Tikkun and the Network of Spiritual Progressives have long been promoting the idea of a foreign policy based on generosity, not domination. The central program would be a Global Marshall Plan. Utopian? Yes. Necessary for American security? Also yes. Essential for creating one world in which all are included, basic needs are met and we can together address the perils of global warming which will fall heaviest on the poor? Yes, yes and yes.

Others are having big ideas too, and this one is very apt for Tikkun readers, being based on the Biblical idea — and not just an idea but an actual societal practice at one time — of the Jubilee. Our friends at Jubilee USA have sent us this about an teach-in and action this Thursday night and Friday noon in Washington, DC.

Proclaim the Jubilee: A lesson from the story of Joseph

By Nate Kratzer, Outreach and Congregations Fellow, Jubilee USA

When I was a child, the story of Joseph that I was told ended with Joseph being happily reunited with his father and brothers. But that’s not where the story actually ends. After the reunion, Joseph sold food from his storage bank in exchange for the money, livestock, and land of the Egyptian people. Having taken their possessions he then made slaves of them and required them to give one fifth of all they produced to Pharaoh (Gen 47: 14-25). Joseph instituted a form of economic slavery over the Egyptians. Unfortunately, the roles were soon reversed. After the death of Joseph, a new Pharaoh arose and decided to oppress the Israelites, using the very mechanisms of forced labor and tribute that Joseph had originally implemented to enslave the Egyptians. It’s not quite as pleasant as the story I heard in my childhood, but it does explain why the Hebrews came out of Egypt with a healthy suspicion of centralized economic power.

The controversy over Be Scofield’s post on perceived racism in the mainstream, chiefly white, yoga world seems to me to reflect a clash of at least three American cultures. All three are made up of decent people trying their best to survive, thrive and help this suffering world. Be straddles these cultures. In his post he talks in the voice of one of them to his friends in another of them, and is getting very angry responses from some of those friends, partly perhaps because of the influence of a third culture that is rising today and that a lot of us are trying to learn from. These three I am calling white liberal culture, the critical writings of the oppressed, and nonviolent speech and action.

1. White liberal culture

The first is the white liberal culture that is the heartland of American yoga today. This culture thrives among people who are mostly well educated, in wealthy or middle class families (though some are living simply by choice), and liberal in opinions especially on religious and social issues, who have been drawn to an originally Asian spiritual and physical practice for good reasons. It’s no easy thing to be in a typical middle class job or lifestyle, especially these days: everyone seems to be doing more than one person’s job, needing a high degree of focus, long hours, serious people skills, constant juggling if one has children, a curtailed personal life, exhaustion, stress, and fear that it can all unravel with one job loss, car accident or illness. The stay-at-home spouses and the retired are also stressed, not least by their awareness that everyone envies them while the entire voluntary sector depends on their leadership and the world is in terrible trouble: poverty, war, pollution, global warming. This is a frenetic culture more conspicuous for rising rates of depression and prescription drug use than for its joy and happiness.

Yoga can be an absolute boon to people in this harried state, not just calming the body and nerves, but also awakening experiences that might have seemed beyond reach: inner peace, a stilling of the self, more space for awareness of others and this beautiful world, compassion, an opening of the heart, even joy. That some people who are on this journey find great value in going to places where very poor and different people live, and experience a sense of oneness and connection with them, is no surprise: it may be absolutely extraordinary and life-changing for them.

The image of a hand pressed against thick glass, fingers outstretched, made its way onto Evan Bissell’s canvas because it still haunts one of his collaborators, a young woman named Chey who saw it as a child visiting a jail.

“My dad used to do that when I’d visit him,” she wrote in a note to viewers of the “What Cannot Be Taken Away: Families and Prisons Project” at San Francisco’s SOMArts space. “The glass was so thick that you couldn’t feel any warmth.”

Chey chose to include a lotus flower because "the muddier and darker the lotus grows from, the more colorful and beautiful it will be when it blooms."

The collaborative art exhibition, which seeks to open our imaginations to new ideas about why harm happens and how harm can be repaired, is itself a hand pressed to the glass of the prison system, a warm-hearted attempt to create new flows of communication and empathy between people shut inside and people shut out.

A Rip Van Winkle Experience
When you have lived more than six decades, it is possible to have a Rip Van Winkle experience. Life may have assigned an aspect of the social universe you once followed closely to the bare horizon of your awareness, where it may have lurked for decades, and then events occur that make you again pay attention to it. When you do, it may seem that, like the fabled Van Winkle, you have been asleep and things, though not entirely different from what you once knew well, have substantially changed.

The “Death” of Socialism?
Not long ago socialism, especially in its Marxist varieties, was widely declared dead. Yet the economic debacles of capitalism in 2008-2009 have stimulated new interest in socialism and non-Stalinist Marxism. Many who in the 1960′s and 1970′s took socialism seriously turned away from such “passé” perspectives in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Perhaps they were convinced by the setbacks and reversals endured in the Latin American Revolution, in the Soviet bloc countries, and the turn of “People’s” China to capitalism that the best people could hope to achieve in their lifetimes would be a “progressive” holding action. Perhaps we might, through single-issue united fronts, non-governmental organizations devoted to social justice, and focused electoral interventions, set limits on sweatshop exploitation of labor, improve health care, halt the degradation of the environment, and win formal and enforceable approval of women’s and gay rights.

On the way to the March this morning. From http://www.onenationworkingtogether.org/news/entry/the-blogmobile-arrives-in-dc

I hope this is one humongously large rally in Washington today. Nonetheless, and I know this will sound bizarre, I am personally more excited for the future of social change by a small conference call taking place tomorrow morning, to which you are invited, than I am by the One Nation March.

Curiously, the left online doesn’t seem very excited about the march either. There’s no mention of it on HuffPost’s front page as I write this morning. It’s not the top story on Alternet, and the headline isn’t “Huge Left Rally in DC” but “Anti-Tea Partiers Descend on Washington to Fight for a Stronger Economy,” which isn’t as anxious as Politico’s “Liberals hope rally rivals Beck’s” but similarly concedes that the Right has the initiative. Only The Nation leads with the story, titled “For Jobs, Justice and Education.” But not even The Nation uses the “One Nation” idea in a headline. Politico tells us:

So let’s hope this is big! Then maybe the left press will cheer up.

But what’s this apathy of the liberal base all about? Michael Lerner makes a strong point in his post of yesterday, that the Left and liberals actually need more than a shopping list of needed items — even ones as basic as jobs, education and justice — to get their energy up.

Some of the many organizations sponsoring the March.

A large number of organizations are sponsoring a One Nation March on Washington tomorrow. We in the Network of Spiritual Progressives have been distressed at the absence of any understanding of how a spiritual transformation of values in America must be central to the struggles that the One Nation March articulates. We are unhappy at the lack of any coherent thinking that links the actual demands of this march to some larger coherent worldview. As a result it provides very little in the way of an alternative to the Right.

The NSP has nevertheless joined in support of the March, with the hope that at some point its rather sketchy demands could be contextualized within a deeper understanding of what is needed to turn America from the center of globalized capitalism, with its ethos of selfishness and materialism, to the center of a global movement for The Caring Society (see, for example, our Global Marshall Plan and our Environmental and Social Responsibility Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, neither of which are likely to even get a mention at this March).

Yet this March does stand for a set of concerns we all share, and it’s important for us to be in solidarity with these liberal movements whenever they choose to move into public political action. So we’ll be there (except those of us in the Jewish world who are Shabbat-observing and hence cannot get there).

But we also urge you to read our Spiritual Covenant with America and raise it to the liberal forces assembled tomorrow — because it presents a model of what a coherent progressive worldview could be and contrasts it with the liberal and conservative agendas (and no, you don’t have to believe in God or be religious to find the Network of Spiritual Progressives’ platform appealing and coherent with your highest values).

Here’s what the official position of the March articulates: