This week’s spiritual wisdom is a prayer written by the Reverend Samuel F. Pugh (1904-2007):

Crossposted on The Daily Kos and on AlterNet.

In the months before my mother suffered her first obvious psychotic break and my family shattered like glass, I woke up in the middle of the night and realized that my brother, sisters and I had been left alone. At six, I was the oldest. My siblings were four, three and one.

It was the first time I was called to political action. It was the moment I realized something in our home was terribly, irretrievably wrong.

During a recent inventory count in the bar where I work, I was surprised to see my boss taking sips from various juice bottles in order to determine their contents. He later revealed to me that he is colorblind.

This revelation that someone I interact closely with every day literally does not see the world the same way I do made me question some things, the least of which concerned who should count bar juices from now on. I realized that in my role as someone who writes about art I have taken for granted that my experience of color is the same, or nearly the same as everyone else’s. I wonder now in what other ways people experience art differently than I do. Do we all see shading the same way? Do we see shapes the same? Are some of us blind to levels of meaning the way my boss cannot see levels of color?

Consider the inspired work of Peter Lewis. The color palette conjures a mixture of psychedelia and the colors of the flags of Africa, evoking in me feelings of mind-expansion, rebellion, and human interconnectedness.

(Head Creator, oil on canvas. To see more of Peter lewis’ work, visit the Tikkun Art Gallery.)

Hundreds of warm voices rang out Monday at the University of San Francisco as spiritual progressives sang together and debated how best to push our society toward a vision of economic justice, environmental sustainability, ethically oriented institutions, and a foreign policy based on generosity rather than militarism.

Hosted by the Network of Spiritual Progressives and Tikkun, the one-day conference in San Francisco included in-depth strategy sessions about how to develop a constitutional amendment to establish that corporations are not persons and how to support Obama while pushing him to live up to his progressive campaign promises. You can read Michael Lerner’s report on the conference to learn more about the proposed amendment and discussions about it. Here are some photos to give a feel for the event itself:

Medea Benjamin speaks at the Feb. 15 NSP conference in San Francisco.

This first appeared on Huffington Post:

Close to 600 people in the San Francisco Bay Area gave up their President’s Day Monday vacation to spend some nine hours in a “Strategy Conference for Liberals and Progressives” to address “How To Support Obama to BE the Obama Americans Thought We Elected” and “How to Launch a Constitutional Amendment to Restrain Corporate Power” after the Supreme Court’s recent decision to allow unrestrained corporate spending on elections.

For many, just being in the context where this discussion was happening in a face-to-face encounter with others, rather than as isolated individuals reading it on a computer monitor, seemed an important step toward re-empowerment. Many are suffering from post-traumatic Obama abandonment syndrome — an ailment that came from being severely traumatized by Obama’s political moves in the past thirteen months. A palpable sadness, depression, anger and even despair carried by many who had worked for Obama and now felt betrayed by his choices in his first year in office was mixed with compassion and a strong determination to not allow the political Right to use our despair as their ticket to a political revival. The conference was conceived by Tikkun Magazine and its interfaith Network of Spiritual Progressives (including secular humanists and atheists who consider themselves “spiritual but NOT religious”) as a way to allow people who have been having these feelings privately to both receive the comfort of sharing those feelings with other liberals and progressives, and then to move beyond them to actually face the critical question: “What do we in the liberal and progressive world do now, if we face three, or hopefully seven, years of an Obama presidency?”

History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.
Karl Marx

Growing with two parents who escaped the Holocaust, from Germany and from Austria, there was no ambiguity in my mind about Adolph Hitler or the Holocaust. He was evil, to an extent beyond any other person, and the Holocaust was an event, sui generis, beyond any other event. For years my dreams were inhabited by desperate attempts to escape jackbooted storm troopers who were searching for me, or trying to survive after having been captured by them. I was horrified at other evils, but this lay beyond them, as the far marker of human cruelty

In political debate that made me very wary of cheap comparisons to the Nazis or Hitler. I’m not alone in that of course: Godwin’s Law, created by Mike Godwin, famously states that, “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.” and goes on to note that whoever raises the comparison is considered to have lost the debate. (The technical term for this logical fallacy is “Reductio ad Hitlerum” Really.)

But the problem with that moral stance, viewing Hitler as an evil beyond all other human possibility, is that it diminishes the chance of our recognizing or preventing such evil from occurring again.

I’ve been organizing two Starhawk workshops here in Madison, so that’s why I haven’t been blogging recently. That’s the bad news. But the good news is that I hope to include an interview with her on this site in about two weeks. Who knows whether she’ll talk about Israel and Palestine, permaculture, the WTO, Wicca, or all of the above. She’s a multifaceted person, and the interveiw may be wide-ranging.

In other pagan news, many of you know that the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs had a problem with religious bigotry about five years back. Evangelical Christian cadets harassed other cadets who didn’t share their faith. There were anti-semitic slurs. And one of the chaplains claimed she was fired for criticizing the proselytizing that was going on. Even the Yale Divinity School issued a report on religious intolerance at the academy.

After much work to correct these problems, there seems to be greater openness in Colorado. In a few weeks, Earth-centered religions– including Wicca, Neopaganism, and Druidism — will dedicate their own worship space. This sacred site will increase the collection of worship areas at the academy that already includes Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, and Buddhist chapels. As opposed to the other indoor areas, the pagan site is a lovely stone circle on the top of nearby hill overlooking the academy. It was created by moving some large boulders that originally sat near the Visitor Center. Here’s what it looks like:

On the eve of her departure for an official visit to Israel, Rabbi Julie Schonfeld, the first female leader (executive vice president) of the Rabbinical Assembly, the international association of Conservative rabbis, reflects on the perils facing her — and other women — whose custom is to pray wrapped in a tallit — the traditional Jewish prayer shawl.

What will happen when my sons are old enough to accompany me to Israel, where I will attend the Conference of Presidents’ annual Mission next week? A highlight of every trip to Israel is a visit to the Kotel, the symbolic site of Jewish yearning for centuries. My boys are young enough to stand with me in the women’s section, where they would expect me to don the tallis and tefillin they are accustomed to seeing on their mom. How long until the heckling and threats of the ultra orthodox begin? How long until the police come to intervene and in front of the horrified gaze of my children do what is only done with “bad guys,” — to arrest me. This is what Rabbi Elad Appelbaum has tragically coined, hatradah datit — religious harassment.

… It is practically inconceivable to me that six short decades after the founding of the State of Israel, we have to fight for religious freedom and equality in the Jewish homeland.

No religious leader will turn my sons’ religious images of inspiration, connection and love to images of terror, oppression and degradation. You will not alienate my sons from our Jewish homeland. You will not, in the gaze of my young boys, remove their mother’s prayers from their Kotel.

Rabbi Schonfeld’s whole statement, which identifies a new culture of religious harassment against non-Orthodox Judaism in Israel, is here.

I asked Eli Zaretsky the other day if he could post something about where he finds his inspiration, how he keeps up the struggle. I don’t always agree with Eli about his opinions, and I am concerned that he mirrors the all too usual approach on the Left of saying what we are against, without attending enough to how we keep going. But at the same time I see a man who has kept going, and I want to know the sources of his inspiration. This week Alana Price and I visited a strongly left organization, AlterNet, and I asked the same kinds of questions of Don Hazen, the executive editor. I reported our conversation yesterday and said I took Don’s jaded or cynical style with a pinch of salt. We talked about nourishment, what keeps us going in the struggle, where we find hope. Today he has posted this. I wouldn’t normally copy a whole post but the AlterNet blog isn’t well suited to presenting poetry, because of the way the ads jut into it, so I am breaking the normal courtesy rule here:

Looking for Inspiration? Try This.

by Don Hazen

People are feeling in the dumps these days, and for very good reasons. Everywhere you turn, there is corruption and exploitation by corporations trying to squeeze every last penny out of our pockets, and it seldom seems we get much in return. Elected officials from the top on down, seem to respond far more to those with money bags, than the rest of us. But you know this already.

What do we do? Well let’s just say that giving up, as much as it is attractive, is not an option. AlterNet’s former Tech Director Deanna Zandt, who by the way has a new book coming out in June: Share This! How You Will Change the World with Social Networking … sent me the Marge Piercy poem, “The Low Road.”

It’s tough, but inspiring. I wanted to share it with everyone this weekend. It is a fitting valentine to all of you who don’t give up, won’t give up, and will support your friends, family those you care about, and those who need it the most. And the hell with Washington, D.C.

I have to say that I love the comments going on on my last post, about conflict resolution and how to do conflict.

The question I would like to ask is this: Were Gandhi and MLK in the conflict resolution business?

Yes they were, in the long term. India and Britain, American blacks and whites, could only resolve their conflicts by the establishment of justice.

But to get that justice (and the struggle is ongoing), their movements had to bring the conflict, that was being absorbed in pain by the oppressed, to the doors of the oppressors, into their media and their faces. So in the short term, they looked to many people as if they were in the conflict promotion business.

They had to disrupt the spectacle carefully crafted by the imperialists and racists of the day that all was well with their rule over Indians and American Blacks. Is Obama disrupting the spectacle the plutocracy needs to rule America? Or is he lending his charisma to give it a new shine? If the latter, what strategy should we pursue? What can we learn from the man Obama reveres, Martin Luther King?

The theme of our conferences on Monday in San Francisco and in DC in June is to support Obama while pushing him to live up to his progressive campaign promises.

This is a balancing act that not everyone appreciates. Maybe I can explain a little from my point of view in this post.

Yesterday a woman whom I have only met a couple of times, but who would seem to me a natural for this kind of message, gave us a good tongue lashing for our approach. From her point of view it’s divisive, it’s the same as the Nader campaign that lost Gore the 2000 election; it’s another example of the Left criticizing its own so that, unlike the Republicans, we never stand together and never get anything done. Her angle on Obama was that he was never a real progressive, as progressives think of the term, and in fact she had recently stopped calling herself a progressive at all; because what Obama is doing is about human connection, seeking common ground and real dialogue, and he will bring the nation along to the limit of what it’s capable of right now by this conflict resolution approach: I’m not able to quote her words, but it was close to that.

I said I understood — although actually it would take a good deal more conversation for me to get if she was really abjuring conflict altogether as a way of building the caring society — and from our mailbag there are a good number who agree with her.

But what, I asked, did she think of the argument that if people had thought that way in the early 1930s, we would never have had the New Deal? FDR responded to being pushed from the Left, and he needed it in order to pass radical legislation. Many on the Left at that time vehemently denounced him as a sell-out to capitalism, a patrician pragmatist, and built movements that threatened revolution — compared to which our “Support Obama to the be the Obama we voted for” seems astonishingly mild. Isn’t it for lack of these kinds of tough radical movements today that Obama is responding more to the Right than the Left?

She replied that we are in a completely different historical situation now. The Right has never before been so completely obstructionist and unreasonable as they are these days. We have to act differently.

I ran the same question by Don Hazen, the editor of AlterNet, when Alana and I visited their offices yesterday. Hazen has a droll, cynical style — “What Left?” he asked when I referred to the Left today. (His website has 1.5 million unique visitors a month so there’s somebody out there and he has worked out how to reach them, so I take his cynicism with a pinch of salt).

Mieraf - One of many people helped by Dr. Rick - Photography by Mark Tuschman

Dr. Rick, as he is known to his patients in Ethiopia, lives his life based on his favorite saying from the Talmud: “Saving one life is like saving an entire world.” For over 20 years, Dr. Rick Hodes has been helping people facing cancer, heart disease, and other ailments, but one of his greatest gifts is helping straighten out people’s spines, going beyond “saving one life” and actually granting his patients new life.

Life is slowly returning to normal after my birthday and my son’s Bar Mitzvah and it is time to turn my mind once again to blogging. I’m going to try something new. For the past year or more, I have been sending brief political analyses out to my New Mexico list serve. I’ve received so much positive feedback about these posts, even from folks who disagree with me, that I’m going to begin publishing them on Tikkun Daily.

I am happy to report that I see lights flickering on the health care horizon. Obama’s newfound offense appears to be working. Last week, the President energized Democrats when he engaged the entire House Republican caucus in a lively exchange over health care and other policies, and dispatched every interlocutor without once peeking at the wallwriting on his hand.

The President then took to the road in a series of town halls. Today the political tide appears to be shifting. The lights are blinking on.

Blue Cross Raises Rates in California

As a small business owner, and one of the millions of people who had individual health coverage instead of a group plan, one of the things I dreaded most was any letter from Blue Cross. Other than my monthly bills, any time I saw their logo on an envelope, I would break out in a sweat. Why? Because every year for over a decade, any letter I got from them was probably telling me that my rates were going up. 10%, 12%, 24% …

I have always thought my best writing happened when I didn’t think about the audience, but instead got taken over by the words I was shaping. When I became so involved with the passion of what needed to be said, so entranced by how best to birth it into the world that I lost my sense of self and there was only the process of trying to shape the words on the page so that they embody the idea that lay just the other side of perception. The audience didn’t enter into it at all. Perhaps on a later draft, I’d look at the piece and recognize a reference that was so obscure that no reader would get it, and so it had to go. But for the most part, the dance was between the words and my ideas, and the audience were wallflowers, watching perhaps but obscured by shadows.

I think of this because of a recent encounter that brought home just how out of touch this attitude of mine is with the way things are done these days.

Last Saturday, my son Benjamin became a Bar Mitzvah. His Torah portion is Yitro. I would like to share his D’Var Torah which was packed with insight about participatory government as well as the taking and giving of good advice.

My parsha is Yitro. It comes right after B’shallach, in which the Israelits left Egypt by the Reed (Red) Sea. In a nutshell, during Yitro, Moses’ Father-in-Law says, “Oy! What the heck are ya doin’?” and tells Moses to correct himself by appointing judges. “Sheesh. Dumb kids!” After that, God apparently thought that Moses should beef up, because God sent Moses up and down Mt. Sinai three times. Finally, God gives Moses and the Israelites the Ten Commandments.

Most normal people with this parsha would choose to talk about the Ten Commandments; but then again, my family is far from normal (although apparently we rank only 5th most eccentric by Ellen’s standard [Ellen is his Hebrew tutor]). I chose to focus on the creation of the judicial system and God’s apparent need to repeat Himself.

This week’s spiritual wisdom comes from “Building Cultures of Peace: Four Cornerstones,” an essay by author and historian Riane Eisler:

To spread the consciousness that we can, and must, change traditions of domination requires courage. It takes courage to challenge domination and violence in both international relations and intimate relations. It takes courage to actively oppose injustice and cruelty in all spheres of life: not only in the so-called public sphere of politics and business but in the so-called private sphere of parent-child, gender, and sexual relations.

It may not be popular, and may even be dangerous to do so, since domination and violence in intimate and intergroup relations are encoded in some religious and ethnic traditions that are our heritage from a more rigid dominator past. But it must be done.

We are at a time when the mix of high technology and the domination system can take us to an evolutionary dead end. High technology in service of conquest and domination — whether of people or of nature — is not sustainable.

[Riane Eisler will be a featured speaker at the Tikkun/Network of Spiritual Progressives conference in San Francisco this coming Monday, Feb. 15, and at our conference in Washington, D.C., June 11-14. Click here for information and to register]

Despite having engaged in numerous debates with Christians, Muslims and Jews across the liberal/conservative spectrum Christopher Hitchens still holds to an amazingly ignorant understanding of the liberal religious heritage. His understanding of who is and who isn’t a Christian is perhaps the most disappointing and surprising piece of evidence for his myopic interpretation of religion. While rejecting conservative Christians’ theological claims about God, the Bible and Jesus, he accepts their understanding of who is and is not able to be considered a Christian. In a recent interview with Marilyn Sewell, a Unitarian Universalist minister and self-professed liberal Christian, Christopher Hitchens paraphrased C.S. Lewis to explain the boundaries of who constitutes a Christian. It’s not surprising then that a recent blog post by Dr. Ray Pritchard of “Keep Believing Ministries” for a conservative Christian site called Crosswalk was entitled, “Christopher Hitchens Gets it Exactly Right.”

During a recent trip to Portland, Oregon, noted atheist Christopher Hitchens laid down some seriously good theology… In one of the delicious ironies of our time, an outspoken atheist grasps the central tenet of Christianity better than many Christians do. What you believe about Jesus Christ really does make a difference.

What did Hitchens say?

Sewell: The religion you cite in your book is generally the fundamentalist faith of various kinds. I’m a liberal Christian, and I don’t take the stories from the scripture literally. I don’t believe in the doctrine of atonement (that Jesus died for our sins, for example). Do you make any distinction between fundamentalist faith and liberal religion?

Hitchens: I would say that if you don’t believe that Jesus of Nazareth was the Christ and Messiah, and that he rose again from the dead and by his sacrifice our sins are forgiven, you’re really not in any meaningful sense a Christian.

Why is Hitchens so quick to accept such an orthodox interpretation of the boundaries of Christianity? His brain seems to short-circuit when he has to think about religion in complex ways. He wants to hold firmly to an either/or dichotomy–the very same one which he is critiquing fundamentalism for. In debates he has stated that he is “Protestant atheist” meaning that he recognizes the validity of the various reformation movements which liberalized, expanded and diversified Christianity. But which denomination of protestant atheist is he? This isn’t clear but it is apparently not one which falls outside of his or C.S. Lewis’s orthodox boundaries of inclusion/exclusion. Isn’t is shocking that of all people, Christopher Hitchens is in agreement with the many forces in history which have led to the extermination, torture and destruction of “heretics” for simply believing the “wrong” form of Christianity? Since when is Hitchens so concerned about who is and isn’t a Christian?

We are counting down to our conference this coming Monday in San Francisco. Any conference Michael Lerner puts on gets rave reviews from just about everyone who manages to get there, so if you are anywhere in the vicinity, come on down.

One of the presenters on Monday will be Riane Eisler, whose work we have featured in Tikkun many times. The latest was the cover article for our Nov/Dec 2009 issue, “Roadmap to a New Economics: Beyond Capitalism and Socialism.”

Almost every Monday night we interview a Tikkun author and I talked with Riane last December. So you can listen to my 20 minute interview with her, and also to her Q and A with Tikkun readers (parts one and two), which she did beautifully, really engaging with the callers. I’m rarely happy with my own voice on these calls but hang in through my intro for Riane!

Riane Eisler is a systems scientist and cultural historian, president of the Center for Partnership Studies, and author of the international bestsellers The Chalice and The Blade and The Real Wealth of Nations.

How should I sum up what I think is so critical about Riane’s approach? Here’s what I wrote at the start a review of her Real Wealth of Nations and a book by Frances Moore Lappe, and below it a longish quote from a 2006 Tikkun piece by Eisler:

Tikkun Daily reader Jan Garrett wrote to us with a link to a piece of upbeat news.

It’s not often that so-called ordinary “first-world” folk (of progressive inclination) are able to strike an effective blow for justice in the relationships between major international financial institutions and the people of the third world. So this article by Johann Hari about the IMF’s backing off its plans to impose “shock doctrine” on Haiti is worth taking note of.

The article is called “There’s Real Hope From Haiti and It’s Not What You Expect.” Thank you, Jan!