This week’s spiritual wisdom is a passage entitled “The Cosmos and Revelation” from Islamic Spirituality: Foundationsby philosopher and professor of Islamic studies Seyyid Hossein Nasr:
The revelation that comes from Him to Whom belong the heavens and the earth and all that is between them and below the earth also addresses itself to all these realms of the cosmic hierarchy as well as to man. The Quran is, in a sense, a Revelation unto the whole of creation, and one of its primary functions is to awaken in man an awareness of the Divine Presence in that other primordial revelation which is the created order itself. Primordial man saw the phenomena of nature in divinis, as the story of Adam in paradise reveals. Islam, in bestowing upon man access to this primordial nature and in addressing itself to the primordial man within every man, unveils once again the spiritual significance of nature and the ultimately theophanic character of the phenomena of the created order. It enables man to read once again the eternal message of Divine Wisdom written upon the pages of the cosmic text.
Ingber: Renewal is many things and contains multitudes. We are a post-triumphalist, post-modern, liberal, progressive, egalitarian, mystical, psycho-spiritual, pan-halachic, movement, that seeks to integrate and honor body, heart, mind, and spirit, East and West pre-critical and post-critical, individual and communal, mythic and post-mythic, masculine and feminine, silence and ecstatic under one, large, HUGE umbrella called Renewal Judaism.
For me, Renewal is the tip of the dreidle whose sides are Orthodoxy, Conservativism, Reform, and Reconstruction – what Renewal can do is integrate these various perspectives. I don’t want to leave any part of myself out of my spiritual life.
Dr. Tony Klug asks "Are Israeli Policies Entrenching Anti-Semitism Worldwide?" in the May/June Tikkun. Join us Monday night, May 3, for a Phone Forum with Klug, or listen to the recording later.
Alan Dershowitz, the Harvard law prof and well known civil liberties lawyer, wrote a fierce attack this week on Judge Goldstone, and those rabbis who supported him in his efforts to have a bar mitzvah for his grandson in their home country of South Africa that he could attend, without major protests from rightwing Jews that would draw all the attention away from the boy and towards himself. Dershowitz singled out our own Michael Lerner as the rabbi most worthy of criticism, for honoring Goldstone with the Tikkun Award. (If you haven’t followed the whole saga of Goldstone’s UN report on Israel’s Gaza invasion, see Tikkun‘s interview with him).
Richard Silverstein took apart Dershowitz’s post on his blog yesterday, showing how many outright inaccuracies and distortions he had perpetrated. If you want a full description of the Goldstone Bar Mitzvah affair go here.
Comments from two women today at Tikkun. This by email:
I just read about your award for goldstone [sic] and I’m disgusted and nauseated. I’m sorry that I don’t subscribe to your rag, because I can’t terminate my (non-existent) subscription, which I would most certainly do. … the award is a large dose of Jewish self-hate.
This comment just went up on our site:
I am so pleased to read this email from Judge Goldstone. The Jewish persecution of this Jewish judge, who so clearly operates within the best traditions of Judaism, has been disturbing to watch. I commend Tikkun for singling out Judge Goldstone for the Tikkun Award: I feel certain that it is important for him to know that he has the support of righteous Jews. David Shasha’s recent article, “What Israel means to me,” helps to put the shameful treatment of Judge Goldstone in its proper context. I hope all Tikkun readers will consult it.
Undocumented migrants have a right to work here because they deserve economic reparations for failed U.S. economic policies and disastrous military interventions.
Hundreds of thousands march for immigration rights in Chicago, May 1, 2006. Credit: Alana Price.
We hardly need another symptom of the spiritual and social bankruptcy of the system, but this new Arizona law targeting and criminalizing undocumented migrants is a good example. You might know that Gov. Jan Brewer signed last week a new law that broadens police power to stop anyone at anytime for virtually any reason simply for looking suspiciously like an undocumented immigrant. It is supposed to take effect in August, but this is unlikely since it is probably unconstitutional and will face a barrage of court challenges.
This Saturday, May Day, the traditional day for workers rights, more than 70 cities are planning protests against the law, and boycotts against Arizona are spontaneously spreading — as they should. Mexican taxi cab drivers are apparently refusing to pick up anyone from Arizona, and the Mexican government has issued a travel advisory warning Mexicans of the danger of traveling through Arizona. In California, pressure is growing to join the boycott.
In the midst of this uproar, few are asking one simple question: Why? Why do so many Mexicans, Salvadorans and Guatemalans enter the U.S. by the most dangerous and expensive route possible?
A few years ago my friend Dorothy Bass, who directs the Valparaiso Project on the Education and Formation of People in Faith, wrote to ask me if I’d help write a book presenting the Christian faith to “emerging adults.” At the time I didn’t know what an “emerging adult” was, but when I heard the description, I knew that it fit. This was me, in many ways. It was the folks I’d gone to school with, the college students I speak to on campuses around the country. The children of Christendom, we grew up with a notion of adulthood that included growing up to be Christian. Maybe you sow your wild oats for a while. But when you come home, you come home to Mother church. That’s the story I grew up hearing. But a whole lot of people in my generation learned to read the Christian story critically. We have friends who are Muslim, Buddhist, and agnostic. We don’t live close the the church we grew up in. Having grown up, millennials aren’t sure what it looks like to grow into faith.
Dorothy’s idea was that we could best present the Christian faith to emerging adults by showing how it consists of everyday practices that make up a whole life–practices that look different, even strange, if the stuff Christians believe is really true. A believer myself, I thought the project sounded worth the time. But I also invited an agnostic friend along–a fellow who isn’t too impressed by God-talk. I asked him to keep me honest.
When we’d finished the first draft of On Our Way: Christian Practices for Living a Whole Life, I asked my agnostic friend to read it. “If this is what Christianity is really about,” he said to me, “I think I like it.” I’ve got a feeling that most millennials are going to have to have a reason to like a faith before they’ll ever believe that it’s true.
I once worked for a small greeting card company in Berkeley, piecework packing cards into plastic bags: $7 for a box filled with twelve-card bags. After a while, I became quite efficient and could fill almost two boxes in an hour. The owner, however, was outraged at what my hourly wage had become and moved to cut it.
Clearly she had earlier decided she could afford $7 a box, but now, apparently, the idea of a mere worker getting a decent wage was more than she could stand. Disgusted and furious, I left as soon as I could find another job.
Little injustices like that and far bigger ones are the reasons we have a labor movement. It has been a long, long, bitter struggle for workers to have a small share of democracy at work. Their rights are won and then eroded or circumvented.
Now, so many people work 12-hour shifts or wildly fluctuating hours; several part-time jobs or full- plus part-time jobs that the eight-hour day and forty-hour week, designed for rest, human development, and Sabbath, are moving out of range once more. It’s symptomatic that few American workers could tell you what May 1 is about.
For years, Israel has said that it cannot negotiate with Palestinians because there is no leader who can represent Palestine and who doesn’t support violence. But finally, things are changing. It appears to be increasingly accepted by Palestinians on the West Bank that the path that offers them the most hope is a non-violent path of demonstrations against the occupation at home and the world wide push for BDS against Israel. Front and centre in this is the Palestinian prime minister, Salam Fayyad.
As always in dealing with the Middle East, perception is as important as reality. So the significance of this recent article in the New York Times is two-fold: both what it says, and that the Times (not traditionally a paper that has said much positive about Palestinians) is saying it.
“For to survive in this dragon we call America, we have had to learn this first and most vital lesson – that we were never meant to survive. Not as human beings.”
The first time I read Audre Lorde’s words, above, they exploded my understanding of my relationship to this life.
At some level, I had known for a while that I HAD NOT survived, not intact, not as a fully alive person. Although I probably couldn’t have articulated all this back then, I knew that somewhere along the way, I had lost my connection to my body, my ability to connect at the deepest levels with other people, my sense of awe and wonder, my ability to hear constructive feedback from others without my world disintegrating, and much of my ability to feel.
We had much to celebrate at “Earth Day at 40.” But, of course, we had much to concern us as well. The good news is that whenever we touched on “global weirding,” water rights, or any number of other environmental issues, someone at the conference offered ideas or solutions. These ranged from the most massive — a new electric grid across the United States — to the smallest and most local — digging up your lawn and planting raised beds with vegetables.
And there was even better news — we all left the conference fired up to make a difference! I’m just sorry we didn’t use that new-found energy to walk the few blocks to the capitol and demonstrate for the “Clean Energy Jobs” bill, which the Wiscsonsin legislature didn’t pass the next day!!!!
Author Margaret Atwood, Activist Robert Kennedy, Jr., Wilderness Society President William Meadows, UW-Madison History Professor William Cronon, and Gaylord Nelson’s daughter Tia Nelson, who is the executive secretary of the Wisconsin Board of Commisioners of Public Lands, all spoke, giving rousing speeches and words of warning (or were those words of “warming,” as I originally typed?). Almost all of these talks will be online at the Nelson Institute website in the next few weeks. I’ll let you know when. But until then, here are some highlights.
“I choose to risk my significance,
to live so that which came to me as seed
goes to the next as blossom,
and that which came to me as blossom,
goes on as fruit.” Dawna Markova
Penny Spawforth asked me in a comment: “I would love to hear how you transform the despair you feel about where the world is heading and your helplessness about contributing sufficiently as I daily experience and feel a sense of helplessness that creates despair and minimal action (‘no action seems large enough to be of use’). What I see as my tiny contribution to the world I want to help create just doesn’t feel ‘enough.’”
Before discovering my current passion for Nonviolent Communication, I was in exactly the kind of place that Penny describes. I saw no way that I could support movement towards what I wanted to see in the world. Then, while talking with my friend Tom Atlee, we came to realize that having a calling, knowing what you are to do in your life, is a form of privilege. It provides clarity and focus, eliminates or drastically diminishes certain forms of struggle, and provides a sense of meaning, and energy for action.
UC Berkeley’s student senate is set to vote once more this Wednesday, April 28, on a bill to divest from two companies that materially and militarily support the Israeli government’s occupation of the Palestinian territories. Yesterday Michael Lerner posted on the diversity of opinion among peace activists on this issue. Today I want to share a piece submitted to Tikkun Daily by Matthew A. Taylor, a Peace and Conflict Studies student and member of Jewish Voice for Peace who is currently on leave from UC Berkeley. As a member of Students for Justice in Palestine, the group that is promoting the bill on campus, Taylor argues with urgency and deep emotion for the bill and explains what those in support of the divestment effort can do to help before the vote tomorrow evening.
When Will the University of California Stop Funding War Crimes Against Palestinian Civilians?
When will the University of California stop funding war crimes against Palestinian civilians and the occupation of Palestinian land? How much longer will grieving mothers have to wait for justice?
“The soldiers came early on the morning of Sunday January 4th. [My husband] Atiyeh went to the door with his hands raised holding his ID but they shot him in the doorway,” said Zinad. “I shouted ‘children, children’ in Hebrew but they started shooting,” said Zinad’s nephew Faraj.
After the massacre, Israeli soldiers left messages for the dead Samounis on the walls of a neighbor’s house. The graffiti read: “Arabs need 2 die,” “Arabs are pieces of shit,” and “1 is DOWN 999,999 TO GO.”
A Palestinian woman cries in Gaza City's al-Zeitoun neighborhood (AFP).
Israel’s attack on civilians was a “deliberate policy” designed to inflict “humiliation and dehumanization of the Palestinian population,” according to a United Nations report.
So here’s another long post. I keep trying to work out how to express this adequately. I wrote about the difficulty of reclaiming hopefulness on the Left, had an exchange with Peter Gabel about two kinds of transformative experiences, and asked how necessary it is to walk the talk.This one feels to me to get to the heart of my own philosophy about what’s needed, but some time soon I will no doubt try again.
Miki Kashtan referred me to a post called “A world where everyone’s needs matter” at the delightfully named blog The Implicit & Experiential Rantings of a Person. If you read the whole thing, I think you will find this post by Ian Mayes gets to the core of a dilemma we are so often talking about here on Tikkun Daily. He writes:
So that’s the dilemma – how to support profound personal change, redoing your own fundamental personal programming, while at the same time supporting profound social change, rearranging our relationships & institutions in ways that address all the needs of everybody.
The idea is that we are stuck. No adequate structural change to create a good society can be made without profound personal change. No personal change can be profound enough without structural change to support it.
Debates continue to rage over the UC Berkeley Student Senate’s call for divestment from two companies that help Israel maintain the Occupation of the West Bank.
Student senators debate the divestment bill. Photo by Skyler Reid from April 23.
The argument isn’t over yet, because — after failing to override student president Will Smelko’s veto of the Senate of the Associated Students of UC Berkeley’s divestment bill on April 15 — the student senate passed a motion to reconsider the vote. The student senators met again for a closed session on April 21 but failed to come to consensus about whether to override the veto, so the issue remains open. [4/29/10 Update: In a meeting that started on April 28 and concluded at 4 a.m. on April 29, the student senate came one vote short of overriding the veto. The resolution was reportedly tabled, making it available again for reconsideration at a future time.]
Rather than charge in with my own position, I want to respect the intelligence of Tikkun‘s readers by offering a variety of conflicting viewpoints and inviting you all to decide what you think. We are planning a full roundtable discussion among voices on all sides of the Boycott/Divestment/Sanctions debate that we will tape, edit, and publish in either the July or September issue of Tikkun (if you still don’t subscribe, please do so now)!
Here are some key parts of the bill being debated:
by: Zach Dorfman on April 26th, 2010 | Comments Off
When it comes to establishing a just and lasting peace in Israel/Palestine, should we let the perfect be the enemy of the good? Does a “good” peace even satisfy minimum human rights requirements? Can and should we negotiate with regimes with despicable human rights records in order to ensure regional peace in the Middle East? I take up these questions–some explicitly, others implied–in what follows, where I call for the Obama Administration to engage in a sustained diplomatic push with Syria and Israel in order to create the conditions for the eventual establishment of a Palestinian state.
The Israeli-Arab conflict has inflamed the Middle East for half a century, and negotiations aimed towards the creation of a Palestinian state have stalled. While we should encourage Israel and the Palestinian National Authority to fulfill their obligations stipulated at the Annapolis Conference, current political and security conditions within both Israel and the Palestinian Territories are not conducive to reaching a final settlement.
This is partly due to domestic politics within both territories. In Israel, powerful far-right pro-settler parties in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition government will seek to stymie any two-state solution, and Netanyahu’s own commitment to a two-state solution appears tenuous. Furthermore, security fears about Iran’s burgeoning regional power are widespread, causing Israel to reorient its foreign policy away from solving the Palestinian question and towards containing Iran.
When I talk with people about Nonviolent Communication and about empathy and authenticity, I often hear skepticism in the form of “Yes, but what about_______.” Frequent candidates for filling in the blank are teenagers that don’t respond to anything; Hitler; very angry people; and workplace situations. It seems many of us are habituated to thinking that empathy and authenticity belong only in some contexts and not others. Today I want to look at the workplace context, because so many of us are at work more of our awake time than anywhere else.
Can Connection and Effectiveness Coexist?
On the surface, it appears that the time it would take to reach mutual understanding and collaboration would detract from task-oriented focus, thus taking away from productivity and efficient decision-making. On closer look, I see at least three ways in which connection could enhance effectiveness. First, people who are heard and understood, have more goodwill to contribute. Second, people who are often operating within the fear and discomfort arising from conflict and mistrust literally have less of themselves available to produce. Lastly, when decisions and agreements are based on true connection and mutual understanding, such that “yes” is really a “yes,” people are much less likely to back out of what they said they would do.
You’ve probably noticed the absurd spectacle – and resulting media feeding frenzy – of a Muslim “group” in New York making a barely veiled threat to the creators of “South Park” for (almost) portraying Muhammad and causing the episode to be censored.
As Hussein Rashid rightly emphasizes in his observations in Religion Dispatches, these inane provocations don’t come from an Islamic “group”. To hear the breathless media coverage you’d think this a call to arms from jihadi leaders on American soil, when this duo is far more Beavis and Butt-Head than Osama Bin Laden and Ayman Zawahiri. Two foolish men with an Internet connection that happen to be Muslim are getting their 15 minutes of fame and scaring the daylights out of everybody. Two men do not an organization make and so far, there is no more evidence that these hateful nutcases are any more representative of any broader stream–or even a really narrow one–within “their” community than, say, the infamous and equally odious Westboro Baptist Church, whose handful of congregants are known for traveling the land to picket at high profile events with outrageously homophobic and anti-Semitic signs (e.g., “AIDS cures fags.”). Both “groups” are minuscule and repudiated by their fellows, and both would be unknown were it not for the media attention they’ve gotten.
That doesn’t make their antics any less disturbing or repulsive. (But what do you expect from disturbed cretins who’d praise the murderer of Fort Hood as an “officer and a gentleman”?) Neither does it make the threat any less concerning or worthy of investigation–I don’t always agree with what’s done in the name of the War on Terror today, but vigilance is certainly necessary. Nonetheless, this episode still needs to be kept in perspective.
Aerial view of the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial. Photo courtesy of mlkmemorialnews.org.
In the arena of social change, I am continually confronted with the question of to what extent symbolic change matters. Sometimes when we seek change that is partially or largely symbolic, we loose sight of the broader issue. For example, legalizing gay marriage doesn’t ensure equality for GLBT individuals and families, nor does a Supreme Court mandate to desegregate schools ensure that everyone has access to educational opportunities. Symbolic change has the potential to fundamentally change the ways in which we think and talk about social issues and it can empower us to keep working. At the same time, it can make us complacent because we feel good about having accomplished really very little.
An illustration from "Descartes Error" by Damasio. Phineas Gage, above with the iron rod that passed through his brain, lost emotional capacity and so could not act on his rationality.
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.” During Sotomayor’s confirmation hearings, Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) asked her, “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.
The concern about empathy reflects a long tradition of valuing rationality, and the Enlightenment’s imperative to overcome instincts, passions, and emotions through exercising reason. This exclusive focus on reason applies across the board: to moral theory, to the law, to professional conduct, and to our assessment of our own choices and decisions.
I want to challenge the idea that we make better decisions without emotions. In Descartes’ Error, Antonio Damasio examined the rare people who have lost their capacity to have emotions as a result of losing their prefrontal lobes. While usually capable of impeccable and intelligent reasoning, such people are unable to make any decisions.
We are hearing much these days about the founders and their views on taxation. Many people who oppose “big government”, deficit spending, and taxation are warning against socialism. They argue that current tax policy amounts to a redistribution of wealth, that it is class warfare, that it is unconstitutional and against the original intent of the founders. This is a kind of ancestor worship.
This week’s spiritual wisdom comes from a piece about Earth Day by Jeff Vogel, a respiratory therapist at Beth Israel Medical Center in New York:
Earth Day 2010
Photo from NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio
All living things — large, small, and in between — share in the precious gift of life on Earth. However, it is we humans, with our large brains enabling us to be self-consciously aware of this gift, that are the only creatures to celebrate Earth Day. As we celebrate the 40th anniversary of Earth Day, let us remember that this grand unifying perspective was made possible by one of our nation’s greatest gifts to the world, the first stunning photo of Earth from outer space taken during the Apollo moon missions. This awesome image of our beautifully round whole Earth, suspended in the vast blackness of space, may be humanity’s crowning achievement, the climax of our long collective urge to explore our surroundings. This new perspective of the Earth took our self consciousness to a whole new dimension. We could all suddenly feel part of a much greater self, the whole Earth.
