signed on during the recess. I will continue to investigate to confirm the claim. If this is true, it indicates that despite a media storm of negative publicity, support for Medicare for All continues to grow.

We are in the last ten days now of producing the next print issue of Tikkun. We’ve been getting compliments on how good the magazine has been looking graphically lately (for which our thanks especially to Sabiha Basrai, our designer — seen here with her colleagues at Design Action, and don’t neglect to run your cursor over their faces for a tiny surprise). That’s despite the fact that every recent issue it seems I get to a point where I say to myself, OK, well this time we just won’t have time to make it look good so we’ll have a plain vanilla issue, if only we can just get the words right. That’s where I have been the last three days, except we are even further behind than usual. I’m only writing this post because I started to breathe a little easier last night, and am thinking that maybe our amazing team can pull another one out of the hat after all. Maybe.

One reason Alana and I (the print production team) are behind is that we are also the Tikkun Daily production team and it alone could take up all our time if we let it. And what fun it would be if we could let it. This is only the second print issue we have put out since Tikkun Daily went live in July.

Another reason we’re frantic now is that then we had about eight interns, college students or grads (and one sharp high schooler) who came from all over the country to work with us for the summer. But this time we have had none on site since mid August until last week, when two new interns started with us. Thank you Erin Shitama, back from a Fulbright year teaching kids in a rural Muslim school in Indonesia, and Suzanne Sherman, artist and mother of four kids in school, for taking on the print editorial and art internships! I just ran across Suzanne’s comment on Lanell Dike, our artist of the week, which shows how in sync she is with our ideas about art and why we were so happy she agreed to work with us.

Marcus Buckingham has caused a stir in the blogosphere by reporting on the United States General Social Survey about American women’s happiness. The long and short of it is that women are unhappier than they were 40 years ago (and men are happier). Nobody can figure this out. People have their own pet theories (See several of them at Huffington Post and elsewhere). But really it’s all sheer speculation. Why would women be unhappier now when they have more opportunities, greater education, more access to the political process, and better work options?

Part of the problem is Buckingham’s description of the study involved. I read another report of this major study, and it showed that some of the reasons for the discrepancy between women’s and men’s happiness had to do with how much time each of them engaged in activities they disliked. Since the 1960s, men have gradually stopped participating in pursuits they find unpleasant, while women are working just as hard, then as now, on things they don’t like. There’s been a shift in which activities those include — more paid work and less housework — but the bottom line is that women spend 90 minutes a day more than men doing what they would rather not do. In 1969 it was only 40 minutes.

At The Immanent Frame, Richard Amesbury explores the role of denominationalism in the formation of religious identities and configurations of “civic belonging” in the United States:

[...] what is replacing the conception of the United States as a “Christian nation” is not a post-Durkheimian imaginary but an alternative “neo-Durkheimian” one, which portrays America as a religious nation, understood quasi-pluralistically. This difference between the United States and Europe is due not merely to the absence in the U.S. of an established church – a feature often cited by secularization theorists to explain certain religious dimensions of “American exceptionalism” – but to the presence of an alternative ecclesial structure.

Some days I really don’t want to read my newspaper. Today was one of them. It wasn’t the hydrogen peroxide bomb or Obama’s waffling on the Patriot Act. It wasn’t the Palestinians and the Israelis, who still aren’t negotiating. And it wasn’t the ongoing court battle over a new Wisconsin law granting some rights to domestic partners. All of those things bothered me. But what really got to me was the news about climate change or “global weirding”, as my brother-in-law calls it.

Today my paper regaled me with the fact that NASA scientists have found that Antarctic and Greenland glaciers are melting at a rate that’s much more rapid than previously thought (and the last time I read about polar ice, meterologists were already saying it was much faster than predicted, so they’re telling us now that it’s even worse). The glaciers in the Antarctic thinned by nearly 30 feet a year from 2003 to 2007, 50% faster than the preceding eight years. And in Greenland, glaciers are shrinking by nearly 3 feet a year, a lot faster than measurements until now had calculated. It’s bad. In fact, one Berkeley climate expert called this discovery “ominous and distressing.” In other words, climate changes will be worse and faster than we feared.

Glaciers Melting in Greeenland and Antarctica

When I read this I had visions of myself walking up and down State Street with a sign that read “The End is Near.” I guess I needed a little humor to offset my absolute terror. And as I write this post, I’m having difficulty holding onto my thoughts, because I almost instantly repress them, deny them, or distance them from myself with humor or distractions. Looking for very long at the facts of our global situation is much too scary for me.

Dave (peerless leader) Belden writes: And other Tikkun Daily bloggers, please post about your own recommendations now and then if you have them (tag them “recommended novels” so we can find them when story-hungry later). I’ve got my library card. I’m ready.

And that’s an offer I can’t refuse. I’ve already blogged about Robert Wright’s challenging and rewarding “The Evolution of God”, which traces how the concept of the divine described in the Bible and Koran evolves in a manner that correlates strongly with the political situations that the writers were in at the time. (i.e. the suras of the Koran written when Islam was a struggling minority religion in Mecca are much more tolerant of others than later suras written after Islam was a majority religion. Or that when Paul started preaching Christianity to the gentiles, he found it was more appealing if he dropped the circumcision requirement that had prevailed at first.) You can hear a half hour interview with Wright on the CBC radio show Tapestry. What makes Wright so interesting is how he reconciles this realpolitik with the possibility that what it really shows is how we are gradually moving to a deeper and more profound understanding of the great Mystery.

But the read of the summer for me is the new Dave Eggers book, Zeitoun. It is non-fiction, and traces the story of Syrian-born Abdulrahman Zeitoun and his wife Kathy, a married Muslim couple with children who own a contracting business and a number of houses in New Orleans. As hurricane Katrina approaches Kathy and the kids flee, but Zeitoun stays to look after their business. After the flood he paddles his aluminum canoe around, distributing water and food to the stranded, until he is picked up by armed FEMA guards, to whom it is abundantly clear that a Syrian must be a terrorist. He is disappeared, and the story of his and Kathy’s struggles to save him is riveting.

President Obama told Congress he would not sign a health care bill that added any amount to the national debt — a criterion he does not use when considering escalating war in Afghanistan or bailouts to banks.

In a recent article for Tikkun, Dr. Arnold Relman argues that there is no way to meet that criterion unless health care reform includes eliminating the profit motive from medicine, including licensing doctors so that they get a fixed salary each year rather than, as now, making profits from prescribing more tests, procedures and visits that increase their incomes. He writes:

There are two interrelated critical issues in health reform right now: how to extend and improve insurance coverage, and how to control the unsustainable rise in health care expenditures. Virtually all of the current legislative attention is focused on the first issue but, notwithstanding claims to the contrary, none of the proposals now on the table offers any credible solution for the control of rising costs. Without control of health cost inflation, the present system will not be viable much longer.

This is a link to a post of my responses to many comments that have appeared as response to my piece on Mussolini’s Hindus and how to battle them in the latest Tikkun available here. Some of my comments are also as a follow-up to the “hate mails” that were posted on this site in response to the call to the Financial Times to not give an award to the chief minister of the state of Gujarat under whose administration a pogrom that resulted in the killing of 2000 people (mostly Muslims) occurred in 2002 and continues to reveal some shocking violations of basic human rights (see here for a petition to the Prime Minister of India following up on a high court decision that indicted the same administration for the most recent murder of a Muslim student).

Interested readers can read the entire piece from Tikkun and the responses here

Peace

Murli

This morning I woke up at “Oh Dark Thirty” (5:30am for you civilians) and by 6:34 was on a train heading to San Mateo for a meeting with staffers of Representative Jackie Speier (D – California) to talk about torture. The organizer of this gathering (BARCAT – Bay Area Religious Campaign Against Torture) had asked each person in the delegation to be prepared to share ONE thing about torture, that represented their unique perspective on the issue. I wear many hats when I attend such a meeting. Today, I was representing Multifaith Voices for Peace and Justice, a ragtag group of folks from various faith traditions who have been working for peace and social justice since the lead up to the Iraq war. I call myself a Jewbyterian, Jewish by birth, Jewish in much of my spirituality, but who spends most of my time among progressive Presbyterians at the First Presbyterian Church of Palo Alto.

I just received this from the people at Color of Change (above: photo from their website):

Glenn Beck was just on the cover of TIME magazine. Instead of telling the truth about Beck–that he repeatedly race-baits, lies and distorts the truth–TIME raises the question of whether Beck represents a legitimate voice in American politics.

It’s absurd, and it’s not just TIME. In article after article, reporters seem afraid to call out what Beck is actually doing, and they often neglect to mention the very real backlash against Beck, including the fact that more than 62 companies have stopped advertising on his show.

You can help. In just a few minutes you can write and submit a letter-to-the-editor to papers in your area and help the media tell the whole story. We’ve got a tool that makes it very easy and gives you tips for writing your letter. Just click here to get started.