Many have praised Obama’s Nobel Prize speech, but few have read it with critical attention. The speech is actually two speeches artfully woven together. One, which is unexceptionable, concerns war in general, its place in human society. The second concerns the USA, its place in the history of war. In equating the US with the world, Obama repeated a trope used by many Presidents (Franklin Roosevelt was an exception). However, this sliding between the US and the world leads the speech into three major contradictions which can be seen 1) in the awarding of the Prize in the first place, and in Obama’s acceptance of it, 2) in the intellectual framework of the acceptance speech, and its presumed audience and 3) in the content of the speech.

The first act that set everything askew was the awarding of the Prize in the first place. Nobel Peace prizes are given for positive accomplishments, such as the negotiation of a treaty or the banning of a weapon. Obama received his prize not for anything he had done, but for what he was not, namely Bush or, more precisely, Cheney. Thorbjørn Jadland, the head of the Committee, actually stated this in an interview. But if the Prize is given for the repudiation of something bad in the past, why did not the later Bush get it for repudiating the mistakes of his first two years. Why didn’t Gates get it for not being Rumsfeld? Why didn’t Nikita Khruschev receive the prize in 1956 for his repudiation of Stalin, a far more thorough break than Obama ever made with Bush? In fact, the prize was a craven kow-tow to the American President expressing the hope that he will not only talk but act for peace, which he certainly has not.

The second distortion of the speech lay in its framework and audience.

“Nice guys finish last.” That’s what we believe in this country. Without that assumption, advertisers couldn’t sell their latest energy drink and “Turn Boys into Monsters” as Derrick Kikuchi told us yesterday. Because of this notion, boys are besieged with images from marketers and the media that they have to compete rather than cooperate, go for the selfish power play rather than take part in the team, and become a macho man rather than a pansy. It’s every man for himself, these commercials say. If you don’t look out for number one, you’ll lose.

Well, it turns out that we’ve got it all backwards in this patriarchal, heterosexist, individualistic, might-makes-right society. And I have to add, “Thank goodness!” Because as a woman, many people assume that I throw like a sissy before anyone even tosses me the ball.

Scientific evidence has been accumulating over the last twenty years that shows what should have been common sense before now — that instead of being hard-wired to be selfish, human beings have evolved to be compassionate and collaborative. The social scientists fostering this research call their new understanding “survival of the kindest” to distinguish it from the social Darwinism of the past. They’re showing that we’ve been successful as a species precisely because of our altruism, nurturance, and compassion.

Die Pflaumen reifen im September, by Gennady Karabinskiy

Maybe the first time I became excited about Michael Lerner’s ideas, and certainly the first time I wrote about him, was when I read a piece by him about Chanukah. As I wrote then (only 2003 but it seems a very long time ago):

The “first national liberation struggle in recorded history,” writes Michael Lerner, was that of the Jewish Maccabees against the Hellenic tyrant, Antiochus. Many Hellenising Jews had accepted his rule. Lerner writes, (my italics):

To fight against superior military force was totally illogical and unrealistic from the Hellenisers’ standpoint. But the Maccabees rejected assessments of ‘realism’ that derived from the framework imposed by the imperialists, and drew instead upon the Jewish religion and the stubborn spirit of a people who had come to believe that every human being was created in the divine image, hence had a right to be treated with respect and decency. These were people who could not submit to the rule of the imperialist, and whose religion taught them that they need not, because the central Power of the universe was a power that rejected the reality of oppression. The Torah told the tale of their origins in a slave rebellion against another imperialist power thought to be invincible – Egypt of the Pharaohs.”

I read that on some other website now long gone, not at Tikkun’s site. Now I know it is from a supplement that Tikkun publishes every year at Chanukah in our Nov/Dec issue, which you can download as a pdf here. The image above comes from this year’s version of the supplement.

If you are in the San Francisco Bay Area you are warmly invited to come celebrate Chanukah with Michael Lerner’s community at Beyt Tikkun synagogue-without-walls meeting in SF and Berkeley on Saturday evening, December 12.

I’ve decided to take Dave Belden up on his challenge Imagine a Time When the Eco-Crisis is Over: Then Tell Us How We Got There? and address one aspect of how necessary behavioral change was achieved. Imagine if we got to a point where the realized threat of climate change to our own personal health and well-being and the health and well-being of our children was so ingrained in us that we would even consider a carbon footprint tax as a realistic revenue source for California? What if we got to a place that our understanding of ecology was such a given that a carbon footprint tax would even be popular and acceptable to the bipartisan leadership of this country with almost 1/2 of the Republicans supporting it?

It is a question of intentionality.

I say and say again that what we see, where we direct our attention, depends upon a fusion of past, present and future horizons.  We do not all share the same understanding of humanity’s past and present.  We do not all share the same vision for its future. Much of the initial reporting and commentary surrounding President Obama’s Nobel lecture focused on his explication of just war theory and read his remarks as a defense of his sending more warriors into Afghanistan.  This is understandable.  Just war theory is thousands of years old. The United States has been engaged in perpetual warfare since its birth.  A vast majority of people do not know just peace theory.

However,   these initial reports failed to note President Obama’s emphasis on just peace principles.  They failed to recognize his call for an expanded moral imagination.  They failed to acknowledge the logic of the Nobel Peace Prize Committee in giving the honor to President Obama.  They failed to understand the character of the prize:  an instrument of peace intended to inspire us all.

I owe an apology to all you Tikkunistas out there for my prolonged silence on health care issues at such an important time. My organization has received two new health care grants through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and I am snowed under with work. Coincidentally, I am also snowed under with snow which knocked out my internet and made it difficult to retrieve children from various undisclosed locations.

However, I’m back. I hope to blog soon about some of my personal adventures in healthcare reform. And about a few little known and very arcane regulation changes that will make a huge difference.

But tonight I will limit myself to a few very brief words about the Senate’s Health Care compromise. Of course, the devil is in the details and I haven’t seen them yet. But I like the bits and pieces that have leaked out.

Here they are:

Hi all! I wanted to share with you a recent piece I wrote for the Theology of Prayer class I am currently taking with Rabbi Art Green. This piece is another segment in the exploration of traditional Jewish prayer and embodiment.

For those who are unfamiliar with the framework and language of traditional Jewish prayer, the “Amidah,” which I am writing about in this piece, is known as “the standing prayer,” “the silent prayer,” or sometimes even just “the prayer.” It is the central point of the traditional service, the crescendo in a long flow of liturgy. Traditional Jews recite the Amidah three times a day. In rabbinic literature there is a set posture for the Amidah: standing, and an established choreography that one follows throughout the 19 blessings that make up this prayer.

* * *

As we approach the Amidah during this morning’s tefillah I want to offer one way of expanding our connection to this foundational prayer of our davening. Not only does this prayer give us an opportunity to approach the Divine through the framework of tradition, history, and community, but it also allows us to come into deeper relationship with our own physical form as a means of accessing Gd.

During a discussion in the Talmud, the rabbis ask what it is that establishes the number of brachot we have in the Amidah. To this question, three possible answers are given. The first two responses say that the number of benedictions reflects the number of times the Divine name is mentioned in David’s Psalm 29, or the number of mentions of Gd’s name in the Shema. Both of these answers use textual evidence as their basis. The third answer given seems in stark contrast to the first two. Rather than citing a biblical passage, Rav Tanchum says in the name of Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi that the number of blessings is related to the number of vertebrae in the human spine.

Through these answers, three paradigms are given for understanding prayer. From the first, we understand prayer as an ancestral paradigm, connected to our past and future. The second ties prayer to a revealed paradigm, linking it to Torah. From the third, prayer is seen as a personal paradigm, connected to our bodies.

First we had the case of a Jewish woman arrested for praying at the Western Wall while wearing a tallit, or prayer shawl, which Abby Caplin blogged about here. Now we have an unrelated case of a Jewish woman and her father arrested at the Temple Mount (known by Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary) on the day before her wedding because the father was thought to be “moving his lips” in presumed prayer. I’m not going to comment on why non-Muslim prayer is prohibited at the site–that’s a different issue. I just wanted to draw attention to the comments made by the woman’s brother, himself a guide at the Temple Mount, who fulminated against Muslims (and against the Israeli government for abiding by their wishes in this case) by saying that, “It is unheard of to arrest someone just for praying in their own religion.” Perhaps he hadn’t heard that if his sister wanted to pray wearing a tallit at the Western Wall…

About the Western Wall, there’s action afoot. Abby Caplin writes me:

As many of you know, medical student Nofrat Frenkel was arrested at the Kotel on November 18th, 2009 for the “crime” of praying while wearing a tallit. In response, a special shacharit service will be held—Sunday January 10, 2010, from 10-11:30 AM. Women and men will daven Shacharit together while wearing kippot, tallitot and t’fillin (no requirement, all individual styles welcomed) at Union Square in San Francisco. We will begin promptly at 10 am. This shacharit service is one of many being held in town squares across the United States on this date, in support of Women of the Wall (WOW). The service will include a group “donning of the tallitot and t’fillin,” prayers and singing. Contact person: Abby Caplin, MD RSVP: 415-255-9981.

“I love beautiful things and beautiful artwork so my first goal is to create that in my own way.” – Kim Keever

The feeling I have when I view one of Kim Keever’s photographs is one of serenity and astonishment at the richness of earth’s wilderness. Then I realize Keever’s process and serenity turns to irony, that a manufactured landscape has made me feel so heart-warmed.

The nature scenes in Keever’s photographs are constructed by Keever inside of a 200-gallon tank in his studio in New York City. He fills the tank with water, submerging the miniature landscape. Then, illuminating the scene with colored lights from outside the tank, Keever adds paint to the water, creating a temporary, vibrant, colorful, dynamic environment that he quickly photographs.

(To see more of Kim Keever’s work, visit the Tikkun Daily Art Gallery.)

I feel a little like I am visiting the zoo. Like the manufactured realms built for elephants and tigers in the heart of many cities, Keever creates enclosed, controlled nature spaces for humans to look at. They can enjoy them in relative calm and detachment even though they have failed to protect such spaces in the wild.

This story is a dramatic example of the increasing pressure European Muslims face, as rightwing nationalism makes its grim resurgence.

What is especially troubling is how this political tension is affecting the lives of children and teenagers. No one should have to go through her or his own mini-Kristallnacht at a school, field trip or school event.

The anti-Islamophobia site LoonWatch.com, citing The Croatian Times, has reported the following incident:

Two schoolgirls are to be expelled after setting a Muslim girl’s hijab headscarf on fire during a school trip.

The 15-year-old girls, from Graz, Austria, escaped race hate charges by claiming the attack was a prank and not related to the victim’s religion.

LoonWatch goes on to quote an article in The Austrian News, commenting on this incident, discussing how it reflects growing insecurity among Muslim Austrian girls and women who choose to wear hijab.

Friend and colleague, Amy Jussel wrote a wonderful article titled “Turning Boys Into Monsters: Energy Drink Leaves A Foul Taste (Again)” today on her blog ShapingYouth.org.

Amy writes, “With everything from motocross and macho madness to the thumping, screaming, over the top rebel yell, Monster ‘packs a vicious punch’ by creating lil’ monsters out of the male middle-school set without a clue (or a care) as to the impact of the jolt and crash ‘kick ass flavor’ to their adolescent bods. Wow. I feel like I got a testosterone infusion just reading the freakin’ label…”

Besides writing about the obvious health implications of energy drinks on developing adolescent or even adult bodies, the article primarily focuses on the hype and specifically male gender-targeted marketing and messaging that is being used.

Michael Lerner in the Sydney Morning Herald. Interesting picture: Australian excitement at finding a radical American rabbi?

“From jail to the White House, rabbi gets his message across” reads the headline in the Sydney Morning Herald.

RABBI Michael Lerner sports a small lapel pin. It is the paired flags of Israel and Palestine, with the words ”Justice Peace Life” emblazoned beneath: heavy political baggage for a little ornament.

It says a lot about its wearer, a controversial Jewish intellectual and prolific author who is also the spiritual leader at a San Francisco synagogue.

And here he is being interviewed on the Late Night Live national radio show. Listen here. He covers a lot of ground about Obama, Afghanistan, Israel, Palestine, and more.

Michael has gone as a speaker at the Parliament of the World Religions. He is on various panels and platforms, and presenting this seminar:

Spiritual Progressives: Networking Towards a New Bottom Line

Spiritual progressives are all those (including ‘spiritual-but-not-religious’ people) who seek a New Bottom Line. Institutions, corporations, laws and government policies, educational, legal and health systems, and even our personal lives should be defined as ‘productive’, ‘efficient’ or ‘rational’ not only to the extent that they maximize money or power (the Old Bottom Line), but also to the extent that they maximize the human capacity to be loving, caring, kind, generous, ethically and ecologically sensitive, aware of the sacred in other sentient beings, and capable of responding with awe, wonder and radical amazement at the grandeur and mystery of Creation. Rabbi Michael Lerner invites participants to a meeting to discuss how to build a network of spiritual progressives within their own denominations, religious communities, academic communities or local places of worship or work.

I posted a draft yesterday by Jason Hamza van Boom that wasn’t ready to go – my fault entirely. So if you are looking for that post that was up and has mysteriously disappeared, that’s the reason. My sincere apologies to Hamza.

Josh Stanton’s post about Sexy Jewish Stereotypes was not just the most popular post of last week on Tikkun Daily: it actually overtook Rabbi Lerner’s Israel as Idolatry to become the third most popular post of all time on this blog, behind two about health care (here and here).

The post featured a photo of a young Jewish woman in expensive blond hairdo, pink tiger-striped top and leather pants.

Hmmm. What does this say about our readers? Happy for young Jewish women to be free and finally approved by the wider society as hot? Or just in need of some eye candy in a spiritually approved context (it’s on Tikkun after all, it must be permissable)?

What? I’m not sounding happy about this post? Am I some kind of puritan or something? I don’t want young women to be liberated in their sexuality? Or men (in particular) to have pleasure in looking?

Let’s do the “liberated in their sexuality” bit first. Here’s a wise comment about the “sexual revolution” that my generation launched, that comes from the pages of Tikkun and is more representative of our attitudes. It was written in 1988 but is entirely relevant today:

If we came of age in the 1960s, we were told that sexual revolution presaged the total transformation of society;

At The Immanent Frame, Nathan Schneider interviews Mark Johnson, Executive Director of the Fellowship of Reconciliation:

NS: How is the FOR’s religious identity evolving today?

MJ: We’re forced to ask ourselves what it means to do peacemaking in an interreligious—or even a secular—world. There’s quite a bit of anxiety among many people, who are asking, if the community consciously opens itself more broadly to humanists and avowed atheists, what confidence do we have that we will share basic values in common? But you can argue, I think, that atheism or agnosticism or humanism are as much religions as any denomination or sect in terms of having an identifiable set of values and, eventually, sets of rituals that shape how people think about and act in the world. A lot of what we struggle with is simply a matter of words. I love Charles Taylor’s arguments about the emergence of the secular age. We’re also reading Peter Berger and Anton Zijderveld’s very nice new book, In Praise of Doubt. Doubt lies at the heart of the practice of pacifism. You can never know, ultimately, how you’re going to respond when confronted by violence. Absent a total conviction or confidence that you’ll act nonviolently, can you characterize yourself as a pacifist? Part of the conversation that we’re having, also, is about how doubt can create the space for being more accepting of more people.

Read the entire interview at The Immanent Frame.

Regardless of whether or not Obama is making the right decision in regards to Afghanistan, isn’t it disconcerting that there are 30,000 extra military personnel who are available to be sent to Afghanistan? For those of us who do not support armed conflict and want to see an end to violence perpetrated by our government, we might want to start thinking about how to keep people out of the military in the first place. Starve the beast, so to speak.

I know a lot of good people who have been deployed, and I also know that very few if any of them enlisted because they supported a specific military cause or ideology. They put their lives at risk, because, for many of them, joining the armed forces is their best chance at receiving a college education, professional training, or a decent paycheck.

If we really supported the men and women who make up our troops, we would support alternative paths for them to pursue that do not involve shooting or being shot at. If the army can financially support a soldier during training, while on active duty, and put them through college, not to mention hefty signing bonuses, wouldn’t it be saving money (and lives) to just put that person through college?

About a month ago, Bill Moyers called for a reinstatement of the draft in order to curb the numbers of troops being deployed. He argued that Congress would be more hesitant to send men and women into battle if more of our military came from their own middle or upper class communities. Our politicians are largely out of touch with the undereducated or economically disadvantaged communities that are willing to risk their lives for an education.

I definitely don’t support a draft, but I agree with Moyers that we need to stop exploiting the underprivileged and their desire to better themselves. He wants to displace some of them with financial analysts and bankers. I say staunch the flow altogether by providing alternate means to a better future. Then maybe we’ll see a decrease in armed conflict. You can’t wage a war without soldiers.

Photo Credit: CINDY SKOP | THE LEDGER - Click to see slideshow

The Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) led over 500 farm workers and their allies to Lakeland, Fl. yesterday to protest Publix Super Market’s tomato purchasing policies. In recent years the CIW has through boycott and protest managed to bring Taco Bell, Yum Brands, McDonalds, Burger King, Whole Foods and Subway to the bargaining table. Not surprisingly Publix is adopting the same strategy as many of these previous corporations and denying responsibility. I have followed this story closely for years and it is my opinion that it is only a matter of time before Publix gives in. The Ledger.com has the story:

The Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) wants Lakeland-based Publix and other food retailers to pay an additional penny per pound for tomatoes from Florida and break ties with suppliers who abuse workers.

Publix spokeswoman Shannon Patten maintained Sunday what has become the company’s standard response to protesters: the state’s largest grocer does not want to become involved in what it calls a labor dispute between others. “This is a labor dispute between the farm workers and the farmers, and not something Publix is going to get involved in,” she said. “It’s disappointing that they want to tarnish our reputation.”

But organizers say their issue isn’t about a labor dispute.

“We won’t stop until Publix makes good on its promises to support families,” said Lucas Benitez, a CIW organizer. “The existence of a labor dispute only exists in Publix’s imagination.”

Place Setting from Judy Chicago's "Dinner Party"

When I take a vacation, I love the freedom it offers. And the experiences I would otherwise miss. This time those events included hearing our daughter Linnea sing and play drums with her band Lights (magnificently, I might add). They were at the end of their eastern tour and it was her 28th birthday, so all-round it was a unique occasion. If you want to hear (and see) them, check out their music video. (Linnea’s the drummer. She faces directly into the camera in the first frame with faces, and her music partner Sophia Knapp is in profile on the left). They’re now on their southern tour, so go see them if you’re nearby. Here’s the schedule.

This was a special time for both sides of the generational divide. I’m a proud mama and surprised as well, because in her youth, it didn’t look like Linnea’s future included composing songs for a rock band. And during the concert, I heard my daughter exclaim in exuberant tones that all her best Brooklyn buddies were there “with her parents in the front row!” We think she’s amazing, and I guess she returns the favor.

Besides wonderful ethnic food, which we always savor while in NYC — this year the best was a sushi fusion outing — we also spent time enjoying the Dinner Party. This installation is perhaps THE iconic artwork of twentieth century feminism. Judy Chicago envisioned and designed much of it, and hundreds of other women helped her create the runners and ceramic pieces that adorn the triangular banquet table that pays homage to 39 historical and mythical women. It took all of them five years to complete this gargantuan project, and when it came out in 1979, the entire feminist community was breathless with anticipation. I’ve seen photos of most of the place settings, but I had never been in the presence of the entire dinner party. I say “in the presence,” because that’s what it felt like. As I walked through the banners that led into the banquet hall, I began to tear up, overwhelmed with the immensity of what I was about to experience.

The Copenhagen Climate Conference is under way. Our focus is on what can be achieved this week. But I want to ask you, the reader, this:

Do you have any vision in mind for how we might really get past this huge crisis about our human behavior on this planet?

Imagine a time when there is only mopping up to do, but everyone agrees that the big crisis is past. We have learned our place on the planet. We are living within sustainable limits. It may be 100 years from now or 250 or some other time, whatever seems viable to you. Then tell us: how did we get there?

One sentence answers like “we had a revolution” or “we all achieved spiritual consciousness” are not too interesting to me. I’m interested in history, in the way things have actually developed, the revolutions that actually happened, the changes in spiritual and psychological consciousness that actually have happened. I’d like to know your vision about how things could get from here to the place we need to go.

I’m not well read in the eco-literature. Perhaps you are and are convinced by the ideas that are laid out in a book or website you can direct us to. Please do, or tell us the thinkers from whom you take this piece and that piece and put together a vision of our future path.

Some questions:

• Can reforms mount up that are fast enough and deep enough that our system evolves into sustainability? If so, how?
• Or is some radical break necessary, comparable to the political revolutions of the past?
• Do we have to imagine some radical movement towards a new kind of human being who is caring and unselfish, or can we get there with our pretty much unreconstructed human nature and the psychological tools for it that we already have?
• Do we have to develop new psychological / spiritual tools?
• Can an ecologically sensitive culture emerge and has such a cultural change ever happened in history that gives you hope that this one can?

Our friend Rick Charnes of the Boston Tikkun Community wrote us this post:

Reactions to Obama’s War Speech

by Rick Charnes

I’ve been very interested in following the reaction to Obama’s Afghan speech on Tuesday night. A frequent theme seems to be that though many people aren’t particularly happy about the escalation, they feel that Obama had no other choice.

We’re of course all familiar with this line of thinking: the Republicans would come down at him too hard otherwise; we need him to win re-election in 2012 and he’d probably lose if he pulled out; etc, etc.

And in Thursday’s NY Times article “Obama’s War Speech Wins Over Some Skeptics” we see this theme reiterated. A Democratic voter is quoted to the effect that though she didn’t want the US to send more troops to Afghanistan, after listening to Obama she “now believes he has no choice”.

It painfully strikes me that Obama (or any president?) really doesn’t need to convince anyone of the correctness of his strategy, that it was the most effective, or that it would work. All he has to do is convince us that he had no choice. Sadly, he needs only to convince us of his own powerlessness. Obama himself of course doesn’t need to draw our attention to this lack of choice; this ‘understanding’ is fairly ubiquitous among Americans. We all ‘sense’ it and agree with it on some level. It forms the basis for our political opinions.

So much of our economic policy is also based on this same ‘understanding’ of our powerlessness.