Do you have a good novel to recommend for readers of this site? Novels get classified this way and that, literary, genre, experimental, rollicking good read and what have you. I’m no lit crit guy, just someone seeking help to lead my life. Trying to understand the world, people, nature; how to lead a good life; change the world; small stuff like that. What are we trying to do here? Support each other. With experience, ideas, images — so let’s add novels to that list — that help us get up in the morning to follow our quests.

My sister says she needs her fix of story. When she first said that, the older, wiser sibling, I thought: wow, that’s right, I need that too. I am drawn to the conceptual — socio-economic analysis, scientific results, spiritual insights — but I need to see them in the stories of people’s lives to really get the feel of them, to make them part of my life.

So please use the comments to make your own recommendations. 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.

Here’s my first one, chosen because it’s so well suited to Tikkun and the San Francisco Bay Area, and because it had an impact on my own life. Ruhama Veltfort’s The Promised Land, published by Milkweed, is a story of Hasidic Jews from Poland trekking across America to San Francisco in the 1840s. This is what I wrote about it on the Amazon site eleven years ago and I find I can’t do better now:

This is a most beautiful and original book. I have never read one quite like it, but would greatly like to. The narrative line is strong, the characters very real, the places come alive in all their smells and sights, and it is a fine piece of storytelling. One has to say this up front, because this is a book about mysticism,

I went to my first “Tea Party” rally this past weekend in the city of Kingston in upstate New York . It was a small rally of about 200 people held on the same day as the big Tea Party rally in Washington DC. I went to watch, listen, and talk to some of the people there. Yes, I witnessed a good deal of anger and fear on display, with much of the anger directed at Obama. There was also a small counter protest of people holding up signs in favor of health care reform. I was pleasantly surprised to see a few people from each side willing to cross over and have conversations with each other. I’ve always been a strong proponent of the need for such civil conversations and I joined in a few of them. It soon became apparent, though, that most people needed some training and practice at having such conversations. The participants generally approached the interactions with the intent of scoring as many debate points as possible on every topic that came up. The discussions usually degenerated into emotional arguments with neither side really listening to the other. To hold civil discussions with people you strongly disagree with, my experience suggests that you need to take an alternative approach. If I may make some suggestions…

Over at the New Humanist blog, Caspar Melville writes:

That nice Dave Belden over at Tikkun magazine has paid me the compliment of disagreeing with a piece I wrote for the Guardian’s Comment is Free site, in which I argue against Dave’s notion that humanists need to organise themselves like religious communities, have services, rituals, build a community that sort of thing. Dave thinks I am too individualistic and we will never heal the world if we can’t build a strong ‘base’. He may well be right.

His perspective, I think, would be that being a humanist implies a desire to improve the world – for humans and other animals – it’s a commitment to a kind of activist attitude. (This is well expressed in Tikkun’s strapline, they want to ‘mend, repair and transform the world’). I wonder if my own humanism isn’t more of the “I don’t believe in God, I’m fascinated by what humans have done, do and might be capable of (good and bad), I want more peace and love, less war and greed, but life is short and full of sorrow (and plenty of laughs), most human endeavours and ambitions are fragile and misguided, if not ludicrous, and much harm is done by those with grand visions, so I don’t want to join a movement, any movement, and I will choose my friends and confreres from the weird and (often) wacky individuals I gather to myself, for possibly perverse and certainly unexamined reasons, along the way,” sort. Not a very snappy slogan, I grant you, but my own. I admire those with the courage to believe they can change the world and the drive to try – but they scare me too. So, good luck with your humanist religion, Dave, but include me out.

What about you?

Well the last line was irresistible, so of course I left a comment much longer than Caspar’s post–I’m the Dave on his site here. The next two comments side with Caspar. It’s fun to get out among the movement-phobic.

You do not have to be Jewish to use these spiritual practices that I have culled from the Jewish tradition. As Jews around the world enter into the Jewish High Holy Days (starting Friday night, September 18, with the eve of Rosh Hashanah and concluding Monday night, September 28th at the end of Yom Kippur) they and everyone else is invited to use these key spiritual practices. Practice number two, the Forgiveness practice, should be used every night throughout the year.

A Spiritual Practice of Forgiveness and Repentance

Practice 1: Repentance

Carefully review your life — acknowledge to yourself whom you have hurt and where your life has gone astray from your own highest ideals. Find a place where you can be safely alone, and then say out loud whom you’ve hurt how, and how you’ve hurt yourself. In the case of others, go to them and say clearly what you’ve done and ask for forgiveness. Do not mitigate or “explain” — just acknowledge and sincerely ask for forgiveness.

We do not start from the assumption that anyone has become evil. Rather, we vision any ‘sins’ as “missing the mark.” We are born pure and with the best of intentions to be the highest possible spiritual being we can be, as though we were an arrow being shot straight toward God to connect more fully, yet at various points in our lives the arrow gets slightly off track and misses the mark. Repentance is really about a mid-course adjustment to get back on track, and can be done every day.

Practice 2: Forgiveness

“I am not sure I would call my work revolutionary. I think I would call it transformational. I do believe that if openly perceived it can unlock new ways of seeing and being to the viewer.” — Helena Tiainen

In Finland, in the long winter months in the part of the country that lies above the Arctic Circle, the sun does not rise at all for weeks on end.

It is during this time of extreme darkness each November that Finland’s capital city of Helsinki is transformed by the festival of Valon Voimat, “Forces of Light.”

For more than a week artists converge on Helsinki, filling the city’s urban spaces with light-filled installations, glowing, mechanical sculptures, fire-ridden street performances and imaginative, luminous creations of all sorts, bringing the city temporarily aglow.

Valon Voimat challenges the Zen kōan that it is impossible to study the darkness by switching on a light.

Helsinki-born artist Helena Tiainen is no stranger to the contradictions raised each dark November by Valon Voimat.

Through the intuitive paintings and drawings she creates, Tiainen shines a light on the darkness of her viewers’ preconceptions by challenging them to “not take things for granted, to question perception and push the boundaries of what might be.”

“Freedom of Speech” by Helena Tiainen. To see more of Helena’s work, visit the Tikkun art gallery.

Asra Nomani’s recent piece in Marie Claire, “My Big Fat Muslim Wedding,” underscored everything that is wrong with Marie Claire’s coverage of Islam and Muslim women. Nomani’s piece was a confused narrative at best, conflating culture with religion and individual bad experiences with larger truths about entire faiths. A story that should have been about Nomani’s conflicted path to love somehow became a treatise on Islam and love generally, suggesting that all Muslim men and women follow similarly conflicted, contradictory paths. Western ways of premarital intercourse and freedom to marry without regard to religious frameworks are presented as the higher moral ground.

A similar sort of paternalism is rampant throughout Marie Claire’s treatment of Muslim women. Time and again, the image we see emerging from this magazine is that of Muslim women as sequestered, brainwashed, and victimized if by no one else than their own naïve, unknowing selves. Almost all of Marie Claire’s stories dealing with Islam or Muslims have to do with Muslim women either oppressed by or complicit in terrorism and extremism. Women who choose to embrace Islam are belittled, and Islam, in the process, is portrayed as attractive to only lost and desperate souls. On the flip side, Malika, the female jihadist in “Love in the Time of Terror” reflects the danger of Muslim female strength, while purportedly more respectable brands of strong females have spurned Islam to some degree or another (think Ayaan Hirsi Ali).

Consider, for example, Paul Cruickshank’s piece, “I Married a Terrorist,” the story of Maureen, a Belgian woman who met a non-practicing Muslim man at a bar and started dating him, their affair a whirlwind of partying. Somewhere amidst all the clubbing, Maureen began feeling empty, overwhelmed by her crazy ways. Her emptiness prompted curiosity about religion, and she began asking her boyfriend, Rachid, about Islam, of which he himself was ignorant.

This is where the story about Maureen begins to reveal its anti-Islamic and sexist undertones;

Norman Podhoretz’s new book Why Are Jews Liberals? (and Leon Wieseltier’s erudite take-down thereof), has sparked a lot of discussion on both left and right. Both pieces deserve a mention at Tikkun Daily. Podhoretz, pulling no punches, argues that American Jews have substituted the “Torah of Judaism” for the “Torah of Liberalism.” Such faith in the power of the state is surely a perverted form of idol-worship, no?

Both Podhoretz’s essay in the Wall Street Journal, which offers a summary of his book’s arguments, and Wieseltier’s response in the New York Times, are worth reading in full. Each offers a glimpse into two competing tendencies in the contemporary thinking of American Jews. (I won’t say contemporary Jewish thought, because as Wieseltier argues, Judaism is so rich a body of knowledge that many, many different political tendencies can be distilled from it. Essentializing “Jewishness” is part of Podhoretz’s problem.)

Podhoretz himself serves an interesting synecdoche for the ideological transformation of a an important minority in the post-World War II Jewish intelligentsia. Originally a liberal, he grew disillusioned with the left in the 1960s and became a hardcore neoconservative, but not before he penned some important pieces about the American Jewish experience, notably “My Negro Problem–And Ours,” an intellectually honest account of Jewish-African American relations in Brooklyn in the 1930s. (In the piece, Podhoretz argues in favor of interracial marriage–and procreation–as a means to end racism.)

When Podhoretz truly decided to abandon the liberalism of his younger days, and why, I do not know. But I am saddened at the ossification of a once fertile mind.

We usually think of environmental justice when we refer to how the disadvantaged suffer from pollution and other toxic chemicals more than those of us belonging to the middle or upper classes: siting of waste facilities, home location near highways or poison-spewing factories are just some of those issues. But when I spoke with my sister Amy, she brought up another form of environmental inequality — lack of access to wilderness and nature. You could call this a form of nature-deficit disorder imposed by poverty and class, not by the decisions of middle-class parents or their kids. (You can see the third part of my talk with Amy at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qj8LIWpVw_0&feature=channel_page).

This issue has interested me for a long time. In fact, at least a dozen years ago I read about Alastair McIntosh, head of Graduate Studies at the Centre for Human Ecology at the University of Edinburgh and a program he began there. Several of McIntosh’s students introduced groups of poor inner-city youths and adults to the Scottish Highlands, a place they had never visited before. According to McIntosh, at first these people felt frightened or ridiculous, because wilderness was an environment foreign to them. But after two or three days of supportive experiences in the wild, these city dwellers began to change. Some of them became angry, others quite sad, as they realized what they had been missing all their lives. Direct contact with nature, with wilderness, with trees and animals and birds, is a profound experience of beauty, “almost a spiritual experience,” according to McIntosh, an experience of which the urban poor had been deprived. (Of course, as a Wiccan, I would delete the “almost” from his statement.)

As we prepare for Rosh Hashana at the end of this week we enter into one of the most spiritually powerful periods in the Jewish calendar. Rosh Hashana marks the intensification of a period of introspection or teshuva begun at the start of the Hebrew month of Elul, just a few weeks ago. We move from Rosh Hashana, the Day of Judgment through a ten-day period where our teshuva process is revved to its highest point, reaching its apex on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. The totality of these days are known as the Yamim Noraim, the Days of Awe.

Rosh Hashana is a time when we thoughtfully examine the ways in which we have succeeded or fallen short in our relationships with ourselves, others, and the Great Power of the Universe. It is a time of personal reflection on who we have been this past year and of spiritual recalibration to return us to our highest version of ourselves. As the blasts of the shofar echo in the walls of our prayer spaces and reverberate in our souls we are given a powerful call to discard that which is no longer serving us and renew our commitment to that which gives us life.

We have expressed our differences with the religious campaign for health care but I sure am glad these people are working at it. Today’s email from Kristin Williams at Faith in Public Life:

300,000 listened to our health care webcast with Obama; tens of thousands have taken action; and hundreds of clergy have preached about health care. TODAY, faith groups are demonstrating a new level of coordination: asking hundreds of thousands of their members to call their Senators and Reps to make the moral case for reform. Meanwhile, our TV ad featuring local faith leaders saturates key markets in six target states. Tomorrow, local faith leaders flood Congress with Hill visits and a noon rally.

Terrific! So what if we wanted them to take a stronger line (as expressed here by Michael Lerner for example)? We may be right and they may come to agree with us, or vice versa, but we all learn by doing, not by sitting on our backsides, and they are certainly doing.

Caspar Melville

I am happy to find myself being quoted on the Guardian website by Casper Melville, editor of the New Humanist.

Belden (who is now managing editor at the non-denominational spiritual US magazine Tikkun), in a piece entitled Is it time for humanists to start holding services? wrote that while humanism had done well to meet the philosophical challenges set by religion, it did less well reproducing the kind of “vibrant social connections” that religion provides. He was rather stirring, in fact…

Caspar has a go at demolishing my argument–that humanists need to build congregations–in the kindest way, intelligently and entertainingly. (The New Humanist is full of English wit and irreverence and always a good read, with great cartoons.) Caspar’s main point is that any kind of ongoing community, with attendant meetings and formalized (gasp!) rituals, necessarily involves groupthink, and disapproval of outsiders.

As if unattached humanists don’t suffer from these traits themselves? They don’t look down their noses at the religious and judge them?

Caspar, it comes with our humanity. We’re tribal. We ALL have to struggle against groupthink, devaluation of outsiders, unhealthy reliance on charismatic leaders and so on. Those problems are not confined to formal associations, they just become more visible there, and therefore in some ways are easier to identify and guard against in communities, IF their members have their humanist and skeptical wits about them.

We need more humanists to help work out how to do this!

Chris Hedges is a man who has seen, lived and reported on hell for much longer than any human being should do, and he knows that others have had it worse. I expressed my deep disagreement with the darkness of his vision here, but nonetheless I think that when he warns us about the prospects for American fascism, we should take him seriously. Of our returning vets, he says:

We risk creating a homegrown Freikorps, the demobilized German soldiers from World War I who violently tore down the edifice of the Weimar Republic and helped open the way to Nazism.

The Afghanistan and Iraq wars have unloaded hundreds of thousands of combat troops, suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder or major depression, back into society.

I’ve been reading a lot lately about “nature-deficit disorder.” I guess this is a result of Richard Louv’s recent book Last Child in the Woods, where he coined this term to describe the human costs of alienation from nature. According to Louv, the proliferation of structured activities (homework and sports), fear of “stranger danger,” and video games keep children from playing outside in nature. Lots of these same young people can tell you all about the destruction of the Amazon rainforests and which species are endangered, but they don’t know much of anything about the bugs and birds in their own backyard.

I agree with Louv when he says that children need time to bond with nature on their own terms, time to play without any necessary goal beyond following their curiosity. But I would go even further and say that all of us — adults as well as kids — need time in wild settings, time to rejuvenate, time to experience amazement and discovery. We all need unstructured time to unwind, to play, to find calm in our frantic world. And nature may be the best place for these activities.

There seem to be two sides to the nature-deficit coin.

In the years since September 11th, I’ve often heard radio-talk-show hosts / callers, chatterers at family gatherings, and TV pundits asking “Where are the peaceful Muslim leaders?” as though there were none out there condemning violence and encouraging friendship and peace. Whenever I have a chance to directly answer that question I’m very happy to have some solid examples of incredible Muslim leaders who have spoken out and continue to work for peacemaking and friendship. On September 11th, one of my closest friends and colleagues helped organize a gathering outside the White House, lighting the night for peace and friendship.

Carlton Pearson

As a Unitarian Universalist (UU) who loves to go to Christian services in the black gospel tradition–for their emotional depth and warmth, even though I am pretty allergic to Christian theology–it was a delight to read this article about the largest UU congregation in the country teaming up with a black (universalist Christian) congregation.

First, who would believe that the largest UU congregation–in a religion that is so identified in people’s minds with its New England origins–would be in Tulsa, Oklahoma? Maybe they need it more and know they do, while New England itself is going increasingly post-religion altogether.

Second, just contemplate the courage of the Rev. Carlton Pearson. This man was a rising star in the evangelical world, charismatic, successful on the ground (he built the Tulsa church he founded to 0ver 6,000 members) and on TV, making a lot of money and garnering adulation. Then, watching the Rwandan genocide on TV, his life was changed.

His assumption was that the victims were bound for hell, persecuted yet unsaved. Feeling angry at God, and guilty that he himself wasn’t doing anything about it, he recalls, he fell into a sort of reproachful prayer: “God, I don’t know how you can sit on your throne there in heaven and let those poor people drop to the ground hungry, heartbroken, and lost, and just randomly suck them into hell.”

He heard God answer, “We’re not sucking those dear people into hell. Can’t you see they’re already there – in the hell you have created for them and continue to create for yourselves and others all over the planet? We redeemed and reconciled all of humanity at Calvary.”

Pearson had the courage to preach the gospel of God’s universal love for everyone. He was expelled from his church and lost his congregation, his TV spot, his income. Well, not his entire congregation. About 200 stayed with him, attending services he held in a sympathetic church. Now, thanks to the openmindedness of the young UU minister in Tulsa, Pearson and the 200 have joined the Universalists whom he used to despise.

I recently talked with Amy Vedder, one of our nation’s foremost experts on wildlife and wilderness conservation. She’s the vice president of the Wilderness Society, and made her name in environmental circles by starting — with her husband Bill Weber — perhaps the first ecotourism project in the world: the Mountain Gorilla Project. She and Bill recently published In the Kingdom of Gorillas, describing their groundbreaking work in Rwanda with this Fragile Species in a Dangerous Land, as the subtitle spells it out.

Despite her prominence, I was able to get her alone for an hour, talking about things that are important to me. You see, she’s my sister. And we were attending a family reunion. My brother-in-law videotaped our discussion, so you can listen to the whole thing if you’re interested. (I’ll be blogging about it for the next four days, and my brother-in-law Luciano‘s four YouTube videos will correspond to my posts). See it here–Sister Talk: A Discussion with Nancy Vedder-Shults and Amy Vedder–or at the end of this post.

From Gary Oliver <golliver@sbcglobal.net>

This post was written by Zehra Rizavi and Yusif Akhund for altmuslimah.com. I think it helps non-Muslims understand the Ramadan experience from an insider’s perspective, while also raising questions of how different interpretations of gender roles may change each couple’s experience of Ramadan.

When my husband finally makes his way down the stairs, my frustration abates and he and I sit across from each other and share our early morning meal. We speak intermittently and keep one eye trained on the clock to ensure we finish our food by the time dawn prayers begin. Despite the sparse conversation and the hurried meal, I enjoy the feeling that we are both beginning our obligatory fasts together, as a unit.

Continue reading on Altmuslimah

Rep. Barbara Lee

As we rightfully remember September 11th, 2001 and the tragedies of that day for the United States, my thoughts also move forward to September 14th of that same year and a courageous but lone vote made by Rep. Barbara Lee to oppose the use of violent force in retaliation. In explanation Lee said, “There must be some of us who say, let’s step back for a moment and think through the implications of our actions today — let us more fully understand its consequences… Far too many innocent people have already died.” This voice of reason was drowned out by a country ready to proceed with the fervor of a Holy War. The voice was outnumbered 420 to 1.

A funny thing about holy wars… In my own understanding of my faith tradition, I don’t believe we’re ever asked to battle against evil at all, only to stand against it – to withstand it. Yes, we have armor but it is there only for our protection (more about that in a bit).

President Obama ignited controversy when he named empathy as a necessary quality in a supreme-court judge. Wendy Long, legal counsel to the Judicial Confirmation Network and former clerk to Justice Clarence Thomas, said, “Lady Justice doesn’t have empathy for anyone. She rules strictly based upon the law and that’s really the only way that our system can function properly under the Constitution.” Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-S.C.) referred to empathy as “touchy-feely stuff.” Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) asked Sonia Sotomayor during the hearings, “Have you always been able to have a legal basis for decisions you have rendered and not rely on extralegal concepts such as empathy?”

Long, Graham, and Kyl understand empathy as an uprising of emotion that is irrelevant – even harmful – to sound reasoning and the application of justice. I see empathy as the capacity to understand the world from another’s perspective, part of what Daniel Goleman refers to as emotional intelligence. Empathic reasoning recognizes that others are human like us, thereby shedding light on the facts and making sound judgment more likely.