I have been editing and posting transcripts of speeches from the June Network of Spiritual Progressives conference to our website and I am blown away by how good some of them are. Like this:
In theory, if you want the outcomes – equality, environmental change, community stability – you can rig the incentives and the regulatory structure to get the corporations to do that for you. The problem in actual practice is they’re too powerful. We know that. “Well,” he said, “well if you can’t get that, then how are you going to get what you’re talking about?” That’s a really good question, so I want to address it and then we can debate it.
If I didn’t think there was a possibility that was different from “The pendulum will swing and we’ll elect a few more Democrats” – I come out of liberalism, I worked in the House and the Senate, I know that world – if I didn’t think there was another possibility, then I wouldn’t be here.
What I think is really interesting, and why I think this is the most interesting period in American history bar none – including the Revolution, including the Civil War, including the Depression, including the Civil Rights and Feminist eras – is that what’s happened is that the solution that we used to have available to manage the system through traditional means is faltering, and there is no easy answer that way. And unlike [what] the Marxists [believe] – this is where it gets really interesting – it is not collapsing. It is not reforming and it is not collapsing.
Nablus, Palestine, 2003. Courtesy of Rusty Stewart.
Shanah Tovu um’tukah and Eid Mubarak.
Here’s a guide I created for the Holy Days; perhaps you’ll find the section on Teshuvah useful.
May this year bring transformation and renewal on the side of reparative justice.
Blessings,
Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb
Guide to Conducting Ta’anit Teshuvah: A Public Fast During the Jewish High Holy Days For Palestinian Human Rights
An initiative of Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb and Shomer Shalom Network for Jewish Nonviolence, with Ta’anit Tzedek/Fast for Gaza and The Fellowship of Reconciliation
It is a tradition for the pious to fast from morning until evening during the Ten Days of Teshuvah, as it is written, “I am with them in distress.” (Psalm 91:15)
In order to prepare for these days of reflection, we ask:
Who is driven from the land and who is invited to settle?
Who weeps amidst the rubble of her house and who destroys the family home?
Who uproots a neighbor’s tree and who replants them in the ground?
Who must choose between washing her body and a cup of tea and who waters her lawn?
Who is crushed by bulldozer and who drives the tank?
A veteran of struggles for nonviolent social change was quoted to me this year to the effect that for all his long life “the science has been against us, but now suddenly it’s for us.” He was referring to the recent scientific work that has been done on empathy and cooperation. Edwin Rutsch has a very useful collection of this work at his empathy website. His list of experts, with links to articles, books and video, includes people I do know of, like Frans de Waal and Antonio Damasio, and many more I don’t. If I had a month off I would love to soak myself in these new understandings of our cooperative and empathic nature. And it’s not just humans: there is a potential revolution brewing in biology as a whole, as seen in the work of Joan Roughgarden at Stanford (who has written us a piece for our next issue of Tikkun, and whose book The Genial GeneI reviewed for Tikkun last year).
Tikkun Daily blogger Jan Garrett sent us this video that sums it up in a fairly entertaining manner.
I’m interested to know how well the cartooning works for people. I don’t think it does quite work because it goes at the speed of Rifkin’s speech, which is just too fast some of the time. If it had been planned as a cartoon first, rather than as a way to illustrate an existing speech, I think they would have slowed down the voice over so we could enjoy the cartooning more. But the content is amazing, revolutionary, inspiring, so far as I’m concerned!
Harriet Fraad sent us this French video with a comment from her husband, econ prof Richard Wolff:
The General Strike in France rallied, according to the CGT (France’s largest of the 6 national trade union federations who united to produce this strike), over 2.7 million demonstrators marching against raising the retirement age and against austerity around the slogan, “do not permit governments to make the mass of people pay for the failures of capitalism.” Not the least of the mechanisms helping to generate this support were video clips like this one:
Note: It does help to know that Greve means strike, and Lutte means struggle.
Everyone from President Obama to Angela Jolie has made a pronouncement on Pastor Terry Jones’ proposed September 11th Quran burning – publicity that Paul of Tarsus, a man who knew how to stage an event, might well have envied. Paul presided over the first public burning of books by Christians. In Ephesus, recent converts burned their scrolls on magic (presumably voluntarily) as a symbolic act of penitence as well as a literal act of destruction. Knowledge was more vulnerable in those days of hand-copied scrolls. Though the content of the Quran cannot be destroyed in this proposed fire, burning the Quran is a literal as well as symbolic assault on the Islamic faithful. In both cases, the book burnings are an aggressive assertion of the absolute supremacy of one religion through the demonizing of another.
Below is a fictional rendition (edited for brevity; for the juicy version read the novel) of the book burning at Ephesus from my novel Bright Dark Madonna (Monkfish, 2009, used by permission). The narrative point of view belongs to Maeve, the feisty Celtic Mary Magdalen who is nobody’s disciple:
Intent on my own thoughts, I did not at first notice a larger than usual crowd gathering in the center of the square, until a hush fell, and a voice I could never forget rang out.
Now that the Iraq war is supposedly winding down, America needs a period of reflection, repentance and atonement before rushing into more of the same mistakes we’ve been making globally and domestically. So I’d like to invite my non-Jewish neighbors and friends and allies in the struggle to heal and transform America to join with Jews to use the ten days of repentance from Rosh Hashanah (Sept. 9) through Yom Kippur (Sept. 18) for that purpose-to create an All-American version of the Jewish High Holidays!
What makes the Jewish tradition useful in this regard is that it focuses not only on our own individual lives, but on taking collective responsibility for our larger world. The formulations of repentance and atonement use language like “Our father, our king, WE have sinned before you” and “For the sins WE have committed by….” (and then the community fills in the blanks).
The notion of collective responsibility means that we acknowledge how impactful the community, its institutions, its worldview, its shared understandings and assumptions, and its daily operations shape the behavior and consciousness of each of us. In contemporary terms, this means: Don’t expect a society that privileges money, fame and power and ridicules idealism, prophetic critique and anything not judged “realistic” by the inside-the-beltway commentators and power-brokers to then produce human beings who can look beyond their own immediate self-interest and concern themselves with the well-being of the rest of the world and with the survivability of the planet.
The notion of “sin” in this tradition is also relevant. The Hebrew word for sin is cheyt, and derives from archery — the arrow shot toward the target has gone off course. In my own Jewish Renewal synagogue we expand on this notion by singing the atonement prayers this way: “Who are we? We’re God’s image and truth and infinite wisdom, eternal goodness. Yet we’ve abused, we’ve betrayed, we’ve been cruel, yes we’ve destroyed.” Rather than see ourselves as at the core evil, the Jewish tradition sees us as created in the image of God and hence intrinsically good and worthy — and it is with this understanding that Americans can then feel safe to explore where we’ve gone off course, missed the mark, and hence need a mid-course correction.
It won’t take long to help each of us to construct a list of the areas that we need to address in our repentance. We could start with the easy ones:
True myth may serve for thousands of years as an inexhaustible source of intellectual speculation, religious joy, ethical inquiry, and artistic renewal. The real mystery is not destroyed by reason. The fake one is. You look at it and it vanishes. You look at the Blond Hero – really look – and he turns into a gerbil. But you look at Apollo, and he looks back at you.
Ursula K. LeGuin “Myth and Archetype in Science Fiction”
Ashkenaz Festival started in Toronto fifteen years ago, as a celebration of the worldwide revival of Klezmer and Yiddish culture. It became a biennial event, held on Labour Day weekend at Harbourfront Centre, and my own smouldering appreciation for Klezmer music was brought to full vivid flame by performances I saw there, by bands such as the Klezmatics, Brave Old World, and Andy Statman. There were free shows along with paid shows, theatre, a parade, art, and of course lots of good food.
It was exciting, back then, because it was both old and new, and of course for many of us who had grown up in North America, a lot of the old stuff was new. I’d never been exposed to Eastern European Jewish music, the roots of Klezmer, before. When I played it to my parents, who had grown up in Western Europe, it was new to them as well: they had been raised on Mozart and Beethoven. Yet somehow this music called to me, and sounded like coming home in a way that much other world music didn’t. And it had a good beat and you could dance to it, too.
A few weeks ago, the congregants of Temple Beth Shalom in Santa Fe were honored by a visit from Bishop Gene Robinson who delivered the evening’s d’Var Torah.
Bishop Robinson is the first openly gay Episcopal Bishop. He was invited to Santa Fe as Grand Marshall of the Gay Pride parade. When Rabbi Marvin Schwab learned from a colleague at St. Bede’s that Bishop Robinson might be barred from speaking in an Episcopal Church, he invited him to deliver the Friday Night D’Var Torah at Temple Beth Shalom. I remembered the Bishop from his inaugural prayer. His sermon was an inspiration. After services, my teenage daughter, who had complained incessantly throughout the long drive from Albuquerque about being dragged, dragged to Temple for her brother’s best friend’s eruv bar mitzvah, turned to me and exclaimed, “Oh My God! I’m so glad I came!”
I asked Rabbi Schwab why he had extended the invitation and what he thought the impact would be on our congregation.
I felt that what Gene had to say was important and it was important that the community have a chance to hear it and that Temple Beth Shalom would be a neutral ground where he could speak and say anything he wanted. I think it was great. I think in terms of speaking to tolerance, respect for people as human beings, to see human beings with respect to see beyond some of the nonsense and to see that everyone has a divine spark within them… This was a message that Gene could deliver with eloquence. We are a welcoming congregation. We have members that happen to be homosexual. This was a way of reaffirming for them that they really do have a place within our congregation and the greater community.
Rabbi Schwab lent me the Temple’s DVD recording of the d’Var Torah. The instant I figure out how to upload it to the web, I will embed it in a diary. However, Bishop Robinson was kind enough to grant me this interview for Tikkun Daily. The first installment of the interview, Bishop Robinson on Obama, follows below the break.
Muslim-bashers like to style themselves as “defenders of Western civilization.” Like all effective lies, there’s a certain grain of truth to their assertion. They do not stand in the Western traditions that support reason, liberty and tolerance. They do, however, recycle themes and motifs that have appeared in previous waves of fear against “witches,” Jews, lepers, Catholics, and others.
A striking recent example is the use of pig imagery.
The following image is from a German-language Islamophobic site (my apologies fro reproducing a blasphemous image, but we need to be frank about political pathologies):
Piglets suckling on a sow bearing the Arabic name of God. Translation of the caption: "Muhammad, from German lands. Fresh on the table."
Big things seem to happen on Wednesdays. A week ago Wednesday, we opened up a brand new innovative Health Commons in Rio Arriba County. A week from Wednesday, the Rio Arriba Community Health Council is meeting to untangle a Gordian knot caused by conflicting regulations attached to state and federal funding streams. If we can solve the puzzle, we can form new alliances and relationships…bringing America closer to single payer health care…permanently.
This post is a response to Dave Belden’s comment on part 3 of my Personal Growth and Social Change mini-series. I believe what’s below will make more sense if you read part 3 of my mini-series and Dave’s comment before reading what’s below.
When I wrote the section on willingness and group functioning I was well aware that what I was writing would not be practical. What would be needed in order to put any of this into practice is beyond the scope of what a blog entry here and there could support people in doing. Instead, I was reaching for enough clarity so that the ideas and images could inspire some people to want to explore, learn, experiment, and ask questions. At least to hope instead of be resigned to how things are. We are much more often motivated by fear and anger than by hope in our actions, and I want to contribute to more hope if I can.
All that said, I would like to address at least partially the specific questions that Dave raised, because I treasure the opportunity for more depth and clarity they provide. This leads to a few key points.
The Significance of Decision-Making
Dave asks about starting and running groups or projects with the tools I point to. In truth, I don’t know of any groups or organizations that are operating fully in line with the principles that inform my writings in this blog. I am heartened by knowing that BayNVC, the organization I co-founded, approximates such operation to an extent I feel moved and happy about, and functions most of the time smoothly and without endless meetings because we have a high level of trust. Perhaps some stories about BayNVC operations will arrive in future posts.
“You don’t want a messianic apocalyptic cult controlling atomic bombs,” he said. “When the wide-eyed believer gets hold of the reins of power and the weapons of mass death, then the world should start worrying, and that’s what is happening in Iran.” Israel, Netanyahu told me, is worried about an entire complex of problems, not only that Iran, or one of its proxies, would destroy Tel Aviv; like most Israeli leaders, he believes that if Iran gains possession of a nuclear weapon, it will use its new leverage to buttress its terrorist proxies in their attempts to make life difficult and dangerous; and he fears that Israel’s status as a haven for Jews would be forever undermined, and with it, the entire raison d’être of the 100-year-old Zionist experiment.
Jeffrey Goldberg’s The Point of No Return, The Atlantic September 2010
Contrary to Netanyahu’s cries, Iran is not a crazy state… Of course, Israel’s own nuclear arsenal should be sufficient to deter Iran… Israel will still have a larger arsenal than any of its neighbors, including Iran, for years if not decades. Bruce Reidel’s If Israel Attacks, The National Interest September-October 2010
Imagine that at some point next year, Israel destroys Iran’s nuclear facilities. Video of explosions in Isfahan, Qom, and other sites are endlessly replayed for a stunned world audience to see. Almost immediately, Russia and China contemplate a UN Security Council Resolution condemning the unilateral attack. Arab nations like Saudi Arabia, who stand to benefit from Iran’s momentarily weakened nuclear program, vehemently denounce the bombings. The United States, aiming to quell the ensuing political fallout, carefully distances itself from any involvement while simultaneously trumpeting the benefits of Israel’s decision. Then something takes place that foreign policy hawks rarely contemplate.
For years, Rio Arriba County has been the butt of jokes about its high overdose death rates and its supposed lack of coordination between providers. But on August 25, over 350 people showed up at my office (a huge crowd for a working day in Espanola!) to celebrate our town’s health care reform success. (More)
