If you are in Northern California or want an excuse for a visit, consider coming to the Engaging The Other conference in San Francisco (San Mateo to be precise) November 12-15.

Huston Smith

Michael Lerner

Michael Lerner and Huston Smith give the keynote speeches on the first evening, Thursday the 12th. Michael needs no introduction here. Huston Smith, the site delightfully tells us, is “internationally renowned as the world’s leading philosopher, scholar, and author on world religions, and has devoted his life to the study of Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and Hinduism, all of which he believes in.” We also learn that his book The World’s Religions has been the most widely-used textbook on its subject for a third of a century — selling over 2,500,000 copies worldwide.

Steve Bhaerman

The next afternoon you can attend a roundtable on “Economic and Environmental Sustainability” at which both Steve Bhaerman, aka humorist Swami Beyondananda (from the inside back page of Tikkun), and my own good self will be appearing. Does Steve eschew his puns when appearing as himself? We will find out. The teaser for this one is: “How can we transcend greed, power, and scarcity thinking to insure economic and environmental policies and practices that work for the good of all?”

Meganwind Eoyang

But if you come you’ll have a hard choice as one my favorite people in the Bay Area will be doing a concurrent workshop. Meganwind Eoyang will present “Empathy – Can You Stay and Stay?” The blurb promises:

In the face of accelerating social and political polarization, we can learn to care for ourselves so we can stay present and participating in difficult dialogues, reaching the human being behind the position with sustained empathy and compassion. Demonstrations, role plays and discussion.

Meganwind Eoyang “Grew up fighting in inner city street gangs and later studied and taught martial arts.

The Guardian emailed yesterday asking if Michael could respond to a pretty extreme denunciation of Goldstone by Harold Evans, transatlantic superstar journalist (once voted the greatest newspaper editor of all time, married to Tina Brown, former editor of Vanity Fair and the New Yorker, etc.). Michael was given two hours to come up with a response, and he did so, voila:

A War Crime Whitewash

The global choir of ethical cretins who condemn Goldstone’s Gaza report do Israel no favours

By Michael Lerner

I recently met a leading representative of the foreign ministry of Israel who acknowledged to me “off the record” that Israel had made a tremendous blunder in refusing to cooperate with the UN Commission led by Judge Richard Goldstone, which investigated the charges of Israeli and Palestinian war crimes in the invasion of Gaza last December and January. Judge Goldstone, an internationally respected jurist whose Zionist credentials include being a member of the governing board of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, wanted to hear Israel’s account of what happened, but Israel blocked that inquiry so Goldstone could only report what the victims of Israel’s attacks sought to convey.

Unfortunately, Israel’s predictable choir of ethical cretins around the world have joined in condemning Goldstone and the UN instead of urging Israel to investigate the charges by creating an impartial, objective and open process in which the victims can testify and the perpetrators can be brought to justice.

For this week’s spiritual wisdom, I’d like to share with you a piece on Jewish mysticism that I wrote for the October 2009 issue of Radical Grace, a publication of the Center for Action and Contemplation.

JEWISH MYSTICISM

The Jewish Mystical tradition has as one of its central motifs the notion that God is in need of human beings, and that we are beings who need to be needed in the way that God needs us.

What God needs us for is both to be partner and proxy in healing the world.

To be God’s partner is an amazing task for humanity. The Kabbalistic text, the Zohar, describes God as the creator of the world in order to share His/Her love with another. It is this fundamental desire to be giving love and to be in love that is the central creative force of the universe, and the reason why it exists in the first place. And what kind of creature could love? Only one that participated with God in God’s essence as a free, self-determining, conscious, love-seeking and love-giving, generous and caring being. So when the angels came to complain to God, as was recorded in the Psalms, “What is Adam (human being) that Thou thinkest of him, the son of humanity that you recognize him?” they are told, according to a Midrash, that they, the angels, could not be God’s partner because they lack freedom, they are, by their very nature messengers of God who are fixed in their lives by the task that they have been given and have no capacity to be other than they are.

Let’s face it, when it comes to science fiction, Jews wrote the bible. And they wrote a lot else besides. Ursula Le Guin says that the Frankenstein myth (and Mary Shelley) are the mothers of invention of science fiction, and she may be right (she usually is). But the Frankenstein myth is a variant on the Golem story, the story of a man created without a human soul, and it goes back over a thousand years in Jewish folklore before Shelley created her version, on that dark and stormy night in Switzerland.

Isaac Asimov, the dean of the golden age of American science fiction, (or (better) speculative fiction, or (best) SF) was of course Jewish, born in a Russian shtetl. His first novel, “Pebble in the Sky”, deals with a stiff-necked and rebellious people facing the wrath of a galactic empire, with a central character called Joseph Schwartz. And there are lots of other fine Jewish SF writers, but that’s just data and boring. What are the deeper patterns of Jewish SF? Why bother reading it?

As I was writing the last post, about J Street and the Poet, the poet himself, Josh Healey, was sending this to us.

Israel, McCarthyism, & the Struggle for Real Dialogue
by Kevin Coval and Josh Healey

This weekend, J Street, a new Jewish “Pro-Israel, Pro-Peace” PAC and Washington-based organization is holding its first national conference. The two of us, along with another artist, were to perform and read poems at several sessions during the conference. Specifically, we were invited to lead a workshop on how culture and spoken word create democratic spaces that sift through difficult issues and ensure a multiplicity of voices are heard: and how that can be used to open up the Israel/Palestine debate. Instead, we have been censored and pushed out of that very debate.

This week, some right-wing blogs and pseudo-news organizations latched on to various lines of poems Josh wrote and churned the alarmist rumor mill saying that hateful anti-Israeli poets are keynote speakers at the J Street conference. This is not surprising. The radical right-wing, including the growing Jewish right-wing of this country and abroad, hates complex discourse, especially when it brings to light truths they seek to systematically deny. The Weekly Standard, Commentary, and their AIPAC-influenced brethren have been attacking J Street for weeks, scared that the conference will bring together the majority of American Jews who do favor a more rigorous peace process. When they found Josh’s poems and took lines out of context, they had the perfect straw man: the Van Jones to J Street’s Obama. Again, this is not surprising.

Poet Josh Healey: J Street's Van Jones? Photo by Natasha Mozgovaya of Haaretz

We all have a lot of hope for J Street as an Israel lobby that can counteract AIPAC and promote justice for the Palestinians, just as we all have a lot of hope for Obama as a president who can talk with “our enemies” and create a more caring and ecologically sane society at home. We forgive their efforts to capture the center by ditching any of their friends who appear troublesome, we forgive, we forgive, and we mourn because when you start throwing your friends overboard, you only let the opposition know you have little belief in your ship, and so your potential friends may not wish to board. It’s an old story that pundits keep pointing out, but the liberal left-of-center seems so shellshocked by thirty years of rightwing ascendancy that they just can’t act as if they were as strong as they are.

“So Van Jones resigned, but did the right wing stop attacking Obama?”

You know the answer to that. It didn’t, but Obama’s friends lost a little heart, a little confidence. The voice is that of Josh Healey, J Street’s equivalent to Van Jones. Healey is the poet they just removed from their conference line-up for pointing out some similarities between Guantanamo and Auschwitz. In an interview in Haaretz, Josh Healey explains this problem with centrists beautifully:

The worship committee at First Presbyterian Church Palo Alto wanted to try something new….. They asked four folks in the congregation to get together and plan one worship service each month for three months. This would help the staff by giving them a week when they could concentrate on other ministry work and could also add a bit of new spice to the Sunday worship experience. I’m on that little team (I’m a good Jewbyterian*) and last Sunday was our first crack at planning and carrying out worship.

This is provoked by Sam Ewell’s post, and also by Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove’s work on the economy, especially his recent article in the Christian Century called “Economics for Disciples. An alternative investment plan.” These New Monastics are challenging.

Sam wrote about borders that keep poor people out of rich countries, and about the limits to capitalist growth, and what these two kinds of boundaries might have in common. The word that came to my mind, that is often used about both, is ‘scarcity.’ When we think in terms of scarcity and are fearful about it, we tend to think about how to hoard what we have for ourselves and not let others share. When we think in terms of generosity and sharing, we tend to think how our and everyone’s security lies in the caring not the hoarding.

It’s really hard though to make the leap. When I read Jonathan’s piece about savings, it felt like a personal challenge to my own way of life. He started off:

When Jim Douglass graduated from college in 1960, his father sent him a life insurance policy as a graduation gift. It was an investment to help protect the future of Jim’s young family. Jim wrote his father a letter of thanks for the gift but returned the policy with his letter. He could not accept the gift, he wrote, because he wanted to understand the truth of an “economics of providence” that he had read about in the sixth chapter of Matthew’s Gospel. Rather than pay the monthly premiums on a life insurance policy, Jim said he would store up treasure in heaven by sending a monthly payment to provide basic care for a little girl in France.

I did something similar in my twenties. Now I’m 60 and I have savings: I am hoarding.

Here’s a great project worth cluing in on: Huffington Post’s effort at helping us all to trim down our fossil fuel use (intro by Arianna Huffington here). It’s inspiration, or hook, is the guy who tried to live a zero-waste lifestyle for a year in New York City with his young family: a great story if you haven’t read it (at left). Our own Zach Dorfman, Tikkun Daily blogger and former Tikkun staffer is hard at work on HuffPo’s No Impact Week, which is this week.

Zach asked us at the Tikkun office to think what we could do to trim down ourselves. We thought about it and checked off the things we are doing already.

All of us who are regular in the office commute by bike or on foot: I come furthest, five miles each way, along a lovely bike path under the BART tracks, where in spring I counted 185 crabapple trees in bloom. I can’t say enough about how refreshing it is to bike home after a long day’s work. I first discovered this in my twenties when I apprenticed as a carpenter after completing my doctorate, and was more physically exhausted at 5 pm every day than I had ever been: and I discovered to my amazement that when I took two buses the nine miles home over the Yorkshire hills (I worked in Leeds, lived in Bradford) I was dead for the evening, but when I biked, I came alive again. All you car commuters who could possibly bike: it’s a joy once you build up the muscles.

What else?

Think back to the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign.

One of the issues that generated a lot of heat was the immigration debate. While the debate touched on several other issues, such as unemployment and national identity, at its heart the debate centered on this: the rights of those who were not U.S. citizens but live within its borders, or of those who do live outside its borders and are trying to get in. After all, borders are there to establish who’s in and who’s out, right?

Now, fast forward nearly almost one year. Now, in the last quarter of 2009, the immigration debate has taken back seat to another debate: the debate over the global economy and climate change. As a prime example, consider the G-20 summit which took place earlier this year in London, where world leaders tried to figure out how to prop up and even stimulate the global economy without doing further damage to our terrestrial habitat.

If we compare the global economy to the Titanic, the main question that world leaders seem to be asking is not, Who should be allowed to enter the boat?, but rather How can we keep this boat from sinking?

I posted an action diary yesterday morning telling readers how they can become involved in the fight to pass a public option (with links). I encourage my readers to pressure Harry Reid to pass a public option.

Deborah Phelan asked a great question in the comment thread that merits a complete response. She asks:

One other issue I think needs addressing in this is why none of this legislation (correct me if I’m wrong) is going into effect until 2013….. That is 4 years away! Am I wrong? Are there just sections that don’t go into effect? And if this is true, why is there this rush to get legislation passed this year?
UN:F [1.5.4_809]

First of all, we need to pass the bill now because we can. We have the votes. Let’s not wait until the opportunity passes.

Secondly, insurance regulation will go into effect immediately.

Ezra Klein states that the delayed start up allows Congress to allocate $140 billion per year as opposed to $100 billion. Because congress and Obama have arbitrarily set a ceiling of $1 trillion over ten years, a start up date of 2013 allows Congress to spend more in perpetuity.

I believe there is a second at least equally important reason as well. The federal government is a huge bureaucracy and the infrastructure required for a program of this size is not in place. There are huge gaps in our delivery and information technology infrastructure.

I have noticed from comments on this and other blogs that many people seem to believe we have an excellent health care system that is only available to wealthy people. This is not true. We do not have an excellent health care system. We have no system at all.

To give you a few examples from my own experience:

Everyone knows that a meal in an expensive restaurant will probably taste better than a meal in a cheap restaurant, that a $5000 sofa will probably look better than a $500 sofa, or that a $500,000 house will probably be in a better location and be better built than a $50,000 house. Why is it then that Obama’s supporters are so convinced that cheaper health care will be better health care? There are at least four reasons to question their assumption.

First, medicine is not a hard science like physics or chemistry. It has a hard science dimension, but it is also a clinical practice, more akin to art in some ways than science. That means doctors sometimes have a “feel” that a certain test may be called for, even though the official protocol may not allow it. In other words, the doctor/patient relationship is at the core of health care and needs to supersede insurance companies as well as “outcome” studies aimed at cutting costs. Of course, the counterpart to that is that doctors need to be salaried, and not paid on a fee-for-service basis. So far as I know, this is not addressed in the present health plans.

Dr. Benjamin Rush, physician and signatory of the Declaration of Independence. From http://dodd.cmcvellore.ac.in/hom/Thumbnails.html

The American Revolution continues.

This is important to remember as we continue the debate about health care and the other challenges we face in the United States. In his “Address to the People of the United States,” June 3, 1786, Benjamin Rush, political radical, physician, signer of the Declaration of Independence, drew the distinction between the end of the Revolutionary War and the end of the revolution. Rush observed: “It remains yet to establish and perfect our new forms of government; and to prepare the principles, morals, and manners of our citizens for these forms of government, after they are established and brought to perfection.”(­Founding America: Documents from the Revolution to the Bill of Rights)

He was writing during the interim between the Articles of Confederation and the establishment of the Constitution of the United States. He was writing at a moment when people were still digesting the meaning of liberty and thinking about how a representative democracy without a monarch would function. It was a moment when political radicals were still thinking through the meaning of liberty and tyranny. Rush understood that “the temple of tyranny has two doors.” The Declaration of Independence and the Revolutionary War closed the door to monarchical tyranny. That was not enough: “we left the other door open, by neglecting to guard against the effects of our own ignorance and licentiousness.”

CNBC interrupted its usual program today for a shocking bit of breaking news: the U.S. Chamber of Commerce had decided to stop opposing the Kerry-Boxer climate bill and instead “throw its weight behind strong climate legislation.”

What great news! Could it be true?

In this case, it wasn’t: the Chamber’s supposed about-face was concocted by the Yes Men, a clever group of activist pranksters whose new movie, “The Yes Men Fix the World,” hits theaters nationwide this week. By snookering numerous media agencies, the Yes Men managed to shift the public’s sense of the possible.

Has any bishop said a wiser thing about marriage and the separation of church and state than this?

Bishop Gene Robinson very simply and clearly points out that marriage is a civil act that the state deputizes clergy to perform. But it doesn’t deputize them to end it: you have to go to the courts for that. And of course you don’t need clergy to perform the wedding in the first place. He is going to ask his clergy in Maine New Hampshire [edit thanks to the comment below] to stop performing the civil part of weddings. Instead, he will suggest to them that they get a Justice of the Peace in their congregation to do the state’s work, to actually marry the couple, and then the clergy can bless the union.

The interview is by Adam Bink of Open Left and his post about it is here.

Marriage Equality rally in a Maine church, from Open Left's blog

Here’s a wonderful thing. Adam Bink at Open Left, which is the best left political blog that I know of, has gone up to Maine to write about the campaign for marriage equality. And what was he surprised to find? Religious activists for equality. A lot of them.

First some background, from ActBlue which went to the progressive netroots to ask for money for ‘No on 1′:

No on 1 / Protect Maine Equality

Marriage equality was passed by the Maine state legislature this year, and signed into law by Gov. Baldacci. It’s been put to a ballot vote by right-wing hate groups, and will be voted on Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009.

We have to stop it from becoming another Prop 8. If the right-wing achieves two high-profile attempts to repeal marriage, it will depress our side’s enthusiasm, embolden hate groups to trumpet their success, and pour more money into the campaign to strip LGBT married couples of their rights.

The Catholic Diocese, Focus on the Family, the Mormons, and the Knights of Columbus have already poured in hundreds of thousands of dollars. Your contribution will ensure our side has the resources to compete. Please give to protect LGBT married couples, and deliver a blow to the right-wingers.

ActBlue and associated netroots people have so far raised over a million dollars for ‘No on 1′: amazing, and here’s a video I loved of grassroots activists thanking the netroots for doing it (you won’t get all the names and allusions to organizations in it — I didn’t — but you’ll get a feel for ordinary people doing political work with energy and heart).

So back to Adam Bink going up there to report on what all this money he and others have raised is doing. Will it defeat the Catholics and Mormons, who won in California? And this is what he found:

At The Immanent Frame, eminent philosopher Charles Taylor reflects on the life and work of his colleague Jürgen Habermas:

Jürgen Habermas is known in the world of analytic philosophy primarily as a moral and political philosopher. He has striven against a slide which has often seemed plausible and tempting for modern thinkers, that towards a certain relativism or subjectivism in morals. The difficulty of establishing firm ethical conclusions in the midst of vigorous debate among rival doctrines, particularly when these disputes are contrasted to those among natural scientists can all too easily push us to the conclusion that there is no fact of the matter here, that ethical doctrines are not a matter of knowledge, but only of emotional reaction or subjective projection, that the issues here are not cognitive.

[...]

The alternative route which he explored was that which makes the rationality of ethical conclusions a function of the rationality of the deliberation which produces them. A deliberation is rational if it meets certain formal requirements. This is, of course, the route which was pioneered by Kant. But Habermas made a revolutionary change in this tradition. Whereas for Kant the principal criterion of a rational and therefore defensible deliberation was that it was sought universalizable maxims, for Habermas the very notion of deliberation is transformed. Following Kant a lone reasoner can work out what maxims can be the objects of a universal will. But Habermas introduces the dialogical dimension. The ultimately acceptable norms are those which can pass the test of acceptance by all those who would be affected by them.

Continue reading at The Immanent Frame.

The battle for health care reform remains fluid. Various proposals have been working their way through Congress. At each stage of the process, a different sort of concerted action is required to insure a meaningful bill and a robust public option. We have reached another critical juncture, and your help is badly needed.

After sitting on its hands for months, Senate Finance finally passed a bill out of committee last week, enabling the process to move forward. At this point in the Senate, the Finance proposal (which is the weakest and perhaps most expensive of all the draft bills) must be merged with the bill drafted by the Senate HELP (Health, Education, Labor and Pensions) Committee. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid will be key to our success.

Here are some facts, links and tools that will help you to contribute to our effort.

1) The bills will be merged behind closed doors by a small team composed of three Senators and a few top White House Aids. Politico reports that Reid is limiting participation to Senator Chris Dodd (who helped usher a bill through HELP), Senator Max Baucus (of finance), himself and the White House. Senator Dodd has been outspoken in his support for the public option. Senator Baucus has been notable for his obstructionism and chumminess with insurers. If we want to influence the bill, we need to focus on Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid.

2) There is already an organized means of doing so. Reid is currently polling poorly in Nevada which has been hard hit by the recession, and which is ranked among the bottom ten in terms of health care provision. Congressman Alan (“the Republican Health Care Plan is to die quickly”) Grayson recently delivered a petition with 90,000 signatores (and presumably, 90,000 potential donors to a primary challenge) to the office of Harry Reid. The Progressive Change Campaign Committee (PCCC), a project of ActBlue and the originators of the petition, are raising funds to air television ads for the public option in Nevada. Here is one of their ads:

You can donate in order to air this ad in Nevada here.

And, if you have a few moments, you can watch Alan Grayson and PCCC deliver their petition, which demands that Reid revoke the chairmanship of any democrat who does not vote to block a fillibuster of the public option:

You can also call Harry Reid’s office directly to inform him, that if he does not produce and pass a bill with a robust public option, you will donate money towards a democratic challenger in the next primary. His phone number is 202-224-3542.

Happy calling! (And don’t forget to pass this link along to all of your friends!)

Am too delighted with this cartoon and too short of time and energy to find out if I can post it here, so it may come down tomorrow. But then you can find it at http://www.credoaction.com/comics/. Tom Tomorrow’s blog is here.

Later: reading the New York Times op-ed page today I find this, by Bono, no less:

So here’s why I think the virtual Obama is the real Obama, and why I think the man might deserve the hype.

Read the rest. The parts about Obama saying he wants to end extreme poverty. Bono’s mention of the Marshall Plan. These guys been reading Tikkun again?

Whenever I am in a really good movement class, be it yoga or Nia or some other type of dance, I become grounded in my body and feel connected to The Force of the Universe in such a direct and visceral way. My movement then becomes a prayer practice – a process that wakes up every part of me, shakes off the dust, fills me with energy, and allows me to connect to something greater than myself. However, alive and energized from the movement, I often leave these experiences longing for a way to connect these moments of resonance to my Jewish prayer practice. I feel a profundity that I yearn to share in a community of shared language and experiences.

At the same time, as I sit and stand and bow, singing and chanting my way through traditional Jewish prayer, I often feel as though I am only engaging from my shoulders up. After exercising my brain at school all day, I arrive for prayer in the morning and sometimes have a hard time differentiating it from my classes. On the one hand, our liturgy is poetic, beautiful and moving, and the service is designed to bring us into deeper awareness and to enhance our capacity for gratitude. On the other hand, traditional Jewish prayer is so full of words that it can feel like an intellectual exercise rather than a method for connecting to the Divine.

Fortunately for me, there are students and teachers who resonate with this dissonance and who are interested in going deeper to see if we can begin to weave threads of connection between the two practices.