Kim Chernin

Beautiful writing here from Kim Chernin, from a piece in our archives before my time, that I just happened to read. I very long ago wrote a doctoral thesis about experiential religion, if that isn’t a contradiction in forms (I guess it was) and have been delighted by Chernin’s wrestling with experience and ideas each time I have picked up something by her: her novel The Flame Bearers especially, which is a brilliant evocation of experiential religion, but also her memoir on the women in her family, and one of her books on eating disorders.

This passage makes me think of my son, 21 next week, who plays guitar in a rock band which performs some of his own compositions though he doesn’t read music, but who is finally now taking a music theory class at college: from my way of thinking, that is the right way round to do it much more often than we imagine it is.

Obviously, I loved books, but weren’t there other kinds of learning I also cherished? … I was indeed fascinated by the type of learning that came from direct experience. I thought that probably a great deal of women’s learning fell into this category–the learning of measurement through cooking and baking, the meaning of volume from pouring a glass of milk, an understanding of heat and its transformation from turning on a flame under a pot and so on. One summer when my daughter Larissa was a year old, I took a class in Child Development at UCLA. I never had to open the book, which seemed obvious and redundant to me. I consistently scored 99 out of 100 on the multiple choice exams because, obviously, I had been learning from watching my child. This learning, moreover, would never be forgotten because it had been imprinted along with my child’s first words, first steps, first eager groping for a fistful of cereal. Similarly, I had learned a great deal about psychology from having been a psychoanalytic patient for twenty-five years. This particular learning seemed more valuable than what I had come to understand from the clinical and theoretical books I had read.

“Answers are limiting.” — Lanell Dike

Years into a successful career as a fundraiser, Lanell Dike informed the people in her life that she was leaving her job to live on her savings and create art. Having no formal training as an artist, Lanell sought advice from experts on how to make a living in her new career.

“I was meeting with an art consultant, and I took a class about how to sell your art,” she says. “Neither of those experiences resonated with how I wanted to live my life.”

The art consultant advised Lanell to create limited editions of her work. Here’s how Lanell describes her reaction to his advice:

It’s hard for artists to make a living on art, so one of the ways artists have done that is to use limited editions. We are constantly placing limits on ourselves and on each other. We are so focused on scarcity as a reality more so than abundance.

When you look at money, it doesn’t really exist. It exists in our mind and as a concept, but when you look at this piece of paper, it only has value because you and I agree that it has meaning. I don’t want to create the illusion of limitation for something that is technically unlimited. We play so many psychological games on each other in the global marketplace just to make money. I’d rather not do that.

“How Do We Live in this World”, Lanell Dike

Louise Cankar, an assistant professor of sociology at Marquette University, recently published a book in which she argues that, while anti-Muslim suspicion existed prior to 9/11, 9/11 created an environment in which hostility toward Muslims could thrive and their political and social exclusion could be legitimated by both the government and nativist Americans. While Cankar’s discussion in her book, Homeland Insecurity: The Arab American and Muslim American Experience After 9/11, is, as a whole, thoroughly fascinating, if not depressing, her research regarding gendered dehumanization stands out as especially troubling – though also suggestive of where we may find solutions. Cankar’s dissection of the gendered patterns of dehumanization identify gender as a critical area for cross-cultural dialogue. She lays out three patterns in particular of gender dehumanization.

Women In Hijab As Symbols of Anti-Americanism

As is perhaps inevitable, after 9/11 Muslim women who don hijab (the headscarf worn by some Muslim women) became central to the construction of Arabs and Muslims as the ominous “Other” – that is, as belonging to a culture in which women are oppressed and incapable of exercising choice, and men are violent and misogynist. No woman could possibly choose to wear the hijab, or perhaps more accurately, a woman could not legitimately exercise choice when it came to something like the hijab, which represented a revolt against American values. Those forced to wear it and those who chose to wear it were both acting in a manner unacceptable to the American way. By obliterating choice with regard to the hijab, these social constructions essentially debased the free will of Muslim women.

Saving Muslim women from these purportedly oppressive garments became a theme used to invoke support for the U.S.’s war in Afghanistan. Those who supported the war, justified the need for the invasion by pointing at images of Afghani women shrouded in all-encompassing, billowing blue burkas, sometimes seen being publicly beaten and executed by the Taliban.

The government’s construction of women in hijab as symbols of barbarism made them counter-symbols to American freedom. The localized effect of such a construction: some Americans – self-fashioned “defenders” of American values – wanted to kick out women who wore hijab from their neighborhood.

Interestingly, the same set of notions that posited women in hijab as the opposite of freedom construed the chastity of Muslim men as equally foreign and threatening. “Muslim women were perceived as forced to cover their hair, just as Arab/Muslim men were perceived as forced into sexual sublimation.” (256) Muslim men’s not being allowed to view female flesh, or enjoy sexual intimacy outside of marriage, militated against the nativist idea of freedom, and for this, Muslim men were made the enemy.

Muslim Women: Producers of Terrorists

While the belittling of Muslim women in hijab may be a familiar concept, a less known phenomenon highlighted by Cankar is that of Arab and Muslim women as producers of terrorists. This was an attack on Arab and Muslim motherhood, alleging that Muslims are cold and unloving toward their children, thus predisposing them to terrorist behavior as adults. Cankar quotes Howard Bloom’s 1989 article, The Importance of Hugging, from Omni magazine to highlight the types of arguments commonly restated by nativists in the post-9/11 climate:

Could the denial of warmth lie behind Arab brutality? Could these keepers of Islamic flame be suffering from a lack of hugging? … In much of Arab society the cold and even brutal approach to children has still not stopped. Public warmth between men and women is considered a sin. And the Arab adult, stripped of intimacy and thrust into a life of cold isolation, has become a walking time bomb. An entire people may have turned barbaric for the simple lack of a hug. (243)

According to Bloom, the lack of public displays of affection between grown Muslim men and women signal a lack of warmth between parents and their children. The total absence of logical consistency in Bloom’s argument is jarring.

Bloom was not alone. The Global Ideas Bank, relying on Bloom’s work, argued:

The cultures that treated their children coldly produced brutal adults, according to a survey of 49 cultures conducted by James Prescott … Prescott’s observations apply to Islamic and other cultures, which treat their children harshly. They despise open displays of affection. The result, he claims: violent adults. (243)

Bloom-like arguments about the barbarism built into Arab and Muslim culture – sinking as low as questioning Muslim motherhood – have been employed in the cultural front of the War on Terror. Muslim women, as reproducers of culture, have thus found themselves frequent targets of this tactic of attack by nativists, or those seeking to protect the “American way of life.”

Gendered Emasculation of Muslim Men

Muslim women are not the sole scapegoats of nativist slander; Muslim men shared in the suffering. Cankar explains that in times of crisis, when nationalism is mobilized, “men and women are expected to conform to hegemonic definitions of masculinity and femininity.” (244) In the post-9/11 process of determining what characterized an American, attacks on Muslim women who donned hijab amounted to an attack against those who did not fit this hegemonic concept of femininity. For Muslim men, the process was a bit more convoluted. Because they did fit the hegemonic conception of masculinity, rejecting them required that they be made not to fit; essentially, they had to be feminized. As such, Muslim men were stripped of their masculinity – the degradation ceremonies perpetrated against Arab and Muslim men imprisoned at Abu Ghraib were emasculation rituals.

While Muslim men at Abu Ghraib experienced a direct form of emasculation, Muslim-American men suffered from a more subtle form. These men were not afraid of the type of neighborhood attacks Muslim women faced, but instead felt unprotected by the rule of law, particularly in small towns where unregulated, abusive detention could be carried out more easily than in urban areas. “They feared being beaten, being detained, and being moved from place to place while multiple agencies searched for records of illegal activity, suspicious contacts, or ties to terrorism, and they feared that, in the process, no one would know.” (259) Muslim-American men were and still are to some degree subject to detention without adequate cause or explanation, and once detained, are made completely powerless. This implied emasculation is tied into larger hegemonic notions of masculinity and who is allowed to fit that image. If, in times of crisis, men and women are expected to conform to hegemonic definitions of femininity and masculinity, and if Muslim men are seen as the enemy and cannot be allowed to fit this definition, it becomes necessary to strip them of their masculinity. As this is not an easy process that can be undertaken by neighborhood crusaders, it must be done through “government actors with powers of detention.” (233)

The Way Forward

In the years since 9/11, Muslim men and women have responded to nativist hate mongering by working within the American legal framework. Muslim women have made the hijab a civil rights issue; similarly, the fight for the human rights of detainees has been going strong for some time.

An additional response – one that is more nuanced to the gendered aspects of the problem – is to use gender and Muslim notions of femininity and masculinity as the focal point of cross-cultural dialogue. In times of crisis people revert to hegemonic definitions of masculinity and femininity and this suggests that there is something about gender and sexuality that is fundamentally linked to national identity. There is something about gender that helps the dehumanization process in times of crisis. It seems, then, that in times of [relative] peace, efforts should be made to explore those connections in a way that prevents the crisis impulse to dehumanize the other.

The inherent femininity of Muslim women who wear the hijab is thus a theme to be explored, as is the seeming “foreignness” of the hijab. Are there ways to make non-Muslim Americans understand the hijab as essentially American? Are there ways to argue for femininity within the framework of Islamic modesty, in a way that non-Muslims can understand?

As for Muslim men, much of nativist fear is rooted in the idea of Muslim men as forced into sexual sublimation, that is, unable to view female flesh or act on their lust outside of marriage. Nativists perceive Muslim men’s modesty in this regard as a threat. Can peacetime dialogue change this conception? Is there a way that male chastity can be explained for its voluntariness, and perhaps even for its inherent masculinity?

Often, cross-cultural dialogue revolves around generalities, focusing on the minutiae of religious history and ritual or varying cultural practices. Broad-based, but deeply probing, discussions on notions of masculinity and femininity and the ways these notions are shared, and cherished, by Muslim and non-Muslims alike, may be more effective in paving the path forward. In place of imposing Muslims concepts of modesty on Americans, or American concepts of freedom on Muslims, cross-cultural dialogue should explore the connections and intersections. That is, it should explore how Muslims who choose to be modest are “free” in a very American way, and how American and Muslim notions of modesty are fundamentally connected rather than diametrically opposed to each other.

Do you know Uri Avnery? He’s the founder of the Israeli peace group Gush Shalom (and so much more), and on their website he’s recently posted a remarkable piece of writing on the Israeli boycott, and on the struggle against militarism in Israel. What makes it truly wonderful is his insight into the dangers of demonizing your enemy during a struggle. Here’s an excerpt:

I HAVE no argument with people who hate Israel. That’s entirely their right. I just don’t think that we have any common ground for discussion…..One thing is certain: hatred does not lead towards peace. Let me be quite explicit about this, because I sense that some people, in their righteous indignation over Israel’s occupation, have lost sight of this.
Peace is made between enemies, after war, in which awful things invariably happen. Peace can be made and maintained between peoples who are prepared to live with each other, respect each other, recognize the humanity of each other. They don’t have to love each other.
Describing the other side as monsters may be useful in waging war, but singularly unhelpful in waging peace.

As I read this I thought how much this is the other side of the coin that Rabbi Lerner wrote of in this blog last week, of idolizing Israel. Surely once you hold Israel, or anything of this world up as so good as to be beyond criticism, it logically follows that its opponents must be evil incarnate. And since they are evil, isn’t anything you do to them justified?

Imagine that government services were designed and delivered by people who really care. Wouldn’t that have been so attractive we would have had universal healthcare by now?

But what does it mean to really care for the people who receive government services?

My friend Chase knows what it means for her in her office. She is a member of the covenant group my wife and I joined at our Unitarian Universalist Church. The group meets twice a month to talk about our lives. I didn’t expect much when Chase said she would tell us about her spiritual practice as a government employee, but I was blown away. Chase is a quiet woman, who doesn’t say much. But this is what she said that evening she talked about her work. She gave me permission to publish it here.

What has stayed with me from that evening wasn’t so much that I could imagine doing the same practices as Chase myself: it was the quiet glow about her as she told us what a difference it had made to her, her fellow workers and her clients for her to pray on behalf of each client coming to the office. It made me want to find what the equivalent kind of spiritual practice might be that would work for me: some day when the hectic rush dies down, I’ll try and think about that again. Chase said:

My Work as Spiritual Practice:

When I first decided to make my job a spiritual practice I realized that the energy in my cubicle was chaotic and anxious. I wanted to change the energy and the only way I knew to do that was to create sacred space, which I did in two ways. I put up symbols of my beliefs, prayer flags, pictures of Buddha, a Zen garden, and hindu gods and godesses, and muslim prayers beads. And I conscientiously began to pray, chant and meditate at my desk periodically throughout the day. One of my prayers is by Shantideva:

Shantideva

May I be a guard for those who need protection
A guide for those on the path
A boat, a raft, a bridge for those who wish to cross the flood
May I be a lamp in the darkness
A resting place for the weary
A healing medicine for all who are sick
A vase of plenty, a tree of miracles
And for the boundless multitudes of living beings
May I bring sustenance and awakening
Enduring like the earth and sky
Until all beings are freed from sorrow
And all are awakened.

This week’s spiritual wisdom comes from composer Gary Malkin, president of Wisdom of the World, who wrote this piece on April 18, 2009:

Global Peace Prayer

Mother, Father,
God, Goddess
Ancestors and Spirits of the Land
Artist of the Cosmos
Source of all that is

Creator of Music, Beauty, Comfort, and Inspiration
Author of Clarity, Courage, Discernment and Illumination
Mother of all things alive, pulsing with life
Father of all things illuminated with consciousness and presence

Help us to be here now
as we engage our hearts, minds, bodies, souls and spirits
in a holy prayer for global peace.

Hussein Ibish

There is huge scope for the secular and the religious to work together! We are currently missing far too many of those chances. Believers and nonbelievers tend to look down on and mistrust each other. The emphasis on belief, creed, and ideas — the ways we understand and describe our experience of the world — tends to overwhelm an emphasis on our actual shared experience, and on ways we could care about and for each other, and pursue shared goals.

Look at how various atheists have been promoting Islamophobia. Some secularists are so overwhelmed by fear and distaste for Islamic beliefs and for existing Islamic states that merge religious with political power, that they cannot conceive how to make common cause with the uncountable millions of Muslims who are simply trying to lead good lives in peace.

Maybe it’s obvious that secular ex-Muslims might be the ones who could teach secular non-Muslims how to do this. But how many prominent people have come out in public as secular ex-Muslims? Here’s one, and a very interesting and eloquent one at that, and my thanks to Danny Postel for sending me the link.

Check our Hussein Ibish’s post yesterday: “Why an agnostic and secularist fights for American Muslim rights and against Islamophobia.”

Abir Aramin, aged ten, who was killed in 2007. Her father, Bassam Aramin, and former Israeli soldier Yaniv Reshef, of Combatants for Peace, present a tangible, nonviolent way to end the brutality in Israel and Palestine. They ask your help to build the next Abir's Playground.

September 21 is Peace Day. It is the UN International Day of Peace and Global Ceasefire. It is a day when we dream of peace with our eyes wide open, when we apprehend a vision of a world where humankind has put down the burden of violent conflict and studies war no more. Peace Day reminds us that peacemaking is not only a top down process of diplomatic acumen and strategic military deployment, but peacemaking is a bottom-up process of person to person relationships.

On March 21, 2009, the Courage of Conscience Speaking Tour came to my church — Union Baptist Church in Montclair, NJ. Two members of Combatants for Peace, an organization of former Israeli soldiers and former Palestinian fighters, talked to us about why they work together to build peace through building playgrounds.

Bassam Aramin is a Palestinian who spent seven years in an Israeli jail for planning an attack on Israeli soldiers. While in prison, he learned about the Holocaust and recognized the human suffering of his enemy. He decided to work for peace. In January of 2007, his 10-year-old daughter, Abir, was shot by an Israeli soldier as she was walking home from school with her friends. A few days later, she died. Both Palestinians and Israelis stood with Aramin through his terrible suffering. They knew that such awful pain could either lead to a will to vengeance or to a stronger commitment to peacemaking. Bassam Aramin poured his suffering into a rededicated effort to make peace.

Yaniv Rashef is a former Israeli soldier who lives in a town within missile strike distance of Gaza. He has seen his share of violence and fear and suffering. He too has decided that a perpetuation of violence will not bring peace. He made sure we knew that the Israeli soldier who shot Abir Aramin used an American made weapon that shot American made ammunition and was riding in an American made jeep. One purpose of their coming to the United States was to meet with Congress members to ask them to encourage Israel to bring the soldier who killed Abir to justice. Justice is requisite for peace. We are all responsible.

Blind loyalty to Israel is the primary form of idolatry today in the Jewish world.

Go into any synagogue in the US or Israel and you can tell people that you don’t believe in God, don’t observe the commands of Torah, don’t observe the Sabbath, or even that you plan to be eating a pig sandwich on Yom Kippur and the majority of people will shrug their shoulders, and welcome you in. But dare to say that you think that Israel is violating human rights or, worse, that it really is just a political entity like all other political entities and does not have any particular claim on your loyalties, and you will be treated as though you had just spoken the greatest of Jewish heresies.

And that is what it means to be the god of a particular people — when critiquing it is seen as the one belief that you cannot critique without being dismissed as hurtful, evil or perverse. When Aaron facilitated the creation of the Golden Calf, he proclaimed “These are your Gods, O Israel.” Today, in word and deed, most of the synagogues in the world proclaim “The state of Israel is the ultimate holy God, O Israel.” Israel is the new idolatry.

It’s not hard to see how this happened.

A riveting to and fro has developed around David Gibbs’ article “Was Kosovo the Good War?” in the July/August Tikkun. Responding on our site Roger Lippman, the editor of Balkan Witness, has strongly objected to what he considers Gibb’s anti-Serb attitude Gibbs’ argument [my apologies: Roger Lippman tells me I misrepresented his view, see the end of this post]. Lippman is a long-time social change activist and in 1970 was a co-defendant, with Michael Lerner and others, in the Seattle Seven conspiracy trial of anti-Vietnam War activists. He writes:

One could refute Gibbs’ misstatements one by one, but the overall point is that he seems determined to blame anyone but the Serbian aggressors for the Albanian plight… In conclusion, Gibbs repeats his claim that the intervention “served mainly to increase the scale of atrocities.” But he neglects to notice that it also rescued a population of two million from Serbia’s intended expulsion or annihilation.

David Gibbs has now responded, concluding that:

Overall, I find Mr. Lippman’s position on Kosovo a disturbing one. He seems intent on condemning only Serb-perpetrated atrocities, while he denies or dismisses all evidence of KLA atrocities against Serbs. Even the hundreds of thousands of Serbs and Roma who were ethnically cleansed after the KLA victory in 1999 — crimes that were well documented and widely reported– elicit no interest on his part. When I check Lippman’s web site, Balkan Witness, I once again see this ethnic one-sidedness, on an even larger scale. Lippman’s position is not a human rights position in any meaningful sense of that term. It is merely one of ethnic partisanship.

I am a know-nothing on this topic, though for what little it is worth I confess I am personally finding Gibbs’ arguments more convincing at this point. I do however realize that how foreign policy experts inside and outside of future administrations judge this issue will be extremely important to the way future U.S. military “interventions” are carried out.

Note on 9/22/09: Roger Lippman writes me that he is not saying Gibb’s is “anti-Serb.” He summarizes his three main points as:

Gibbs incorrectly credits the Serb authorities with negotiating in good faith;

He finds Serbian war crimes comparable to those of the Kosovo liberation fighters and the oppressed population;

He finds NATO’s intervention comparable to Serbian war crimes.

At The Immanent Frame, Nathan Schneider interviews Terry Eagleton, author of Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate, on the inextricability of religion and politics, and the possibility of constructing an iteration of Christianity relevant to contemporary radicals and humanists. Here’s an excerpt from the interview:

NS: Are you urging people to go to church, or to read the Bible, or simply to acknowledge the historical connections between, say, Marxism and Christianity?

TE: I’m certainly not urging them to go to church. I’m urging them, I suppose, to read the Bible because it’s very relevant to radical political concerns. In many ways, I agree with someone like Christopher Hitchens that most religion is fairly hideous and purely ideological. But I think that Hitchens and Richard Dawkins are gravely one-sided about the issue. There are other potentials in the gospel and in the Christian tradition which are, or should be, of great interest to radicals, and radicals haven’t sufficiently recognized that. I’m not trying to convert anybody, but I am trying to show them that there is something here which is in a certain interpretation far more radical than most of the mainstream political discourses that we hear at the moment.

Read “Religion for radicals” in its entirety here.

“Nearly 45,000 people die in the United States each year — one every 12 minutes — in large part because they lack health insurance and can not get good care, Harvard Medical School researchers found in an analysis released on Thursday.” — Reuters, September 17th, 2009

At this rate,  from the beginning of 2009 to the moment you are reading this article,

141,502 people in the US have died for lack of health insurance.

Tonight is Erev Rosh Hashanah, the eve of the Jewish New Year. Here in the San Francisco Bay Area, Rabbi Lerner’s synagogue will spend the evening romping indoors and out, singing, dancing, doing inner spiritual work, and yearning toward political and social transformation. It’s not your typical Rosh Hashanah service.

Rabbi Lerner leads a service.

No matter what your faith, it’s worth visiting one of Beyt Tikkun’s High Holy Day services to experience one of these  emotional neo-Hasidic “Jewish Renewal” services. Inspired by Rabbi Zalman Schacter-Shalomi, the Jewish Renewal movement has inspired many initiatives and congregations, most of which can be located through the organization Aleph. Rabbi Lerner describes the renewal movement in his book Jewish Renewal as also breathing through the work of social justice organizations like Peace Now, gay and lesbian synagogues, and Jewish feminist collectives, as well as through activism that is happening within all the different movements (Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, Reconstructionist, etc.) of Judaism.

The Rosh Hashanah services today, tomorrow, and Sunday, and the Yom Kippur ones on September 27 and September 28 are Rabbi Lerner’s principle annual opportunity to do traditional Jewish services infused with a radical transformative take on Judaism: the idea that the Torah issues a prophetic call to create caring societies rather than ones built around profit motives and competition for power. Those who take this call seriously, he argues, must work for drastic changes in foreign policy, the domestic economy, the corporate business world, education, the law, our religious organizations, and theology.

In the lead up to 2009′s Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) the Toronto Declaration “No Celebration of Occupation” at first seemed like a local protest about a local decision, one that would get a few people on both sides heated up, and then fade away. But it has grown, and people have joined on both sides, pro and con, and each day in Toronto our local media totals up the scores with the kind of enthusiasm rarely seen around here between hockey seasons. Two days ago, Jane Fonda said she was modifying her position after signing. But yesterday Roger Ebert changed his mind the other way and signed the Declaration. Cameron Bailey, the highly regarded festival coordinator, said the selection of Tel Aviv as the opening choice for the new city-to-city program had nothing to do with the “Brand Israel” program with which Israel is trying to generate images that don’t involve Palestinians in our responses to their name. But today the mayor of Tel Aviv, “said that while the City to City program was initiated by the festival, the Israeli ministry of foreign affairs was involved as part of its Brand Israel media and advertising campaign.” Wow!

For those who haven’t been following closely, the best summary I’ve found is in, curiously, Al Jazeera. (It must be all those ex-BBC reporters, still tuned in to what’s going on in the colonies.) Here’s the start….

Credit: flickr: ragesoss

“I don’t want this country to become another socialized country like Russia.” These were the words of a woman in a Pennsylvania town hall meeting with Senator Arlen Specter. What is important to this woman? What is behind her concern? What are the dreams and aspirations from which this statement arises?

“Health care for all.” These were the words on a placard in New Hampshire. What is important to the woman who carried this placard? What is behind her concern? What are the dreams and aspirations from which this statement arises?

Credit: flickr: europhile1

What if our town hall meetings were devoted to mutual exploration among people with opposing views to answer these questions together? What would we then discover? How would we then experience our differences in opinions? What might be the common shared dreams that would surface? And what kind of health care system would we then create?

We don’t have to wait for our town hall meetings to change before we can experiment with answering these questions.

As you read the words of the woman in Pennsylvania, and especially if you disagree, try to imagine her. Can you imagine that she dearly values the kind of freedom she experiences in this country, and wants to preserve it? Perhaps she treasures the possibility of individual choice? Maybe she cares very much about efficiency in providing health care? Whatever it is, it appears that she is passionate about protecting what is dear to her. Whether or not you share her opinion, do you share her dreams?

As you read the placard of the woman in New Hampshire, and especially if you disagree with her, try to imagine her, too.

Zach Dorfman thought I should make my long comment on his post into a post itself. Here it is with an introduction. It gets longer and longer.

This concerns a new book by Norman Podhoretz, the leading neo-con before there were neo-cons. Podhoretz may bore the pants off longtime Tikkun readers but new ones may like to know that Michael Lerner started Tikkun in 1986 (here’s the first issue) in large part to provide a leftwing Jewish counter to Podhoretz’s conservative Commentary magazine. Ever since then Podhoretz and Lerner have been the fathers and grandfathers of two radically opposite understandings of Judaism and ethics as a whole as applied to politics.

The difference of course is that the neo-cons have had a really good run in power, and served up disaster after disaster, while Lerner’s brand of ethics has resonated with both Clinton and Obama, but neither liberal President has actually followed a Lernerish course with a tenth the zeal that Bush II followed a Podhoretzian course. Would it similarly have led them to disaster if they had, or would it have helped them avoid the disasters they actually did get, or appear now to be getting, themselves into? We will never know until an FDR level of presidential courage — or more likely of popular protest — returns, and not then, unless major changes to Liberalism and Leftism as too often so far practiced can be learned by politicians and protesters.

Back to Podhoretz who, fighting now against the widespread disgust his success has wrought, in his new book laments that American Jews have substituted the ‘Torah of Liberalism’ for the ‘Torah of Judaism’. In short, he tries to make the case that his fellow Jews believe in Liberalism more than Judaism.

As I told you in my first post in this “Sister Talk” series, my sister Amy Vedder — with her husband Bill Weber — first realized the importance of the human connection in conservation efforts while working in Rwanda in the 1970s. Since then they’ve always tried to create win-win situations for the animals and the people affected by their projects. After many years this strategy resulted in a conservation program called “Living Landscapes.” The projects under the umbrella of this program have all involved large-scale conservation efforts that extend beyond the borders of parks and reserves. Their breadth has been necessary in order to meet the needs of both the wildlife species as well as the people in nearby areas.

I’ve always thought Amy and Bill’s win-win thinking made sense. Conservation efforts won’t work in the long-run if people don’t gain something as well. When I talked to Amy about the “Living Landscape” program, she told me how her thinking had evolved. You can see her talk about this at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gp82BMWxgE4&feature=channel_page.

That’s how Meredith Gould describes herself.

The Pew people tell us that 28% of Americans have left the faith in which they were raised in favor of another religion – or no religion at all. If you count people shifting denominations within Protestantism it’s 44%. Who better than these people to teach their religion of choice how to avoid insulting their religion of origin? But I’m not sure how many do. Maybe feeling like a newbie, one doesn’t want to criticize. Or maybe it all happens behind closed doors.

Meredith Gould is a shining example of a religion-crosser, from what I have read of her. Some of her work gently informs Christians how much they owe to Judaism, as in her new book “Why is there a Menorah on the Altar? Jewish Roots of Christian Worship” where you’ll learn for example that:

Abu Rami Al Tawil, (standing right) Head of the Rachel Corrie Football Tournament & Head of Unity Youth play-field.

My friends at the Rebuilding Alliance are struggling to get slightly-worn tennis shows past the Gaza blockade and onto the feet of soccer players in Rafah. Donna Baranski-Walker, founder and executive-Director of the Rebuilding Alliance, just sent an email to all her supporters and posted news on Huffington Post, letting us know that folks carrying uniforms for the players finally got into Gaza after being delayed ten days at the border. Now they’re hoping the shoes will get released from the Egyptian embassy so that they can distribute those too.