Cross-posted from the Fearless Heart.

“Empathy [is] the act of understanding and being sensitive to the feelings and experiences of others. … Empathy is essential for any president… To be authentically empathetic, however, presidents must consider how policies affect all Americans.” – Gary Bauer, Obama and the Politics of Empathy

Understanding Bauer’s Experience
After reading Bauer’s article, I want to extend another invitation for dialogue across the divide. I was struck by the depth of alienation from the current administration and President I see in his article. I want an opportunity to understand and to reach mutual trust about our care for each other’s well being. Is his main concern, in essence, a plea to have all voices matter, including those with whom the President disagrees? What else is important to him?

Permaculture for Starhawk is a practical application of Paganism. This is the link that connects the Goddess(es) and our vegetable gardens. The Goddess, as we know her within Wicca and other forms of Paganism, represents the cycles of birth – growth – death – decay – and regeneration, exactly the cycles that permaculture deals with in a more pragmatic way.

To say that the Goddess is sacred doesn’t mean you have to believe in something outside of yourself, according to Starhawk. It simply means that you need to shift your attitude towards viewing these natural cycles as amazing, even miraculous. Spiritually, we need to pay attention to how they’re happening around us all the time. They are the ways we connect with each other most deeply and with all other life forms on the planet. If we approach them with awe, reverence, and respect, these natural processes will lead us into ways of living and working that will create more health, abundance, beauty, and biodiversity as well as more joy and freedom on the planet. And if we don’t, Starhawk admonishes, we’ll get the mess we’re in today.

As I headed into what we hoped would be the last of a long series of hearings, to decide whether our friend would be granted asylum, I wondered what good, if any, our silent witness had been. At each hearing at least six of us sat in the back, listening to testimony, watching exhibits argued over by our friend’s attorney and the attorney for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)… Did it make any difference for us to be there, other than providing support for our friend?

This translation of and reflection on Psalm 30 was a part of an assignment for a Psalms class we are taking in rabbinical school this semester with Dr. Nehemia Pollan. It has been amazing to learn about the Psalms as the music and poetry of the Bible. Through this translation assignment we were able to find the depth and myriad meanings in each word and to familiarize ourselves with the vastly different and extremely moving translations that have been published, including Robert Alter’s The Book of Psalms and Norman Fischer’s Opening to You: Zen-Inspired Translations of the Psalms. There is a new book of Psalms translations written by a woman in our community, Pamela Greenberg, The Complete Psalms which I am excited to check out!

Here is my translation for Psalm 30, which is part of the daily liturgy of traditional Jewish prayer.

One of Mahatma Gandhi’s grandsons, and his recent biographer, visits the West Bank:

‘The range of Palestinian non-violent activity against occupation,’ said Prof Gandhi, is also ‘larger, and richer in creativity, than I had imagined. The work being done by Palestinians for strengthening civil society – through educational and public health programs – is also much stronger than I had realized. ‘Many Palestinians I have met seem to hold both weapons in their hands – in one hand the weapon of non-violent resistance and in the other the weapon of constructive work.’

Then on to Israel. “The recovery after the Holocaust of the Jewish people,” Prof. Gandhi told the Israeli President Shimon Peres, “is one of the noblest, most stirring chapters in the story of humankind. I pray for another chapter in this story, a chapter where justice is provided to the Palestinians.”

Courage in the Face of Fear
This quote has been haunting me ever since I first discovered it some years ago. I think about it several times a week. I find it so intense, so fascinating, and at one and the same time inspiring and discouraging. I know that the practice of nonviolence – whether in the social activism context, or in daily life – requires tremendous courage. In moments of great challenge this statement sometimes helps me find the courage to face my fear and continue anyway. At other times, in moments of darkness, the continued existence of such basic fear in me becomes so disheartening. If after all these years of rigorous training and practice I am still so often paralyzed, what is the point of even trying to teach nonviolence?

Today, as I am sitting here to write this, I am also wondering: if nonviolence, ahimsa, is about love, is moving forward through the fear enough? Is it possible to act on pure love when we are afraid? Are there different kinds of courage, one protected one not? What exactly are we choosing when we embrace nonviolence – either as a path, or in a particular moment?

While admitting that she hadn’t read the book, Sheila Ward, a Toronto District School Board trustee told the Jewish Tribune that she will “move heaven and earth to have The Shepherd’s Granddaughter taken off school library shelves.” Goodness! What would she move if she actually had read the book?

A little post-holiday levity. TIME has a photo essay on the storied history of the AK-47 and I had to share this incongruous photo from Somalia.

Read the accompanying blurb below and then inspect the weapon.

Dhushamareb, Somalia, 2009 – The Timeless, Ubiquitous AK-47 – Photo Essays – TIME:

Dhushamareb,Somalia, 2009
A Sufi Muslim fighter attends an outdoor religion class. Traditionally nonviolent and tolerant, Sufis in Somalia have only recently picked up guns in response to attacks from al-Shabab, a hard-line Islamist group that has subjected the country’s south to a reign of terror. So far, these moderates control an area in the center of the country, enjoy popular support and have fended off incursions.

I’m not sure I’d be able to focus my thoughts on the Sacred with my muṣḥaf (i.e., my copy of the Quran; literally, a manuscript or collection of sheets) resting on a machine gun, much less with it sharing my lap with with an advertisement for our time’s preeminent icon of pornography, but perhaps this particular gift of Globalization has yet to reach Somali village life (unlike the even more iconic, successful, nearly as pornographic and sexist–and, sadly, increasingly tame-seeming–TV series “Baywatch”).

Starhawk was generous with her time while she was here in Madison a month ago. She granted me two interviews, the first about Palestine and the second — which I will begin to post today now that I’m back from my vacation — about permaculture. For those of you who don’t know her, Starhawk is the best-known Wiccan author alive today. She’s published eleven books, including The Spiral Dance, which introduced many of us to Wicca. From the beginning of her career, she’s been very involved as an activist, and since the 1990s she’s been most active in promoting permaculture.

Star came to permaculture as a natural outgrowth of her Paganism. After many years in the Goddess movement — where we declared that the Earth was a sacred, living organism that manifests Herself in the cycles of birth, growth, death, and regeneration that occur in all of nature, including our own human culture — Star discovered permaculture. She soon realized it was a practical application of her spiritual path.

Don lived for years in the Chicago area, working hard and trying to keep up with the fast pace of his profession. Several years ago, he left the city and took a job on a somewhat remote college campus run by Benedictines. While visiting on the campus once, he and I walked the carefully cared-for grounds, talking about our faith. “Since coming here,” Don said, “I’ve given up my spiritual journey.”

I could tell from his smile that he had a point to make, so I asked what he meant. “Well, you know, we Christians talk a lot about our spiritual journeys. We get excited about experiences and go places looking for the next spiritual high. We say God called us here. Then God calls us there. But it’s all so individualistic. It’s all so focused on little ‘lessons’ or ‘insights’ that we’re supposed to take with us to the next place.” Don paused and looked around at some of the old men in long black robes who were walking by us on the campus. “I think I’m learning from these guys that God can change us if we’ll settle down in one place. So I’ve given up my spiritual journey. I’m going to just stay with God here and see how I can grow.”

We cannot ignore the many ways that our culture of hypermobility has shaped how we think about our spiritual lives. Thanks to cheap plane tickets and strong economies, we can go more places now than we’ve ever been able to go before. We go to Italy to see where Francis lived and to Ireland to learn about Celtic Christianity. When it’s relatively safe, we go to Israel to walk where Jesus walked. We go to conferences to hear from the latest spiritual gurus and we go to retreat centers to find some solace in our busy lives.

Of course, we find some good in all these places. But picking up fragments of spiritual wisdom can begin to feel like trying to piece together a tree from limbs that we’ve broken off here and there. Even if we gather enough limbs to make a tree, something is still missing. Life just isn’t in the pieces the same way it is in a tree whose roots are fixed in the soil of a particular place.

The practice of stability invites us to give up spiritual journeys for the sake of growing in a life with God. As it turns out, people have been doing this for thousands of years. What is more, staying put is becoming something of a movement of its own today. I’ve written more about this in my book, The Wisdom of Stability: Rooting Faith in a Mobile Culture, which released this week. You can watch a short video about it by clicking here: The Wisdom of Stability.

I simply love this article. Key quote:

Optimism is a political act. Those who benefit from the status quo are perfectly happy for us to think nothing is going to get any better. In fact, these days, cynicism is obedience.

It’s not that he doesn’t get it. About the unimaginable catastrophes coming down the pike if we don’t get our act together in a very short time frame. Of those who say the stone age was the last sustainable society and the sooner we get back to it the better, Alex Steffen says:

There’s this sort of college-town anarchist idea that if we let it all fall apart, out of the ruins will come something clean and noncommercial and egalitarian and more in touch with nature, but that’s just crazy. Hungry people don’t think about the future. As my colleague Alan AtKisson says, a world of starving people will be a world without panda bears, dolphins, or rain forests. By the time we got back to the Stone Age, we wouldn’t have the same world we had during the Stone Age. We can’t go back; there’s no “back” to go back to.

There’s a similar, equally deluded idea from the other side, which is to assume that technology will magically find a way to let us continue living wasteful, suburban lives based on throwaway consumption. At the wildest extreme are those who argue that we need to look for ways to “geo-engineer” the planet – for instance, by creating artificial volcanoes to fill the atmosphere with particles that reduce the amount of sunlight reaching the ground. Saying we need to rush back to the caves and saying we need to “terraform” the earth are different sides of the same coin: both are profound retreats from the responsibilities of our day, and both ignore the amazing opportunities we still have available to us to create a sustainable society.

The passage of the health care bill was not an embodiment of the vision of universal health care that many of us aspire to, but it was a major turn-around in American politics, a moment in which Barack Obama was able to regain some of the moral authority that inspired his landslide election only a year and a half ago and gave many of us reason to hope a space was opening up for the creation of a more progressive, more social connected, more loving and caring society.

But Obama will not succeed in fending off the Sarah Palin-led Tea Party revolt against this progressive vision without the decisive emergence of a different kind of progressive voice into public space, a voice on the spiritual left of Obama which strengthens his own resolve and shows him how a new spiritual progressive vision can be both morally compelling and realistic in political terms.

Yet, this is very complicated, because Obama’s programs actually erode the support for progressive politics. Most people think Obama IS the Left: the progressives, liberals, even “the far left.” So when they hear about his or Congressional Democrats’ policies, or get their lives touched by their fallout, (e.g. his and their support for trillions of dollars to the banks and large corporations, but only symbolic acts to stop the millions of home foreclosures and to create jobs; his war in Afghanistan; his allowing the oil and gas conglomerates to ruin the environment through drilling on the coasts of many American states; his abandonment of his promises to end the human rights abuses of the Bush Administration; and the list goes on), many people become disillusioned, and blame the whole mess created by global capitalism on “big government,” thus giving an amazing opening both to the Tea Party movement and to the large business and financial interests.

Cross-posted from The Fearless Heart. [Editor's note: Miki Kashtan leads workshops and intensive retreats in Nonviolent Communication].

I love a good challenge, and Helen Smith’s recent article, How Should Conservatives Deal with the Left’s Disrespect and Lack of Empathy?, immediately called my attention. As someone who’s dedicating my life, in part, to increasing empathy all around in the culture, I found some of her comments painful, because they matched my own experience with liberals.

The Missing Empathy for the Right
In the social circles in which I find myself, and in much of the Left media, conservatives are regularly referred to as stupid (at best), backward, uncaring, or unevolved. At every opportunity I have, especially in my workshops, I invite people to look at what might be the underlying values behind conservative positions, to imagine how a decent fellow human could arrive at such opposing views. I wish I could contradict Helen Smith, but my experience only confirms what she says.

I see a complete dearth of genuine, open-hearted empathy towards conservatives. I regularly hear jokes at the expense of conservatives in my workshops, and I cringe. I am not conservative myself. Far from it! I find most liberals to be more conservative than me. I cringe because if I were a conservative, I would not experience Nonviolent Communication communities as hospitable. I worked for several years with volunteers who are part of the campaign to create a department of peace in the US. They have not been able to cross the Democrat-Republican divide. As I see it, the obstacle was not the Republicans, but rather the challenge these activists had in being able to hear their opponents, listen with respect and care, imagine their values and deeper longings and aspirations, and be open to be affected by what they hear. What is dialogue, after all, if we are expecting others to change their views, positions, or strategies, without a comparable willingness on our part to be affected and changed by what we hear?

Having moved to the Bay area from Detroit less than a month ago, I talk to my Jewish family back home fairly often on the phone. They good-heartedly teased me last week – “Let me guess what your seder plate looked like – wine, wine, and more wine” – prior to attending my first Passover away from home. Although the wine might have played a more important role in the Beyt Tikkun Seder last week at the Unitarian Fellowship in Berkeley – “You’re supposed to drink it to get high!” said Rabbi Michael Lerner, who is the editor-in-chief of Tikkun – than at seders past in Detroit, there were many other positive additions to what I expect of “traditional Passover” that I didn’t expect.

I come from a small family, numbers-wise, but our seder would make you believe that we are even smaller, as my mother’s side of the family is not Jewish. Therefore, I was used to sitting at a table small enough so that I didn’t need to raise my normal tone to recite the Simple Son. At the group seder, it was a pleasure to hear the haggadah spoken with enthusiasm and inflection. Rabbi Lerner is a very charismatic interpreter of ancient history and he ties it into modern history extremely well. The dialogue raised was relevant to the rapidly-changing landscape of American society, given the latest news of health-care reform and the changes in Israeli diplomacy with the United States. It was provocative but respectful, active and calm. It was interesting to share the service with the fresh perspectives of people I had never met, who represented many different age and ethnic groups.

I will be the last person on Earth to decry the virtue of sitting down and eating a delicious, starchy brisket and matzo meal chocolate cake. Nope, nothing like comfort food in the comfort of your own home. However, the meal – including Jewish staples such as matzo ball soup, gefilte fish and macaroons, along with vegetable lasagna and yes, plenty of wine – was enjoyable in allowing a much-larger-in-comparison-to-Detroit sample of Bay area vegetarians into our seder, fitting given the role of Elijah in Passover lore. Overall, I would offer that celebrating traditional holidays in good company is a great time, regardless of who that company is comprised of. To not appreciate that much is just as silly an idea as a dinner of only wine.

When I was a child, my family celebrated Christian holidays in a fairly standard secular way, decorating a tree on Christmas and hunting eggs on Easter, not to mention joining in the customary consumption of marshmallow peeps, “jelly bird eggs” (whatever those are), and other foods invented by companies with a clever eye for turning a profit from a holiday.

My version of Easter lacks the radical Christian religiosity that Nichola laid out in her recent post about Good Friday as a time “to look at the crucifixions necessary to preserve the fiction of Pax Americana, or any false peace maintained by force, whether violent or hegemonic.” It lacks the progressive rethinking of the resurrection narrative that Rabbi Lerner highlighted in his spiritual wisdom of the week post with a quotation from Peter Rollins. But it’s still one of my favorite holidays of the year.

On its surface, the humanist Easter I grew up with may have seemed drained of meaning to religious onlookers, but it was actually highly ritualized and deep in its own way. I want to share my family’s three main rituals — an Easter eve afternoon of collaborative egg art, the collective reading aloud of a surprisingly feminist bunny book from the 1930s, and a morning of romping, outdoor egg hunts in bitter spring weather — as a resource for nonreligious families who want to celebrate a secular Easter that’s about more than just candy.

Why is there an olive on the Seder plate? Why is there an orange on the seder plate? And how can the liberation story of Passover relate to our modern-day struggles against oppression? Traditional Passover haggadot (the books of readings used at seder services) are full of answers but not to these questions. But then again, most seder plates don’t have olives and oranges on them …

I’m always interested in efforts to reclaim, reinvent, or renew religious holidays in ways that make them newly sustaining and politically energizing, so I was excited to learn through my friend Traci of a radical, anti-racist haggadah full of poetic writing and ideas about how to find new relevance and depth in the rituals of Passover: “The Love and Justice in Times of War Haggadah Zine” by Micah Bazant and Dara Silverman. The authors intentionally did not copyright the piece and have made it available for free on the web, encouraging people to print it out and use it as the basis for a “choose-your-own-adventure progressive seder.” Traci used the zine as the basis for a joyful and politicized seder that I had the pleasure of participating in earlier this week.

I met my wife Nadia when we were twelve, and although I’d like to say that our relationship has been that frog and princess story we all love, life is never so perfectly simple. Thus, the fact that we are married means we have accepted the responsibilities and overcome the institutionalized social constructions that pervade our greater world, and more intimately my Jewish and her African American culture. Some of these social constructions are positive forces in our lives, and some we have mastered or manipulated and made such. Of course, there are also those that continue to serve to do nothing more than tear us down and apart and we have to find a way to overcome despite the fact that we were infected with a degree of first love syndrome that has thus far proven to be eternal, and the more days we share a life together, vital; at least, that is, for me. What I am talking about is race, and racism, and what it means to be an interracial, intercultural couple on the cusp of parenthood in Brooklyn, New York in the year 2010.

I have particular movies for particular holidays.  For Halloween, I enjoy Bram Stoker’s Dracula directed by Francis Ford Coppola.  Thanksgiving is just not Thanksgiving until I see the original ­Miracle on 34^th Street.  I pull out ­A Christmas Carol on Christmas Eve, but I prefer the version with George C. Scott playing Scrooge.  My Easter movie is Irving Berlin’s Easter Parade.

The original trailer for the movie called it “the happiest movie ever made.”  I do not know about that, but it makes me happy.  I first saw it as an afternoon movie on television when I was a girl.  From time to time as an adult, I would see it on television, and I would stop what I was doing to watch.  Now in the age of DVDs, I can watch it whenever I like.  And there are times even when it is not Easter that I need a little Easter.

Here in Brazil, some friends decided to put a new spin on April Fool’s Day. The prank was this: instead of tricking people with an “untruth,” why not encourage people by announcing something that we wish were true.

“We decided to come up with some ‘fictitious’ headlines that we would like to announce. But the good news is that all this is really possible. It could be true.” As Claudio Oliver, the Coordinator of the Casa da Videira Collective, puts it: “These headlines can be true. They are based on lived experiences in Curitiba.”

What follows is my translation and adaption of one such announcement.

Such is “April Folly” in Brazil…..
And yet, we hope and trust that such folly is not “nonsense,” but a reflection of God’s own “foolishness” which the Bible calls “wisdom” (1 Cor. 1:25).

_________________________
The Zero Garbage Movement is on the Move
As of last week, the city of São Paulo no longer has anything to send to its landfills. What’s more, the same thing has happened in Rio de Janeiro, Brasília, Port Alegre, and in other 23 capital cities of Brazil. But how does one explain that a city–which until recently produced 13,000 tons of trash per day–has eliminated its garbage problem?
The solution comes out of the city of Curitiba. After years of discussions, plans, and the search for a new landfill area, this solution actually came from the people themselves. The NGO, Casa de Videira, has spearheaded this new direction, inspiring both the “I’m My Own Trashman/Woman” Movement as well as “Landfill Boycott” Campaign. As a result, garbage is no longer seen as a “municipal service” problem, but rather as everybody’s problem. In other words, the people’s solution was simple: Put garbage back in the hands of the people.

“Obama is not a brown-skinned anti-war socialist who gives away free healthcare. You’re thinking of Jesus.”-John Fugelsang

Probably the most tweeted and Facebook-shared quote of the week, this quip from actor, comedian, and spiritual progressive John Fugelsang gives voice to a particularly ironic feature of the current political debate: Many of those who hurled insults at the legislators who voted for health care reform will, on this Good Friday, be mourning in church services over the death of a revolutionary healer whose uncompromising generosity and compassion got him killed.

On Good Friday, Christians remember the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth, an event that over the years has become so sentimentalized, personalized, and spiritualized that its political significance has been all but lost, except perhaps among those of us most desperate for hope of an alternative to the violence, exploitation, callousness, and domination of our own current social order. But then, Jesus has always spoken most powerfully to the nearly hopeless and desperate.