We probably all start out prejudiced; having been brought up by people who look and act like us and believe the things that we learn to believe, we start by assuming that our way is the right way to do things, and if people do things differently they must be wrong. The need to grow beyond that childhood perspective is what led Mark Twain to optimistically claim that, “travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness.” But though we now live in a global village, in which the floods in Pakistan or fires of Russia are no further than a click away, an irrational fear of Islam or Muslims, Islamophobia, has been rising as fast as the floods, and spreading as fast as the fires.
The most obvious examples are the inchoate rage some have felt at plans to build a Muslim community centre two blocks from ground zero, and the proposal to burn Qur’ans sponsored by a fringe Florida pastor. But it goes a lot further: last week Martin Peretz, editor-in-chief of The New Republic, wrote: “Muslim life is cheap, particularly to Muslims… This is a statement of fact, not value,” and “I wonder whether I need to honor these people and pretend that they are worthy of the privileges of the First Amendment which I have in my gut the sense that they will abuse.” Two immediate points: imagine the reaction if such a statement had been made about Jews or Blacks, or any other minority group! But Peretz has not resigned, has not been pilloried in the main-stream media. Philip Weiss does a fine job of disproving the “Muslim life is cheap” canard, meticulously going through the world’s Islamic states and documenting the evidence, but that such desperate medicine is needed is pretty telling evidence of the extent to which the contagion has spread.
Gershon Baskin
Rebecca Subar
Arthur Waskow
We have just put up a transcript of a workshop at which veteran peace activists Gershon Baskin, Rebecca Subar and Arthur Waskow debated BDS with those present. (This was at our June conference and we apologize for the delay: our interns transcribed many speeches and workshops over the summer. We edited some for the print issue here, and more have been going online this month. Our thanks to long-time Tikkun activist Hayyim Feldman who just completed the lengthy task of proofing the text of this workshop to the audio.) Some quotes:
Israeli activist Gershon Baskin on Why a one state solution is no solution at all:
Edward Hicks, "The Peaceable Kingdom"
A friend of mine collected these. I find them helpful, and thought maybe others might find them helpful, too:
“What have I got to fear from my enemies? I carry my Paradise in my heart; it goes where I go.”- Ibn Taymiyya
“Be kind; for everyone you meet is fighting such a hard battle.” – Philo Judaeus
“God made all of us, and we all come from one woman, sucked one bubby; we hope we shall not quarrel; that we shall talk until we get through.”
-Chief Holata Mico to Gen. Wylie Thompson, Oct, 24,1834, in Seminole treaty negotiations
Sue Salinger is a long-time media writer/producer, student of Reb Zalman Schacter-Shalomi, and doctoral student in media philosophy: a new academic discipline to my ears at least. I met her at the US Social Forum where she was training novice reporters, one of whom shepherded me through an interview on Free Speech TV. She just sent me this post about the role of Twitter in the recent fires in Boulder, Colorado. She describes the thousands who used Twitter to tell each other about the direction of the fire, to offer help, prayers and information as “A beautifully anarchic collaboration.” I am personally resisting Twitter though we use it to promote Tikkun and this blog, but this impressed me.
Reportback from Tweeting #Boulderfire
By Sue Salinger
This year the Days of Awe became personal for those of us in town when the #boulderfire raged. During Elul we are called upon to reflect on our thoughts, speech and action. The liturgy is written in large part in the first person plural – ‘we’ are at the same time individuals and community, individuals and country. In my read of our tradition, the personal has in this way always been political. Every year we are asked again to consider how each of us creates or fails to create a just society.
"Stay" by Chris Dennis.
This week’s spiritual wisdom is a poem for Yizkor written by Simcha Raphael, Ph.D. Yizkor is the set of memorial prayers said during religious services on Yom Kippur, Shmini Atzeret, Passover, and Shavuot. It is usually said for a parent, spouse, or child that has died. This introduction or intention (kavvanah) for Yizkor comes from the unpublished manuscript of “Kaddish Echoes – Poems of Night Time, Poems of Mourning.” This poem was also published in the High Holiday Machzor of the Reconstructionist Press Jewish Views of the Afterlife (second edition).
When I was a young girl in Israel, in the early 60s, one of my favorite days of the year was Yom Kippur. For a full 25 hours a great silence descended on the Jewish parts of Israel. No traffic, radio, or commercial activity of any kind took place. For many families, including mine, this was the one time a year we went to synagogue. In the silence I could hear everyone’s footsteps echoing in the empty streets. That silence was my young idea of the sacred.
Even within my ambivalent-at-best relationship with the legacy of Jewish observance Yom Kippur continues to be meaningful to me. I love being part of a tradition that sets aside regular time every year for self-reflection, consideration of one’s actions, and re-dedication to a life of meaning and value. Secular as I am, I still find beauty and peace in the clear notion that God can only forgive transgressions towards God, and transgressions involving other people can only be forgiven and transcended with the other person.
In this last installment of my interview with Bishop Gene Robinson, we discuss interpreting collective story in an inclusive fashion culminating in Gene’s interpretation of Exodus as “The Greatest Coming Out Story Ever Told.”
Feel free to check out the first two installments if you are so moved:
Morning Feature: Bishop Gene Robinson Speaks About Obama and “The Left”
Furthermore! Bishop Gene Robinson Speaks: From Tolerance to Empathy
The following was written by Mark Kirschbaum for many of us who are not having happy days now, who are not able to force themselves to pretend to be joyful simply because the calendar demands it. Is there a place for the heavy of heart in the Rosh Hashanah experience? Mark has a weekly column on www.tikkun.org called “Torah Commentary.” And yes, it’s always this deep. Study of Torah gets you into very significant issues in philosophy, social theory, theology, politics and human relations. If you happen to be in the Bay Area, come to Torah study at my home almost any Saturday (admission cost: a vegetarian dish to share for our potluck Shabbat lunch!). Details on Beyt Tikkun’s website. So, take it away, Mark, and gmar chatima tovah — let everyone be sealed in the Book of Life on Yom Kippur for an uplifting, health and love-filled year!
Rosh Hashana
by Mark Kirschbaum
… If all time is eternally Present, All time is unredeemable … T. S. Eliot, Burnt Norton
Central to, or lurking behind, if you will, any discussion appropriate to Rosh Hashana is the problem of time. For while we all talk of Rosh Hashana as a celebration of the “New Year”, the texts, biblical and talmudic, are rather ambiguous as to what the actual date of creation is. One thing is certain — Rosh Hashana is not meant to be the date of the creation of the world per se. The talmudic debate offers the following alternatives: Was the world created in Nisan, half a year away from Rosh Hashana, or was the world created a week before Rosh Hashana, that is, Rosh Hashana commemorates the sixth day of creation, and as such we celebrate the creation of humanity? Perhaps this approach to Rosh Hashana, which in the proof text of Psalm 81:4 is referred to as “bakeseh,” the hidden or mysterious day, is meant to teach a lesson about time and its unreality.
Robert Wright has a piece in the NYT today that takes essentially the same line I was taking in my “How We Discuss Religion On Tikkun Daily” post. He says it in a slightly more cynical way, pointing out how we all have tunnel vision and only see, let alone emphasize, those parts of our holy texts and traditions that reinforce our own attitudes; whereas I was arguing that if we actively seek and share what will bring us inspiration and nourishment then, if we are trying to build a caring world, we make our own religions into their best versions of themselves. Maybe it’s the same thing. Wright writes:
All the Abrahamic scriptures have all kinds of meanings — good and bad — and the question is which meanings will be activated and which will be inert. It all depends on what attitude believers bring to the text. So whenever we do things that influence the attitudes of believers, we shape the living meaning of their scriptures. In this sense, it’s actually within the power of non-Muslim Americans to help determine the meaning of the Koran. If we want its meaning to be as benign as possible, I recommend that we not talk about burning it. And if we want imams to fill mosques with messages of brotherly love, I recommend that we not tell them where they can and can’t build their mosques.
Of course, the street runs both ways. Muslims can influence the attitudes of Christians and Jews and hence the meanings of their texts. The less threatening that Muslims seem, the more welcoming Christians and Jews will be, and the more benign Christianity and Judaism will be. (A good first step would be to bring more Americans into contact with some of the overwhelming majority of Muslims who are in fact not threatening.)
by Peter Feinman
Once again an American President has entered into the quagmire of Middle East peace negotiations. Once again leaders of the two sides have come together at the invitation of the American President to break bread in a photo op. Skepticism runs rampant and the desperate plea is heard exclaiming the principals to ratchet down their expectations. Why should this peace negotiation be different from all other peace negotiations?
And Joram, king of Israel, said, “Is it peace?” And Jehu, the next king of Israel, said, “What have you to do with peace?” (II Kings 9:17-19)
Writing in the Jerusalem Post (9/1/2010), Gershon Baskin, co-CEO of the Israel/Palestine Center for Research and Information and an elected member of the leadership of Israel’s Green Movement political party, emphasized the dire nature of the present situation: “There won’t be many more opportunities to make it work. That is the growing consensus. Even if the public does not sense it, there is a real urgency; we must move toward reaching an agreement.”
This may be the last chance to reach an agreement — there should be no other way to perceive the current reality. The job at hand is not to outsmart the other side or to get a better deal than the other side; the challenge is to reach an agreement that will build lasting relationships based on mutual interests that will improve the lot of both peoples living in this land. Failure to reach an agreement would be a crime against both peoples.
"It felt as if we were starting the dialogue that can repair our fractured nation." Photo of the event by Daniel Tutt.
My Take on the Inaugural Interfaith Event at Park 51
By Daniel Tutt
On this year’s 9/11 anniversary weekend, I helped organize the first interfaith dialogue event at Park51. Despite all the protests over this hotly debated Islamic community center in lower Manhattan we brought together over 100 faith, community, and student leaders from all backgrounds and gathered inside the dilapidated sanctuary to watch a film and engage in a dialogue. After a long summer of intensely polarized debate around the center, and the nationwide anti-Muslim sentiments it has engendered, it was both refreshing and surreal to see New Yorkers come together inside this center to model the kinds of programs it will one day offer.
As part of the 20,000 Dialogues film and dialogue project, we screened Talking Through Walls: How the Struggle to Build a Mosque United a Community, a film about a suburb of New York that faced similar opposition to the building of an Islamic center shortly after 9/11. We decided to use this film because it offers a mirror onto the Park51 debate as it shows how a small interfaith coalition composed of Buddhist, Roman Catholic, and Jewish members came together to successfully get the mosque built despite the local climate of fear and opposition to it.
Oil came from dead phytoplankton, but our use of oil now is killing the live ones. Above: phytoplankton bloom in the North Atlantic. From NASA.
By Daniel Schwartz
The United States has a 21st century global imperial design for the future. However, nature presents complex issues for achieving the design. Militarism, technology and economics are seen as far more important to achieve imperial ends than nature or ecological issues. Exceeding the carrying capacity of earth along with chemical and other toxic contamination has led to species extinctions, global warming, degrading of the oceans and atmosphere and a general increase of toxics across all environments. Biodiversity has diminished and the health of the planet is in peril. Yet, there is little political will to address these issues in the face of imperial priorities. Political incentives favor economics and militarism rather than environmental renewal and integrity.
There are many unanticipated consequences in creating and sustaining an imperial America. Seldom do things go as expected in the geopolitical realm and social arena. This is especially true with militarism, technology and nature. Imperial leaders have trouble accepting nature has limits. These limits affect all life on earth. Nature’s limits cannot be simply overcome by political decisions, political expediency, or ideology. Imperfect human beings can only make imperfect technology. Therefore, the failures of technology (accidents) are quite normal. The more complex the technology, the more disastrous the accident. Does one degrade the oceanic ecosystem due to expected blowouts and leaks in order to capture deep offshore oil deposits? Meanwhile, safe and sustainable alternative energy sources are marginalized or ignored. Imperial designs will never account for all the variability of the natural world because in part, they do not fully understand nature, ecology and the evolution of life. Of course, nature, beauty and the health and sanctity of life is not an imperial priority. But it is a priority for the vast majority of people on the planet. It is in the interest of humanity and all life to prevent ecosystems from cascading and collapse.
This diary is dedicated to Father Paco Vallejos, who has facilitated my own journey from tolerance to empathy.
Several weeks ago, I interviewed Bishop Gene Robinson, a leader in the modern civil rights movement for Tikkun Daily. Bishop Robinson, who delivered the inaugural prayer, is the first openly gay Episcopal Bishop. You can read the first installment of my interview about Obama and “the Left” here.
Unless you have been blogging at community sites such as Daily Kos and Streetprophets, you probably do not know that a blogger who calls herself Kitsap River needs a kidney.
Some of us contributed to the community quilts Sara R made for River and her husband, CharlesCurtisStanley. For the past year, I have been (somewhat ambivalently) completing requirements necessary to donate a kidney to River. River lives far from me, and even if she lived nearby, she is not someone I would have been likely to cross paths with. We frequent different worlds. Nevertheless, last week, I underwent my first set of blood tests.
The donation center mailed a kit to my local hospital. I fasted and drank a dreadful bottle of orange sugar water. Over a four hour period, I gave up 20 vials of blood and a jar of urine for the cause.
I was surprised by my personal reaction to the tests: I felt suddenly and overwhelmingly guilty.
AAIM Meeting in Austin
I recently moved from New York state to Austin Texas. So far, the people I’ve meet in Austin have done a very poor job of playing the roles depicted by the standard red state stereotypes. As an example, let me tell you about a recent interfaith event I attend here.
The Austin Area Interreligious Ministries (AAIM) organized an event to discuss the fear generated by the controversy over the Cordoba Islamic Cultural Center near Ground Zero in NYC. Most of the people at our discussion table proclaimed outrage that what is basically a zoning board decision for lower Manhattan has been turned into a national issue, and is being exploited for political (or ratings) gains by stoking the flames of fear and anger. “That is evil” stated a Jewish women at our table. Two Muslims who joined our conversation both agreed that the Islamic cultural center doesn’t actually qualify as a mosque by the traditional standards of that term.
There was no sign of fear of “the other” in that room, no sign of intolerance. To me, this is an example of religion at it’s best – bringing people together in a spirit of mutual respect and tollerance.
The leader of the AAIM, Tom Spencer, once asked an interfaith gathering what do all major religions have in common? One person yelled out “a belief in God”. Tom responded that Buddhism had no such belief, and it certainly counts as one of the world’s major religions. After some thought, the group agreed on the response “They try to make you a better person”. The evidence I saw in that room certainly supported the notion that, at least for these people, their religion did help make them better people.
"Miscommunication" by Peter Lewis (see http://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/art-gallery/peter-lewis/)
It’s quite an experience to read all the comments on Amanda Quraishi’s post “I Can’t Make It Any Clearer.” They provide more of a snapshot of the comments widely seen on the web than we often get at Tikkun Daily: some are characterized by one of the commenters as “vitriolic.”
If I try to practice the art of empathy for all the commenters — which is by no means the same as agreeing with them, but involves trying to imagine myself in their shoes — I can make guesses that may or may not hold some truth for the commenters involved.
I find it easy to empathize with Amanda Quraishi and other practicing Muslims when faced with Rob Fox’s comments about that he calls “the psychopathology of Islam,” because I was raised myself in a religious movement that was very heavily attacked, in the press and in books available in the library, in terms that dismissed the entire thing as, essentially, evil. I found these attacks extremely hurtful, because I knew that my family and the people in our movement were very decent people. As a child I couldn’t understand why others were so unable to recognize us as we were.
Later I came to understand that a major source of the attacks came from people on the Left who were afraid that the conflict resolution emphasis of our movement would weaken the efforts of the working class to ratchet up the conflict necessary to create the revolution; and other attacks came from people who, as it turned out, correctly identified the movement’s cultural ethos as homophobic. I also didn’t meet the wounded who had left our movement because of the cruelties or mistakes of its ethos or practitioners until later in my life. When I understood all this, it didn’t stop me loving my friends and family in the movement, but it made me sadder and wiser about even our most idealistic human efforts.
This mini-series started on Aug 8, followed by part 2 and part 3. After posting a response to part 3, I now return to the next section – what actions can we take towards creating the world of our dreams that works for all?
Joanna Macy has been urging us for some time now to operate simultaneously in three directions to move towards a sustainable future: “Holding Actions in defense of life on Earth: actions to slow the damage to Earth and its beings; Creation of Alternative Institutions: analysis of structural causes and creation of structural alternatives; and Shift in Perceptions of Reality, both cognitively and spiritually: a fundamental shift in worldview and values”.* I would like to address and provide concrete examples to how each of these could be done in a manner that is fully consistent with principled nonviolence, the Gandhian approach. The list below is far far from exhaustive, and I only mean it to be an illustration and food for thought for those who want to take action.
Nine years after the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil, it is difficult to imagine Newt Gingrich wire transferring millions of dollars to Osama bin Laden. It is also hard to envision Rush Limbaugh sending a shipment of weapons to Al-Qaeda. However, many “well meaning” American figures are aiding bin-Laden and his cohorts with words almost as lethal as explosives or ammunition.
Unable to defeat the United States militarily, Al-Qaeda’s primary influence stems from its ideology. In a 1998 interview with Osama Bin Laden, ABC reporter John Miller uncovered the heart of Al-Qaeda’s philosophy through bin-Laden’s own words: “The terrorism we practice is of the commendable kind for it is directed at the tyrants and the aggressors and the enemies of Allah, the tyrants, the traitors who commit acts of treason against their own countries and their own faith and their own prophet and their own nation… Our religion is under attack. They kill and murder our brothers. They compromise our honor and our dignity and dare we utter a single word of protest against the injustice, we are called terrorists.” Under the banner of protecting his twisted interpretation of Islam, bin-Laden justifies his actions by saying Islam is “under attack” and that Muslims should protect their prophet and brothers from American aggression.
Philosophically, his objective is crystal clear. He needs to portray America as hating Islam, slandering the “honor” and “dignity” of Muslims, and as a real threat to Islamic culture. To combat this mentality, conservatives like Newt Gingrich have used the following logic: “There should be no mosque near Ground Zero in New York so long as there are no churches or synagogues in Saudi Arabia… America is experiencing an Islamist cultural-political offensive designed to undermine and destroy our civilization. Sadly, too many of our elites are the willing apologists for those who would destroy them if they could.”
Our tears stood still that day, and we could barely breathe watching airplanes crash into buildings on a tiny television in a faculty office in a chapel basement.
We put on our academic robes and marched into Convocation. We knew of the crash into the Pentagon and learned of a crash in a field in Pennsylvania. At this awful unbelievable moment, we believed to read the words of Jesus:
Photo by Andrew McFarlane (Leelanau County, Michigan)
Dear Readers,
My purpose in beginning to blog for Tikkun is to interpret and comment on an experiment in progressive public theology that we’re running at Meadville Lombard Theological School (Unitarian Universalist; Chicago, IL) (www.meadville.edu). But in this first post, I just want to introduce myself and describe an experience from earlier in my life that led me to what I’m doing now.
Though I’m a professor of theology and ethics, my most important work occurs outside the academy. I’m a father of two and one on the way, married to the best woman I know, a son to some pretty amazing parents and a brother to a brother who constantly inspires me. I try to fulfill my familial vocation as well as I can, but I make plenty of mistakes! Like most of us, I suspect, I disappoint folks nearly as much as I do right by them. I think that being in right relationship is one of the most exalting and humbling tasks of being human.
